Nuremberg was the site of the post WW2 war crime trials of top Nazis but it was also the site of the Nazi regime's earlier rallies. These massive and tightly choreographed rallies were used to whip the population into a frenzy of exaggerated xenophobic nationalism and ethnocentricity. Germany had had a tough row to hoe having been the losers of WW1 and were being exploited mercilessly by the winners of that war including the U.S. among others so this emphasis on nationalism was easy to achieve with the help of corporate backing and it's Madison Avenue style advertising machine. The fact that this nationalism was being sold by international corporations was lost on the average German who only saw the display of "a sea of flags" and heard the talk of coming prosperity once the Nazis set things straight by force at these Nuremberg rallies. They declared that moral superiority gave them their God given right to cull the population of it's undesirables, the "genetically inferior" habitual criminals, drunkards, homeless people, homosexuals, mental patients, gypsies, Jews and other "races". This declared moral superiority also gave them the right, they claimed, to ban and imprison Communists and union leaders. In fact they started with these two groups.
The corporate powers who backed Hitler were not solely American but the Americans were at the forefront and the German industrialists who also backed Hitler and his Nazis were business partners with the American backers. Fritz Thyssen is the most famous name and probably responsible for the greatest German investment in Hitler. He later became remorseful and was imprisoned by Hitler. The American backers did not. Led by the current president's great grandfather George Herbert Walker, Henry Ford, Roland Harriman and President Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush, they continued to funnel money and munitions into Germany all through the 1930s and through WW2. Union Banking, created by George Herbert Walker and managed by Prescott Bush and both German and American Nazi party members to fund the German war machine, was shut down under the trading with the enemy act almost a year after the U.S. had declared war on Germany. Other corporations owned by these traitors, who had already tried to overthrow Roosevelt with an army of veterans, are believed to have operated throughout the war. Virulent anti-semite Henry Ford even demanded payment for Ford factories in Germany and (German occupied) France, which were producing vehicles for the Nazi military, damaged by allied bombing. The Nazis had been supplied by Ford and then other Americans from the beginning of their rise to power.
Here is one article that appeared in the New York Times in 1922. It is unlikely that this obscure group of bitter kooks would ever have risen to power without the massive aid of their American backers. They embodied the anti-semitism and other racist views of anti-semitic Henry Ford and "Eugenicists"* including the afore-mentioned members of the Bush family.
Much of the raw material for the German military was produced in Poland's steel mills and, once the consolidation of the Germanic states such as Austria was complete, Poland was invaded. To set the stage for this a massive propaganda blitz was initiated by the Nazis who manufactured stories of Polish aggression. "Poland today launched artillery barrage on German territory", "Poland is massing troops near the German border" etc. None of this was true but it worked as a propaganda ploy with the German people and the German army marched day and night into Poland, stimulated by amphetamines and paranoid propaganda and powered by Ford, the Bush family and other members of the American aristocracy. The occupation of Poland also saw a most brutal escalation of the Holocaust; almost every Jew in Poland died in the concentration camps the most notorious of which was Poland's Auswitz.
All of this would just be history if not for the fact that, while the top managers of the Nazi machine were tried and punished, the owners of the Nazi party survived and thrived, remaining largely untouchable in the power structure of the American aristocracy and today they have consolidated power in the government by deceit and sheer corporate power. They have used the horror of the unopposed attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon the same way Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag** to whip up blind "patriotism" and used it to suspend democratic dialogue by tarring any who oppose them as unpatriotic, invented false stories to invade oil rich Iraq with no concern for the population of that country and have launched an all out attack on the middle and lower classes of this country.
Loving our country means loving democracy, freedom of speech and thought including religion, philosophy and, in light of our democracy, especially politics. It means tolerance of all sorts of people. It means fair trials for those accused of crimes and humane treatment of the incarcerated. The U.S. is not the property of a few very wealthy and powerful people; it belongs to us all and if there is an expectation of accountability for the least of us for anti-social behavior there should be accountability in greater measure for those who wield greater power. The indictments of "Scooter" libby, Tom Delay etc. are of as little consequence as the convictions of traitors Admiral Poindexter and Oliver North who sold arms to our Iranian enemies, operated terrorist death squads in Central America against the express wishes of congress and orchestrated the importation of gigantic quantities of cocaine and military arms into South Central L.A. and elsewhere in the U.S.
The Nuremberg trials in 1946 were a good start but did not go far enough up the chain of power and nothing less will save American democracy, freedom and prosperity now.
*eugenics- "purifying" the human race by purging "inferior" people from the gene pool; the Holocaust.
** The Reichstag fire was set by the Nazis who then blamed it on "Communists". The Reichstag is the German parliament building and it's closest American counterpart would be the U.S. Capitol building.
