One of the photographs that I love most in life is one that portrays the precise moment in which fighters of the Soviet Red Army plant the flag of communism in the heart of Hitler Germany. It was not a dream. It happened in reality (although I dreamed for years with something similar, entering the genocidal fields of extermination of the ESMA and Campo de Mayo in Argentina of the dictatorship of 1976-1983). I feel the same emotion to see the Vietnamese tank entering the US embassy in Saigon.
The same “machotes”, “impregnable”, “superhombres”, defeated and humiliated before the simple and humble, organized and insurgent people.
Thirty years after the defeat of the Nazis, one of those combatants of the glorious red army that hung that flag in the Nazi heart, visited Argentina. He was already an eldest man. If I remember correctly, it was in 1973. He accompanied him and took care of an Argentine militant, the father of a former friend of mine. The red army fighter was a person of flesh and blood. No “superhero” of movies. No bodybuilder. No poster muscular. Common people. But with ideals, with unwavering, unbearable ethic, dedicated to what the That Guevara called “the most noble ideals of the human species.”
Why does that memory become so significant and emotional today? Because the most concentrated elements of multinational capitalist power, which base their power on the superxploitation of oppressed peoples, the relocation of their great productive units, the financing of fictional and digital capital, intend to refloat the sulvary nostalgia their respective genocides. The extreme right, self -perceived as “new” but more apolillad than a low quality souvenir of eighty years, feels and presents “emboldened.” They believe, with little ingenuity and not less historical ignorance, that they reached the “time of revenge.” They will bite the dust again. But maybe this time is worse. He who warns does not betray.
A superficial, merely journalistic and anecdotal political look, suspects that the extremisms of ultra -right, nazism nazism and its derivatives, enjoy renewed prestige in the third decade of the 21st century because they have managed to channel popular discontent against a bourgeois policy that is presented as “progre” but submits the working class to a geometric pauperization, verifiable process even in classes. Popular of the imperialist capitalist countries, not to mention the social economic formations of the Global South.
However, what these journalistic readings are never encouraged to mention is that the economic-social base of German Nazism, Italian fascism and Spanish Franco, not to mention pinochetism and videlism, were absolutely unpunished after 1945.
The Red Army broke the spine and broke the neck of the “invincible” Nazis, who capitulated and humiliated without sorrow or glory, as good cowards that were, in May 1945. But the companies that supported them were protected by the capitalist west (the same as the innumerable Hollywood movies continue to present in their screens as “winners of the Second world war Fantasy stories that are not credible or for the childhood of the first years of primary school).
As the formidable book explains Business are business. Entrepreneurs who financed Hitler’s rise to power From Jewish writer Daniel Muchnik, German Nazism was not an “anomaly.”
The political, military and ideological hierarchs of Nazism are known: in addition to Adolf, the Austrian black hair and no military charge, “self -perceived” as German; They parade through the Ghosts Hermann Göring train, Joseph Goebbels, Ernst Röhm, Alfred Rosemberg, Ulrich Fjvon Ribbentrop, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf HESS, Gottfried Feder, Josef Mengele, among others. But the capitalist western (European-American) protected with a vehemence worthy of better causes to beneficiary-colome businessmen, partners of interest, allies or collaborationists of Nazism in Germany.
The list is long and has a very ugly smell. Among other Daniel Muchnik (a writer who does not belong to the Marxist tradition or anything similar) includes the Siemens (electric), BMW and Volkswagen (automotive) companies, Fritz Thyssen (steel industrialist who died in 1951 in Buenos Aires), Gustav Krupp (owner of the German steel giant), to Ernst Heinkel (since 1938 “Führer economic-military”) already Emil Kircorf (coal entrepreneur). These entrepreneurs, bitterly remembered a lot, even having used slave labor of Jewish, communist or gypsy prisoners were protected in Nuremberg’s judgments … a mere coincidence? No. Capitalism takes care of your family.
Does today – do you ask themselves a lot – do not continue to operate with total impunity companies of Nazi origin (derived from the IG Farben, which manufactured the raw of the genocidal extermination gas chambers) such as the bayer (interwoven with Monsanto), the Hoesch or the BASF, demanded by survivors of the Nazi genocide?
Muchnik then brings a huge number of data on systematic collaboration, business or even the ideological sympathy they had with Hitler – even during World War II – companies such as General Motors (associated with IG Farben), General Electric, Brown Boveri (Westing House’s subsidiary), the British Unilever, the Shell, the United Steel, the Chase Manhattan bank of Rockefeller (Personal Protector of the “Austrian School” of Vulgar Economics), the Standard oil, the Texaco, the ITT (the coup d’etat of September 1973 in Chile), the National City Bank, the Bertelsman Editorial Group, owner of RCA and once a majority shareholder of American online (the main US internet provider until a few years ago) and the ineffable Ford (first with the Nazis, then with the CIA). All of them were filled with money with Nazism and today, in the 21st century, they continue to bulge their bank accounts and their actions with total impunity! Many of these companies finance the groups, groups and political movements of the extreme neo -fascist right in Europe, in the United States and Latin America. The neo-Nazi Zelensky, who jumped from the TV to the defense of the battalions with the tattooed svastics such as the Azov battalion, did not receive support and encouragement of the military-industrial complex of the United States and Western Europe? Did the American oil tankers not first financed Murray Newton Rothbard (author of the Pasquín entitled “Libertarian Manifesto”) and then the Argentine President?
It is no accident that the head of the intelligence of Western Germany (before reunification) has been a high SS officer, then at the service of the CIA. The same can be said of Klaus Barbie in Bolivia: from SS to the CIA.
Hitler set out to govern a thousand years and Fukuyama, licking the boot of his state department patterns, predicted no less than the “end of history” (sic). However, the unipolar world that the German Nazis from before dreamed, was made pieces by the glorious red army. It is highly problable that in the 21st century, no matter how emboldened they are presented, neo -fascists will eat land again, cry in contemporary confrontations.
I want to finish these short lines remembering an anecdote awarded to that endearing sniper of the Red Army, called liudmila “lid” mikaílovna Pavlichenko, who, when asked how many people had shot in the war, replied “people? None!; Nazis and fascists: 309”.
Buenos Aires, March 8, 2025
*Che Guevara Chair
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