By the time he ended his life in his beleaguered Berlin bunker, Adolf Hitler had largely achieved his central ideological aim of destroying European Jewry. For the remnant of Jews who emerged from hiding or from the concentration camps, it would be impossible to re-establish their rich communal life in Central and Eastern Europe. Most of the survivors would seek to remake their shattered lives outside Europe.

Hitler had also succeeded in his main strategic objective: to ensure that the Allies would see the Soviet Union rather than Germany as the principal enemy. With every step of its long retreat in 1943-45, the Third Reich came closer to achieving its underlying political aim of exposing Communist Russia as the main threat to the civilised world. The conservative plotters against Adolf Hitler in the Kreisau Circle were as anti-Russian as the Nazis. Their anger against the German Führer was at least partly based on his failure to forge an effective anti-Soviet alliance.

As the Second World War continued, the Western powers and the Soviet Union were already preparing for a post-war struggle. United by an official policy of demanding an unconditional Nazi surrender, pro-Westerners and pro-Communists promoted rival factions within resistance movements in occupied Europe. In Italy, the prospect of Soviet subversion led Allen Dulles, America's secret service chief based in Switzerland, to negotiate in March 1945 with SS General Karl Wolff, Heinrich Himmler's associate. Dulles organised  "Operation Sunrise", to ensure that Wolff would not be obliged to surrender to the Communists in northern Italy. When the Soviets found out, they demanded in vain to be included in the talks.

Following Nazi Germany's surrender in May 1945, the country's transformation from enemy to associate was remarkably rapid. Of course, there were token war crimes trials. These were hardly the main story. The United States soon started recruiting Nazi scientists such as Wernher von Braun in "Operation Paperclip".

Even more significant were secret actions by US, British and French intelligence agencies to bring Nazi political operatives on board. They could—it was hoped—provide essential information about Soviet political subversion and continue on behalf of the US, Britain and France anti-Soviet operations similar to the ones they had performed during the Second World War. In some cases Stalin discovered what was going on and demanded the handover of the former Nazis who had become servants of Western intelligence agencies. In such cases, the former Nazis were often moved to places of refuge in the USA, Canada and elsewhere.

Chilling evidence of the emergence of Communists as the principal enemy comes from revelations about the Bad Nenndorf interrogation centre near Hanover. Here, complaints about the regime run by Lieutenant-Colonel Robin "Tin Eye" Stephens led to courts-martial in 1948. As the MI5 website reports, "Several prisoners suffered such severe physical harm that they had to be taken to a local civilian hospital. Two of the prisoners died within twenty-four hours of arriving at the hospital, and another was so badly malnourished that it took him six months to recover."

The interrogation centre was set up in June 1945 to obtain information from "some of Hitler's most notorious henchmen" and businessmen such as Alfred Toepfer who had flourished under the Nazis. Within a year, the objective had changed. "[A]s the Nazi threat in Germany declined, by mid-1946," reports MI5, the interrogation centre "began to reorientate its efforts towards the Soviet Union."