The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military-political alliance, was signed in Washington on April 4, 1949, by the governments of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, and  Iceland. Entered into force on August 24, 1949, it has expanded to the present day; Greece briefly withdrew from it in August 1974 due to the Cyprus crisis, but returned after the change of regime in Athens.

The NATO pact was founded by 12 Western European member states that united militarily to prevent the alleged potential military aggression of the USSR on Western European territory. In response, the Warsaw Pact was founded in 1955. The NATO pact has grown from to the current 32 members (2026). Today, Russia (as the backbone of the former USSR) is effectively surrounded on its western borders on almost all sides by NATO members or its direct satellites (Ukraine). For Russia, the only breath of free space in the West for now is Belarus.

Two crucial questions arise here:

1) Why didn’t NATO disband itself after the disappearance of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact?, and 2) Why is NATO successively expanding eastward towards the borders of Russia?

The logical conclusion would be that the NATO pact was not founded to defend Western Europe against potential military aggression by the USSR (the Warsaw Pact did not exist in 1949), but rather for the military occupation of Russia! This reminds one of Hitler’s plans for a European war against that same Russia.

After the Cold War, the USSR disappeared, but not Russia. So, NATO did not fully fulfill its task, just as Hitler’s Germany stopped 30 km from Moscow in November 1941. The Nazi experience from Operation Barbarossa was shared by Hitler’s generals and other high-ranking officers who survived the war.

The formal reason for the creation of the NATO was self-defense against the potential spread of communism by military means from the east after World War II, but the pact itself expanded territorially year after year after the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the disappearance of the USSR, even though all these former communist states adopted the Western-type of multi-party parliamentary democracy.

During the Cold War, two members of the expanded NATO - Turkey and Greece – had military dictatorships that almost went to war with each other in 1974 over Cyprus, i.e. the Turkish invasion and occupation of 40% of this island (with ethnic cleansing) that continues to this day.

The NATO pact has its own hidden or suppressed history which, if it were to see the light of day, would shed a completely different light on the reasons for its existence and activities, including its ultimate goals. Writing secret histories of the activities of certain individuals and / or organizations is a trend in world historiography; the early Byzantine chronicler Procopius is perhaps the most famous in this regard.

Procopius of Caesarea in Palestine was the greatest historian of the era of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I (527–565). Besides Justinian’s wars (History of the Wars) with the Persians, Vandals, and Goths in eight books (551–553), glorified the role of Emperor Justinian I, Procopius wrote the famous Secret History (Historia arcana), a pamphlet in which he presents serious accusations against Justinian I and the imperial authorities at the time – the real truth about the Emperor and his misdeeds. In Secret History, Procopius vents his disagreement with the policies of Justinian I and Empress Theodora, giving a true picture of the Byzantine Empire of his time.

Until now, the true history of the NATO pact has not been written in one place, but only in fragments that can be arranged like a puzzle to obtain the Historia arcana of this Western alliance. This short text is a contribution to the historiography of this puzzle.

Long after 1945, former Nazis and German war criminals served in the highest structures of the NATO pact. Most were highly decorated Wehrmacht officers, who after the war served in the highest positions first in the West German army, and were later promoted to commanders and heads of NATO structures in Europe.

Many Nazis and persons who supported and assisted the Nazi regime in Germany and Nazi satellite entities in Europe in carrying out the Holocaust and other war crimes, were never tried for war crimes against Jews, Poles, Greeks, Russians, and other European peoples, but were appointed to leading positions in the NATO pact, the West German government, the army, industry, and West German society in general.

The biggest Nazi beast was Adolf (Bruno Heinrich Ernst) Heusinger (1897-1982), a military officer whose career spanned the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, West Germany, and NATO. He was Hitler’s Chief of the Operations Department, or General Staff, from 1940 to 1944. Heusinger actively participated in the planning of Hitler’s invasions of Poland, Norway, Denmark, and France. He was promoted to colonel on August 1, 1940, and became Chief of the Operations Department in October the same year. Thus, he was the third man in the Nazi hierarchy in terms of planning the Wehrmacht’s activities on the ground.

However, after the War, Heusinger was not even tried for war crimes but took over the West German army - the Bundeswehr (as a General Inspector from 1957 to 1961), and in 1961 was appointed Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, i.e. de facto Chief of NATO General Staff.

Heusinger retired in 1964 and lived till the ripe old age of eighty-five. Though detained for two years post war, he never faced trial nor paid for the war crimes and atrocities he and those under his command committed. Instead, he was employed by the West German state as an advisor and later a Lieutenant General before he was snapped up by the international military alliance that purports to defend democracy. He enjoyed eighteen years of retirement.

General Hans Speidel (1897-1984) was another German Nazi and war criminal who continued his military career in West Germany and/or NATO after the war. During the Second World War, Speidel was Chief of Staff in Erwin Rommel’s army (“Desert Foxes”). After 1945, he was one of the key military commanders in the Bundeswehr during the early Cold War, and from 1957 to 1963, he served as Commander-in-Chief of NATO’s Land Forces in Central Europe (Mitteleuropa). From 1964, he served as the President of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

Johannes “Macky” Steinhoff (1913-1994) was the next Nazi to hold a high position in NATO. He was a fighter pilot in Göring’s Luftwaffe and holder of the Iron Knight’s Cross, the highest decoration in the Wehrmacht. After the war, Steinhoff joined the West German government’s Rearmament Office as a consultant on military aviation in 1952 and became one of the principal officials tasked with rebuilding the German Air Force during the Cold War. Later, he became Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (Chief of the General Staff) from 1971 to 1974 and held other positions within the NATO pact.

Count Johann Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg (1906-2006) was a prominent military officer who served in the Reichswehr, Wehrmacht, and later as a NATO commander in the Bundeswehr. In 1940, Count Kielmansegg served as a staff officer during the Nazi invasion of France. Later, he was an officer of the General Staff of the Wehrmacht Supreme Command from 1942 to 1944. During the Cold War, he became Supreme Allied Commander for Central Europe within NATO in 1967 and 1968.

Wehrmacht Major Ernst Ferber (1914-1998) and Group Chief of the Organizational Department of the Wehrmacht High Command from 1943 to 1945, holder of the Wehrmacht Iron Cross, First Class, was in the NATO from 1973 to 1975. Ferber was succeeded in this same command post by former German Nazis from the Wehrmacht, Karl Schnell from 1975 to 1977 (holder of the Iron Cross, Second Class, battery commander on the Western Front in 1940 and Chief of Staff of the 74th Panzer Corps in 1944); Franz-Josef Schulze from 1977 to 1979 (bearer of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross in 1944); and Ferdinand Maria von Zenger und Etterlin from 1979–1983 (lieutenant of the 24th Panzer Division of the German 6th Army, participant in the Battle of Stalingrad, adjutant of the Wehrmacht Supreme Command and bearer of the German Cross in gold).

The Nazi army, the Wehrmacht, was not a standard professional army, but an integral part of the organized criminal machinery of the Third Reich, responsible for systematic war crimes and crimes of genocide throughout occupied Europe. Instead of senior Wehrmacht officers finding themselves in the International Court of Justice after the war, many found refuge in the highest positions of the NATO alliance, whose emblem resembles two joined Nazi crosses (das Hakenkreuz) and the new General Staff building in Brussels resembles two Nazi SS symbols (Schutzstaffel) as worn by the SS soldiers on the collars of their uniforms.

After World War II, there was an saying that the German Nazis did not lose the war but fled to America. This was true for a small number of them. Others infiltrated European NATO structures where they also earned pensions. Both before and after 1945, they fought against communism and Russia, neither abandoning nor betraying their ideological positions and doctrines. They only changed their uniforms and emblems, but the enemy remained the same. This is still true today for Russia, although it is no longer communist, but has survived as Russia.

That is why the NATO pact was not dismembered after the end of the Cold War in 1989/1990, after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR. This would be a logical step, but it continued to expand territorially and strengthen militarily. Probably under the influence of the ideology of German Nazism, that Russia (not only the USSR) must be wiped off the geopolitical map of the world.