The Western elites fought the German Reich, not Nazism, says historian Jacques Pauwels.

They didn’t fight fascism, but the German Reich—a competing imperialist power An important aspect of Pauwels analysis is his reminder that, contrary to propaganda, “fascism“ was not the enemy of the “capitalist democracies“, it certainly was not to the Western elites, many of which openly supported and collaborated with the fascist movement. The enemy of the allies—chiefly Britain, France, and the US—was the German Reich, which represented a competing politico-industrial power liable to challenge the established spheres of Western imperialism. The proof of the puddling is that right after the war the “capitalist democracies“ had no trouble opening their arms to thousands of prominent Nazis, handpicked to run the new “Western Germany“ (where “denazification“ was a farce); in fact Gehlen, a prominent Nazi intelligence officer with an extensive network of Nazi spies, not only became a CIA spymaster, but was put in charge of Western Germany’s own security bureau. This is admitted by Wikipedia itself: “Gehlen was instrumental in the negotiations to establish an official West German intelligence service on the basis of Gehlen Organization from the early 1950s. In 1956, the Gehlen Organization was transferred to the West German government and formed the core of the Federal Intelligence Service, the Federal Republic of Germany’s official foreign intelligence service, and Gehlen served as its first president until his retirement in 1968.“ Meanwhile, the new German army received numerous recycled Nazi generals, many joining NATO over Soviet objections. Via Werner von Braun and his associates, the Americans also had no trouble importing a hefty chunk of the German missile research community to work on US rockets, at the time openly designed to “contain“ the Soviet Union.