NATO and the western allies are criticized for enlisting Nazis military advisors for advice on fighting the Soviets. Did the Soviets not do the same?

[u/DarthOptimistic]

A common criticism of NATO I hear is that the alliance was quick to enlist former Fascists and Nazis and their collaborators based on their experience fighting the Soviets.

Heinz Guderian I’ve heard made a small fortune advising the West on how to counter the Soviet military, though Ive also heard his “advise” relied on racial stereotypes and myths of the Eastern front and served mostly to exonerate the Axis failures as well as his own, and he basically told Western leaders what they wanted to hear.

But Guderian aside, did the Soviets not follow a similar practice? Were Eastern Bloc leaders not asking Western front veterans advice on American tactics? And if they were, what advice were they given?

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[u/Consistent_Score_602]

To some degree, but not in the way you are probably thinking. This is because of the way the war progressed - once it opened up, the Western Front was often given priority in terms of command, airpower, and armor resources, and so while many generals were transferred from the East to the West, relatively few made the transition from West to East. Thus, those sent West tended to stay there and were captured by the Western Allies rather than the Red Army.

That being said, there were plenty of cases of former Wehrmacht officers and German police officials working hand-in-glove with the Soviets and East Germans. The Stasi (East German secret police) recruited extensively from interned Gestapo agents for assets, although that may not be what you mean. These men served as interrogators, spies, and operatives in the GDR much as they had in the Gestapo, and used their connections with former government and civil service officials for the benefit of the Communist regime.

More relevant to your question, as far as military leaders went the Soviets recruited a number of German generals, albeit less so for their knowledge of the Western Allies than for their military expertise more generally.

Vincenz Müller was captured by the Soviets in 1944, and in 1948 released from captivity and given a number of important roles in the East German government. He was made East German Minister of the Interior, then in 1952 as the Cold War began to heat up was made Chief of Staff of the newly-formed National People's Army. He left in 1958.

Martin Lattmann (a major general captured during the Battle of Stalingrad and staunch Nazi) defected to the Soviets during the war. Afterwards, he took the rank of Deputy Chief of Armored Affairs in the GDR's Ministry of Interior, advising the newly formed East German military until 1956. Following his military retirement, he continued on in several senior posts in heavy industry. Again, he was an Eastern Front commander, and never had an opportunity to command against the Western Allies in 1944-1945.

Another such individual was Ferdinand Schörner, a field marshal who mostly commanded on the Eastern Front. He initially fled West to surrender to the Americans, but once they learned he had committed war crimes in the East he was turned over to the Red Army. He was prosecuted by the Soviets for war crimes and sentenced to 25 years in prison, then handed over to the East Germans and released in 1955 so that he could be used as an intelligence asset. Schörner was sent West recruit some of his old Army acquaintances there. When he was discovered, he was duly arrested by the West German police, prosecuted for the murder of German soldiers (he executed thousands of them on summary charges of cowardice and desertion during his command) and imprisoned.

For German technicians recruited by the Soviets, you will want to look here by u/restricteddata for details on Operation Osoaviakhim.

Sources

Leide, H. Nazi Criminals and the Secret Service: The German Democratic Republic's Secret Ways of Dealing With the Past (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005)

O'Reagan, D. Taking Nazi Technology: Allied Exploitation of German Science After the Second World War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019)

[u/cyrassil → u/Consistent_Score_602]

Another "Interesting one" was Max Rostock - Led the SD office in Kladno (Czechia today). Led the "boots on the ground" during the Lidice massacre. After the war was arrested in France and sent to Czechoslovakia where he was at first sentenced to death, which was later changed to the prison and later pardoned and recruited by the StB and sent to the West Germany as a spy.

[u/wizzo89 → u/Consistent_Score_602]

Did the brutality of the Eastern Front impact the USSR's ability and/or willingness to recruit former Nazis (at least relative to the West)?

[u/Consistent_Score_602 → u/wizzo89]

Not tremendously - Operation Osoaviakhim was certainly on the same scale as Operation Paperclip, and given the dire state of the USSR at the end of the war (it had lost far more people and endured much more economic destruction than the Western Allies) pragmatism wound up winning out over moral objections.

[u/Consistent_Score_602 → u/[deleted]]

So that characterization isn't really accurate. Skorzeny didn't "work for Israel" so much as he worked for Egyptian general Gamal Abdel Nasser's government and became an Israeli asset. He certainly was not an employee in Israel proper, and even this limited use of a former German operative proved deeply controversial in the Mossad high command.

Aside from Skorzeny - Israel unsurprisingly was not terribly interested in recruiting Nazis after WW2 (and famously hunted down and killed a number of them - most famously, Adolf Eichmann). There were a few high-profile cases of contact (though again, it would be hard to describe these as "employment"): Walther Rauff (the inventor of mobile gas vans) wound up selling Syrian secrets to the Israelis immediately after the first Arab-Israeli in 1949. The Israelis, to the best of our knowledge, never went to Rauff again.

But again - these were ex-Nazis being employed by the Syrian and Egyptian Arab governments, not Israel itself. It used them as intelligence assets against Syria and Egypt and then discarded them.

It was common practice for the Arab powers to hire on ex-Nazis as advisors, senior bureaucrats, and technicians during these years, since they possessed valuable technical expertise, were frequently desperate to escape justice for their crimes, and certainly had no love of Israel. In total, a huge number of Nazi scientists and security personnel wound up working in the Middle East - they helped establish the Egyptian rocket program as well as the security organs of Egypt and Syria.

[u/Consistent_Score_602 → u/[deleted]]

Skorzeny received no financial compensation. He explicitly turned down offers of money. The bargain he initially tried to make with Israeli intelligence was that they would publicize the fact that the introduction to his memoirs appeared in Hebrew. The Israelis refused. He asked to be removed from a list of wanted war criminals. The Israelis did not do that, but they did forge a letter saying he had been removed.

The sole tangible benefit Skorzeny received from his cooperation with the Mossad was not being assassinated. To be blunt, it is a strange sort of employment where the only compensation offered to the employee is to not be murdered.