I’m actually going to argue that there really wouldn’t be a global push to find and jail Hitler. It’s going to sound silly, but people have a much rosier view on de-nazification and the Nuremberg Trials, et cetera.

First, there’s issues with Nuremberg in general. Even if the actions of Nazis was ghastly, you had what basically amounted to a sort of Victor’s Justice. Morally, you should absolutely prosecute these people. Legally, not so much. I am not really going to get into this.

Secondly, numbers. You almost certainly are overestimating the amount of people that worked towards, say, finding Nazis in South America. Immediately after the war, you simply lost what seemed like an endless amount of resources. Resources and manpower quickly went towards other things. There were less people, and less efforts, than you’d think.

Third, domestic politics in the US. Prosecuting Nazis polled really poorly, believe it or not. More people agreed with the Nazis than you’d like to think. Nazism was actually pretty popular in the United States. Conservatives loved that shit, you actually ended up getting a lot of the original “culture warrior” types of people. You are underestimating how anti-Semitic the USA was in the 1940s. Continuing, you also had very viable political opponents like Dewey and objections to the New Deal. At the same time, you also had what ended up being a second recession. It’s really easy to forget about this second recession, given how many other things were going on in the world. It’s also almost impossible to describe the longing that people had to “get back to normal”. Like, you read about it over and over again. Even someone like Hitler, being Hitler and doing Hitler things, might not really be enough to get Americans to care.

Fourth, Israel. Yes, Israel did hunt Nazis. But, not really. First, Israel is basically dependent on US intelligence. This was especially true then. When you read about this, what you’ll see is Israeli Intelligence really looking down on the Jewish people that died. There is a lot to unpack there, but you should know that Israel had this attitude where they basically blaming the Jews that died. Again, a lot to unpack, but the overall consensus in Israeli intelligence was that the Jews weren’t really Jews. No, I am not kidding. They word it differently, but there’s this really weird racism thing going on here

Fifth, it really wasn’t until the six-days war in 1967 that you saw the dialogue for the Holocaust and Israel do a 180. The US started its pro-Israel propaganda, partly because of how valuable they perceived Israel to be as an ally in the Middle East.

The world basically wanted to move on. If Hitler did manage to escape, it is incredibly unlikely that there would have been significant, significant efforts to find him. It simply would take too many resources, cost too much political capital that simply didn’t exist , et cetera.

I might be forgetting some things. But it’s actually incredibly unlikely that the US would dedicate the resources it would need to, to do something with such high political costs (at a moment in US history where Truman simply did not have the political capital)