Common parlance is that the nazis lost the war. And they did materially—there is no doubt—but can the same be said ideologically? When many modern systems in the west are from old nazi blueprints, when their top scientists and cabinet members avoided persecution for warcrimes, or when people still ascribe to neonazism in our modern era—can an ideological victory be declared? We may have killed the weed but its roots grow still in our soil, waiting for the day to proudly break through.
The nazis seemed to have exchanged material defeat for ideological victory. Their ideas on rocketry, on corporate management and the control of human behavior, are enacted everyday throughout the west and in many ways have come to culturally define the United States. We wouldn't have landed on the moon without nazi scientists. We wouldn't have the spanning GDP-machine we a call a country without nazi management techniques infecting modern corprorate culture. According to French historian Johann Chapoutot, in the 1980s there was a West German management school where heads of corprorate office would go to learn modern management from a closeted nazi. These ideas were imparted flawlessly into our culture and have been woven into the social fabric, please read more about it in his latest book, "Free to Obey". This formed my thoughts on why modern nazism is both endemic and threatening to the United States. After defeating the nazis corporeally we invited the "best" ones into our societies where they entrenched and grew like a cancer.
We never beat them in totality, we only assumed their ideology would fade after assimilation into democratic society but it didn't, it can't, because it was never eradicated to the point of fading, of being forgotten. The fact large swaths of Amercians during the 20th century were open admirers of the nazi regime—and some still are today—is telling in itself. Culturally speaking, and with some historical ground to stand on (I did read one book afterall), it's safe to say that the US and the nazis were "frenemies" and in a way, still are, they have to be. Most of what we inherited from nazism is taken for granted today—Objective-Based Management, sensational politics, rocketships—so there was no fascist victory. Instead there was a crypto-fascist victory that allows their old ideas to thrive, to cohabitate with modern democracy because order, in a loose sense, is compatible with any ideology.
I don't think America is a nazi sleeper cell and I don't consider my boss to be a fascist. I think it's interesting what seemingly opposite ideologies can agree on and take from one another, and especially so in such extreme cases.