Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I've thought about this lot, Frank.
Background:
Sociologists in the US were, for a long time, not supposed to make value judgments about cultures or societies unless the mainstream consensus places them in the "fair game" category. They still do, but at a cost, personally or professionally- if they make themselves unacceptable in the world of the apologists and enablers, then they gotta go whole hog in the left or right fringes of the discipline. Which makes them proselytizers instead of researchers.
Teach and shut up, or go rogue.

So there are precious few real successful efforts to define, from the professional middle, what is (or what's not) a healthy society. Mills, Maslow, Studs Turkle, Upton Sinclair, Steinbeck, Chomsky, - there are some heroes out there, but they are largely invisible in the MSM today. They stand out just enough to provide a target, as the exceptions who prove the rule. The many younger critics of today may perhaps represent a resurgence of real debate, but must throw rocks mostly from the vantage of the small presses, or the net. And ---the German horse left the barn a long time ago.

 A good illustration is the mainstream coverage of the Bin Laden murder. Descending into murderous, lawless barbarism and then having the president celebrate it nationwide on television is a striking change, even for the empire, and this goes unremarked in the mainstream press.

The German elite was too--similar, too much like the Americans. So they got a pass, easy visas and places to --- re-create. Which they did.

Had there been a couple decades of real apolitical, toady-free analysis of the roots of the Reich, it would have been apparent early on that the German patriarchal, authoritarian cast of mind produced an elite that is strikingly successful at passing along predatory ideology as well as political power, from generation to generation.

 So is the US.

So the discussion of what happened to the power players behind the Third Reich is as thin as the discussion of what is happening to the players in The Quiet Coup put together by Cheney, Rumsfeld et al.

Rumsfeld resigned, moved down the hall to a different office. Then he disappeared.

Sure he did.

This is my suspicion.
The elite supporters of the third Reich were there all along, hanging out at places like the hotel at Monterroso al Mare, and keeping their head down till the smoke cleared from their holocaust, and their own burning culture.
Hanging out, and cultivating contacts.
The EU was bravely conceived but poorly constituted. A gamble was taken- a bet made- that economic integration would be a sufficient tool to neuter the German drive to dominate. While assuming the prophets of neoliberal globalization were their friends.
So--how did all that work out?
Now that the structure based in Brussels is clearly weak, unable to take decisive action when action is called for, the old guard are emerging, in the person of the sons and daughters of the Krupp empire, I. G. Farben, etc., to pick up the threads of power.
They have their clowns, their toadies. Berlusconi, Sarko, and in the US, Obama, et al do spring to mind.

The historical similarities are striking.

Shades of Toynbee.

Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.