I suspect this is an unfortunate consequence of the fact that people nowadays say “card-carrying member of the X” to say “really believed in the X”. In this case, the fact that he was a decorated Luftwaffe volunteer pilot in WW 2 made the author believe that he “really believed in the Nazi cause”.

I suspect the “need to make false statements” here is more accident than intention.

Anyway, I’m glad you corrected this.

I don't know the difference, but I'm not sure why it's surreal. I mean, the whole point of what they did in the wake of World War 2 was to try to prevent World War 3 (since Hitler's rise was largely dependent on the punishment inflicted on Germans for WWI). And they did that by building up the Japanese and German economies. And during the cold war, the former Nazi scientists were crucial for helping to build up the U.S. space program. Operation Paperclip was an initiative that recruited 1,600+ former Nazi scientists and engineers for that effort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip