Erinnerung Brigade
When Soviet troops captured Hitler, Goebbels, and other notables of the German High Command in Berlin in November of 1945, Germany's leadership was decapitated. Although Field Marshall Erwin Rommel had been captured after nearly crushing the Allied Normandy landings of D-Day, he had since been cooperative with the Allies, even broadcasting pleas to surviving pockets of German troops to surrender.
Hitler, incensed, made dozens of recorded speeches which were broadcast from hidden facilities all over Europe to try and counteract Rommel's 'traitorous activity'. Mere days before the Soviets smashed down the doors of the Berlin Fuhrerbunker, couriers fled Germany with over 300 pre-recorded speeches, in which most of Hitler tasked the German people with 'continuing the fight'.
Although Hitler did attempt suicide, he botched the attempt and succeeded only in blowing away half of his face with a pistol. When his trial began at Nuremburg in 1947 (after spending more than a year as a Soviet prisoner), the horrifically-scarred Hitler became once more a rallying point for fanatic Nazis, hundreds of which had gone to ground.
The Erinnerung, or Remembrance, Brigade was formed in 1947 by persons unknown, though it was believed that Heinrich Himmler, who thus far remained at large, was a major player in the Brigade, if not the leader.
Throughout the rest of the 1940s and into the 1950s, the Brigade prevented Europe's wounds from healing by committing unspeakable atrocities from France to the Balkans, including the executions of hundreds of Jews, terror attacks on Allied garrisons, sabotaging of civilian aircraft, and finally culminating in a massive and well-coordinated gas attack on Soviet-occupied Berlin in 1951. Many historians feel this was what precipitated Stalin's death from a heart attack, and let Zhukov assume control of the Soviet Union.
Zhukov's ascension signalled a thawing of the increasingly frosty relations between the US and USSR, and the two superpowers were brought together once more by adversity, cooperating to end the menace of the Remembrance Brigade. A joint counter-terrorist agency, the CTA, was formed in the wake of the Berlin attack, and in 1956, Himmler himself was captured in Bucharest.
The Remembrance Brigade gradually lost power throughout the 60s, but Germany remained an international pariah - there were countless sympathizers of the Brigade, and the five separate nations that Germany had been split into in 1946 have still not been allowed to re-unite.
On the positive side, there was no Cold War as we know it; just as the threat of the Brigade (and its Japanese counterpart) was overcome, Islamic terror groups began to thrive, giving new purpose to the CTA and assuring continued cooperation between the US and the prosperous, democratizing USSR.
