“All one can do is to scour information, verify its authenticity and then act upon the knowledge attained. If one fails to act or does not share the knowledge attained, then one is no better off than before ones discovery. One might also facilitate the actions of ones discovery by not acting at all.”
G.W.~ 7.27.2008
The website below is a collection of ideas, statements, and historical evidence suggesting a potential reality that is sure to shake up your belief system. If you dare, I challenge you to read it in its entirety. Only you can make of it what you will.
http://www.hermes-press.com/education_first.htm
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGurfyISnN8&feature=related 450 300]Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away;
Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air.
You better watch out,
There may be dogs about
Ive looked over jordan, and I have seen
Things are not what they seem.
What do you get for pretending the dangers not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.
What a surprise!
A look of terminal shock in your eyes.
Now things are really what they seem.
No, this is no bad dream.
The lord is my shepherd, I shall not want
He makes me down to lie
Through pastures green he leadeth me the silent waters by.
With bright knives he releaseth my soul.
He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places.
He converteth me to lamb cutlets,
For lo, he hath great power, and great hunger.
When cometh the day we lowly ones,
Through quiet reflection, and great dedication
Master the art of karate,
Lo, we shall rise up,
And then well make the buggers eyes water.
Bleating and babbling I fell on his neck with a scream.
Wave upon wave of demented avengers
March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.
Have you heard the news?
The dogs are dead!
You better stay home
And do as youre told.
Get out of the road if you want to grow old.
GW,
The Pink Floyd lyrics are so apt.
jog on
duc
GW-
Did you read this part of the website you provided?
http://www.hermes-press.com/bush_hitler2.htm
There, the site claims that the Bush family knowingly aided Hitler.
And there is the problem.
While this site and others have some good ideas, eventually they expose themselves as being nut jobs. It doesn’t matter whether they are right or left wing.
In the end, they all want to promote their (warped?) ideology. It is not truly about wanting a better education system, or a better American. It is about promoting their own agendas. It is a shame because a lot of the changes they want are reasonable, but they get lost in the mix.
Wood, I can’t believe that was the only piece you found objectionable. Howabout the bullscheiss about capitalists killing the poor?
This sounds like more Wobbly (world socialists) website material. The hippy seems to have a soft spot for those nim-numbs.
__
Jake, lol…I missed that part.
Wood and Jake,
If you do your own seperate research you will find that Union Bancorp of New York was haulted for trade and closed down under the siding with the enemy act. It was run by Prescott Bush or he was VP & Chairman of the board.
It was found guilty of taking in Nazi monies, supporting the Nazi Party with money, and for organizing business dealings with American corporations for ammo, oil, and libricants some of which was owned by the Roosevelts.
Not a very nice piece of bonafied American history.
This is why I say you must verify authenticity….
We have alot of skeletons in our closet if you care to look for the factual eveidence.
I told you this would challenge your belief structure and what you think you know.
I’m not promoting anything stated on the website, I just feel there is alot of facts that are disturbing.
GW — Get a clue, bud. Thyssen Krupp, a company that still operates today, is not “the Nazi party.” They were a very successful steelmaking and arms manufacturer. That they operated while (and after) Hitler became Chancellor of Germany does not mean that the bank’s relationship with them meant it’s shareholders “supported Nazism.”
Union Bank, and about 20 other US banks did business with them. They were a good client. Should no one do business with Gazprom today because Putin might be another fascist despot in the wings? There’s an argument there, I guess, just as there would be one with almost any Red Army owned Chinese company doing business with US companies. Usually, business guys leave diplomacy to the diplomats. Conspiracy nuts, however, need their theories.
___
GW- the problem, as I see it, is not the facts. The problem is that the facts are often ignored, in favor of distortions to further a political ideology. Yet, you represent them as if they are facts. I wonder if you take your own medicine, which is to say that you yourself verify anything before treating it as fact.
For example, newly de-classified documents show that Bush did not directly aid that effort.
Furthermore, Union Bancorp was owned by another bank. Of the 4,000 shares registered in the name of Union Bancorp directors, care to guess how many Prescott Bush owned?
I’ll let you read and find out.
WASHINGTON — President Bush’s grandfather was a director of a bank seized by the federal government because of its ties to a German industrialist who helped bankroll Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, government documents show.
Prescott Bush (search) was one of seven directors of Union Banking Corp. (search), a New York investment bank owned by a bank controlled by the Thyssen family, according to recently declassified National Archives documents reviewed by The Associated Press.
Fritz Thyssen (search) was an early financial supporter of Hitler, whose Nazi party Thyssen believed was preferable to communism. The documents do not show any evidence Bush directly aided that effort. His position with Union Banking never was a political issue for Bush, who was elected to the Senate from Connecticut in 1952.
Reports of Bush’s involvement with the seized bank have been circulating on the Internet for years and have been reported by some mainstream media. The newly declassified documents provide additional details about the Union Banking-Thyssen connection.
Trent Duffy, a spokesman for President Bush, declined to comment.
Union Banking was owned by a Dutch bank, Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaardt N.V., which was “closely affiliated” with the German conglomerate United Steel Works, according to an Oct. 5, 1942, report from the federal Office of Alien Property Custodian. The Dutch bank and the steel firm were part of the business and financial empire of Thyssen and his brother, Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, the report said.
The 4,000 Union Banking shares owned by the Dutch bank were registered in the names of the seven U.S. directors, according a document signed by Homer Jones, chief of the division of investigation and research of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, a World War II-era agency that no longer exists.
E. Roland Harriman, the bank chairman and brother of former New York Gov. W. Averell Harriman (search), held 3,991 shares. Bush had one share.
Both Harrimans and Bush were partners in the New York investment firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman and Co., which handled the financial transactions of the bank as well as other financial dealings with several other companies linked to Bank voor Handel that were confiscated by the U.S. government during World War II.
Union Banking was seized by the government in October 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act (search).
No charges were brought against Union Banking’s American directors. The federal government was too busy trying to fight the war, said Donald Goldstein, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.
“We did not have the resources to do these things,” Goldstein said.
Fritz Thyssen broke with the Nazis in 1938 over their persecution of Catholics and Jews, and fled to Switzerland. He later was arrested and spent 1941 to 1945 in a Nazi prison. His brother lived in Switzerland from 1932 to 1947 but continued to operate businesses in Germany.
The new documents were first reported by freelance writer John Buchanan in The New Hampshire Gazette.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,100474,00.html
Now, read what was in the link from GW.
Please, tell me which one is based on facts and which one is based on distortions of truth. Tell me which one is fact-based, and which one is full of emotional rhetoric and assumptions.
The Bushes Helped Create the Nazi Regime
The cabal controlling the United States earlier created Nazi Germany through its underlings, such as Prescott Bush, Dubya’s grandfather. Prescott Bush was a director of the Union Banking Corporation, which the U.S. government took over in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corporation stock shares, all of which were owned by E. Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush, three Nazi executives, and two other associates of Prescott Bush.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The order, published in obscure government record books and kept out of the news, explained nothing about the Nazis involved; only that the Union Banking Corporation was run for the Thyssen family of Germany and/or Hungary, nationals of a designated enemy country.
This act by the U.S. government made it clear that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the Union Banking Corporation were in essence front men for the Nazis. By keeping news of this seizure quiet, the American government avoided the more important issue: in what way were Hitler and his Nazi cohorts set up, armed, and supported by the New York and London cartel of which Prescott Bush was an executive manager?
On Oct. 28, 1942, the U.S. government issued orders seizing two Nazi front organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation, long managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on November 17, 1942. In this action, the government announced that it was seizing only the Nazi interests, leaving the Nazis’ U.S. partners to carry on the business.
These were actions taken by the U.S. government during wartime, but Prescott Bush and his collaborators had already played a central role in financing and arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover of Germany. Harriman, Bush and the other cabal puppets had financed the buildup of Nazi war industries for the conquest of Europe and war against the U.S. They had also helped in the development of Nazi genocide theories and racial propaganda, with the slave labor and extermination camps as the result.
There is a term called connect the dots.
I’m not accusing anyone of anything, but if you were to commit to unspeakable acts would you not cover your tracks.
Furthermore, if you read into the relationship of international banking, federal reserve, war profiteering,
etc. you will see the dots connectting themselves.
IBM has claimed for years they knew nothing of support to Nazi Germany, but it was later found on IBM letterhead they they did know of the gas chambers since they had created the tabulating machines to determine what type of prisoner was capured along with what the outcome was.
They further had to inspect, modify, and maitain the machines.
My point is that you must read copius amounts of material to determine your own decisions.
I can find eveidence to support any side of any issue.
You must discover what is spin and what is not.
There is evidence that our government was so impressed with German skills that we helped war criminals escape in order to gain further inteligence and scientific knowledge.
Like I said do more than one or two searches. Read volumes of material and make your own determinations.
I just found this site to be interesting as to why we might be in a place that should not be. Despite all the greatness this country expresses we have a lot of contradictions that do not fit the mold of our ideology.
Furthermore regarding “nut jobs”….when information or claims are so anti someones thought process it will always appear that they are crazy, mis-informed or presenting an agenda.
If you were taught all your life that the sun was your God then anyone who spoke otherwise would be a heretic. Why because it goes against the grain of everything your taught and what you believe.
Just look at Darwin or Galileo….
Look at how many people believed that we were attacked in the Bay of Tonken incidence.
Research circumstances leading up to Pearl Harbor
See the problem with history is that it is his story.
GW- I just want to make sure that you know that I love a good debate. I’m like a dog with a bone, that way. I will try and keep this in a fashion that does not go ad hominem, out of respect for you and the process.
You just presented a red herring. Rather than defend the link you posted, and the information you presented, you chose to present further distractions.
We were not discussing IBM, international banking, war profiteering, etc.
What was being discussed was whether certain organizations mis-represent facts in order to further a political ideology. Specifically, the link to the article (which you posted) concerning Bush and the Nazi’s was the vehicle for this discussion.
I posted contrary evidence, built from recently released classified documents, and your response was to claim (as is the way of a lot of conspiracy theorists) that anything that happened was obviously covered up, and 2. you posted what can only be described as a red herring.
You offered absolutely no direct response to the information I presented.
See, we are no further along in this debate, because your position does not seem to allow the same consideration of facts as you require of others.
***Debate off***
What you do not know about me was that I spent much of my younger years believing in many of these same conspiracy theories, scandals, etc. that you are writing about. I was a left-wing nut job. I followed the G. Dead. I lived out of a fucking truck with a camper shell. I do not regret any of that. Good times. I am who I am. What I do regret about that time was that I believed a lot of stuff that just was not true. I was fooled, by the very people I believed in.
Jake,
As far as Krupp is concerened you have to decide for yourself what is for you and not for you.
If I was told that I had to make ovens to kill people or be killed…my response would be yes sir I will make what you ask….that is if I could not at that moment escape or kill those who threaten me. As soon as I had a chance my intentions would be to flee or organize.
Personally I will never buy anything from Krupps and I will never drive a Mercedes no matter much I truly like their vehicles.
This is a personal choice based on history.
So it is alright to do busines with known supporters of the Nazi party?
Everyone in Germany said the same bullshit…if I did not listen to them then I would have been killed.
I guess I would have been killed for defending my life and or beliefs cause you could never get me to make ovens or munitons for genocide.
Wood,
I agree that I did not directly answer the evidence you provided.
Perhaps I can get carried away with facts vs. accusations.
I suppose not everyone on the board is as thick as thieves, but I find it hard to believe that information surrounding these dealings was not known or that it was simply was ignored.
Perhaps Prescott is an angel or completely innocent of the the dealings this company had.
I just find the coincendences very strange.
Furthermore I never stated that Prescot Bush was involved I merely pointed out that he was on the board and an executive of the company. Also that “it” the company was shut down.
As far as my response with IBM and such…no one really ever comes out and tells the truth…especially when it is certifiable. Denial is always the case right into appeals court.
Hippy,
First off, the ovens were for cremation, just as an aside. They killed people in droves with the gas.
Second, very few people knew — even in Germany — what was going on in the concentration camps. I am not forgiving this, as they knew innocent people were being imprisoned and chose to “go with the flow.” I am just saying that it’s hardly proper to act — like the asshats you’ve linked are acting — as if Union Bank was hand in hand with the Nazis snuffing people. They dealt with a well established, “good credit” company, not a government.
We are today dealing with Chinese Red Army firms that use slave labor in order to keep that Olympic clock on time.
Here’s hoping there’s no Chinese wastebaskets in your garage with your lack of Mercedes.
GW-
Good debate.
I do enjoy hearing the dark side of human nature, politics, and American history. I hope to never be so close-minded as to immediately dismiss anything which seems unbelievable.
However, I get immediately pissed off, and close-minded, when I read something that might be true, wrapped inside the author’s own assumptions and emotional rhetoric. Perhaps I should ignore the trappings/noise and focus on the essence and the possibilities. I guess experience has proven fairly often that the same authors that use emotional rhetoric and assumptions are often presenting falsehoods as truths in the first place.
Back to the issues at hand:
As to Prescott Bush, keep in mind, it wasn’t illegal to do business with Germany, until the law was changed. Until that point, there was nothing illegal going on. Doesn’t mean it was moral, or ethical. But then we would have to know what P. Bush knew, to accurately judge the morality of it all.
We would have to extrapolate much further than seems rational in order to postulate that the actions of his Grandfather somehow make Dubya culpable.
I have read/heard about some shenanigans with Pearl Harbor, but had not heard anything about IBM. I will have to check those out.
To be clear, I do have a sick fascination with conspiracy and global scandal. I just prefer to have a dry presentation of what is known without any embellishments.
But I just want to drive my Volkswagen/Ford/Mercedes/Opel/BMW (take your pick), drinking a Fanta, while my Hugo Boss shirt is being washed in my Siemens ‘Zyklon’ washing machine.
In my spare time, I read books published by Random House, listen to music from BMG, and watch the satellite feed of RTL.
Also, must remember to take my Bayer aspirin, since the internet (running on my IBM-powered computer) says it’s good for you.
Fanta is a German brand?
No shit?
__
Wood,
I agree with your statements about author assumptions.
I find the facts shocking plain and simple.
As to the authors assumptions well that is subject to debate and under consideration of “nut jobedness” if that is a word….LOL
I just feel the website, despite its position, presents a multitude of facts that are rarely discussed in American history. I was more interested in the results of American literacy…
Regarding your statement about P. B. All is true.
However being in the position he held it is hard to believe that he was innocent. Meaning they knew what and who they were dealing with, but as you said it was not against the law to do business with Germany.
No embelishments would put the facts to be judged and discussed by the readers .
While I was researching the Federal Reserve I came across this. This is what prompted me to research various disturbing facts. When you have time watch all 5 parts with pen and paper. It will diclose disturbing facts which I spent at least 10-15 hours trying to verify.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dmPchuXIXQ
Dpeezy,
Your funny….
The Coca-Cola bottling plants in Germany stopped having access to Coke syrup when the war broke out, thus they came up with a different flavor. Presto change-o, Fanta was born.
Coke bought them out 20 years later and changed the lemon flavor’s name to the goodness that is Sprite.
Jake,
Jake,
My problem is I like to buy all American products, but these days it is becoming harder to find.
Perhaps the Union Bancorp was not hand in hand snuffing people, but they knowingly took in money which was confiscated from the Jews. Just like the banks in Switzerland who are now paying monies to people who were affected by the Nazi party and their design.
I also think there are moral and ethical questions to be asked about dealing with Chinese state run companies.
If you look at Darfur it is also a situtation that has a multitude of improprieties regarding the Chinese funding those committing Genocide so they can satisfy their need for oil.
Some of the good credit companies you mention are:
IG Farben….Great upstanding good credit company:
“George Walker, GW’s great-grandfather, also set up the takeover of the Hamburg-America Line, a cover for I.G. Farben’s Nazi espionage unit in the United States. In Germany, I.G. Farben was most famous for putting the gas in gas chambers; it was the producer of Zyklon B and other gasses used on victims of the Holocaust. The Bush family was not unaware of the nature of their investment partners. They hired Allen Dulles, the future head of the CIA, to hide the funds they were making from Nazi investments and the funds they were sending to Nazi Germany, rather than divest.”
Source: http://www.disinfo.com/pages/dossier/id195/pg1/
Again for the record I’m not suggesting or supporting any position I am just trying to uncover fact.
DPeezy,
Corn syrup will kill you….I have a good recipe that calls for Sprite as a part of the marination ingredients.
Did you know there is only one plant in the world that makes Dr. Pepper with pure cane sugar?
The rest utilize corn syrup….
Hey Duc,
The lyrics are classic and timely.
Cheers….
jake,
Look up Chemagrow Corporation and their relations with the US Army. It is on Wilkapedia…could not post link for some reason.
Perhaps the Union Bancorp was not hand in hand snuffing people, but they knowingly took in money which was confiscated from the Jews.
So Thyssen Krupp was “confiscating money from Jews?”
Seriously?
Dude, no disrespect, but if you’re going to go after someone’s family, you need to come with a little bit of a better dossier than you have already.
Nutty conspiracy sites don’t count.
__
Bushitler is a very popular term up here in dumb fuck NYC.
jake,
Just research the facts and filter out the bullshit.
There are many verifaible facts.
When talking about Krupp I assumed your speaking of former steelmakers turned coffee maker company.
The paragraph about accepting and hiding war profits/stolen jewish monies started with Union Bank corp.
Thyssen Kruppp is often confused with Krupp Works which was leading munitions maker who used 100k slave laborers from Auschwitz.
http://www.freedomdomain.com/map/corporations/union_banking_corp.html
the link above shows the relationship of known Nazis…
jake,
George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.
The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.
His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.
The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator’s action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
The debate over Prescott Bush’s behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the “Bush/Nazi” connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.
Remarkably, little of Bush’s dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush’s business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.
While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen’s US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.
Tantalising
Bush was also on the board of at least one of the companies that formed part of a multinational network of front companies to allow Thyssen to move assets around the world.
Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal company in Germany and grew rich from Hitler’s efforts to re-arm between the two world wars. One of the pillars in Thyssen’s international corporate web, UBC, worked exclusively for, and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands. More tantalising are Bush’s links to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC), based in mineral rich Silesia on the German-Polish border. During the war, the company made use of Nazi slave labour from the concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The ownership of CSSC changed hands several times in the 1930s, but documents from the US National Archive declassified last year link Bush to CSSC, although it is not clear if he and UBC were still involved in the company when Thyssen’s American assets were seized in 1942.
Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush’s involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland.
The first set of files, the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress, show that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen.
The second set of papers, which are in the National Archives, are contained in vesting order number 248 which records the seizure of the company assets. What these files show is that on October 20 1942 the alien property custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director. Having gone through the books of the bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. By November, the Silesian-American Company, another of Prescott Bush’s ventures, had also been seized.
The third set of documents, also at the National Archives, are contained in the files on IG Farben, who was prosecuted for war crimes.
A report issued by the Office of Alien Property Custodian in 1942 stated of the companies that “since 1939, these (steel and mining) properties have been in possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country’s war effort”.
Prescott Bush, a 6ft 4in charmer with a rich singing voice, was the founder of the Bush political dynasty and was once considered a potential presidential candidate himself. Like his son, George, and grandson, George W, he went to Yale where he was, again like his descendants, a member of the secretive and influential Skull and Bones student society. He was an artillery captain in the first world war and married Dorothy Walker, the daughter of George Herbert Walker, in 1921.
In 1924, his father-in-law, a well-known St Louis investment banker, helped set him up in business in New York with Averill Harriman, the wealthy son of railroad magnate E H Harriman in New York, who had gone into banking.
One of the first jobs Walker gave Bush was to manage UBC. Bush was a founding member of the bank and the incorporation documents, which list him as one of seven directors, show he owned one share in UBC worth $125.
The bank was set up by Harriman and Bush’s father-in-law to provide a US bank for the Thyssens, Germany’s most powerful industrial family.
August Thyssen, the founder of the dynasty had been a major contributor to Germany’s first world war effort and in the 1920s, he and his sons Fritz and Heinrich established a network of overseas banks and companies so their assets and money could be whisked offshore if threatened again.
By the time Fritz Thyssen inherited the business empire in 1926, Germany’s economic recovery was faltering. After hearing Adolf Hitler speak, Thyssen became mesmerised by the young firebrand. He joined the Nazi party in December 1931 and admits backing Hitler in his autobiography, I Paid Hitler, when the National Socialists were still a radical fringe party. He stepped in several times to bail out the struggling party: in 1928 Thyssen had bought the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse, in Munich, which Hitler converted into the Brown House, the headquarters of the Nazi party. The money came from another Thyssen overseas institution, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvarrt in Rotterdam.
By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman, which claimed to be the world’s largest private investment bank, and UBC had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler’s build-up to war.
Between 1931 and 1933 UBC bought more than $8m worth of gold, of which $3m was shipped abroad. According to documents seen by the Guardian, after UBC was set up it transferred $2m to BBH accounts and between 1924 and 1940 the assets of UBC hovered around $3m, dropping to $1m only on a few occasions.
In 1941, Thyssen fled Germany after falling out with Hitler but he was captured in France and detained for the remainder of the war.
There was nothing illegal in doing business with the Thyssens throughout the 1930s and many of America’s best-known business names invested heavily in the German economic recovery. However, everything changed after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Even then it could be argued that BBH was within its rights continuing business relations with the Thyssens until the end of 1941 as the US was still technically neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor. The trouble started on July 30 1942 when the New York Herald-Tribune ran an article entitled “Hitler’s Angel Has $3m in US Bank”. UBC’s huge gold purchases had raised suspicions that the bank was in fact a “secret nest egg” hidden in New York for Thyssen and other Nazi bigwigs. The Alien Property Commission (APC) launched an investigation.
There is no dispute over the fact that the US government seized a string of assets controlled by BBH – including UBC and SAC – in the autumn of 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy act. What is in dispute is if Harriman, Walker and Bush did more than own these companies on paper.
Erwin May, a treasury attache and officer for the department of investigation in the APC, was assigned to look into UBC’s business. The first fact to emerge was that Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush and the other directors didn’t actually own their shares in UBC but merely held them on behalf of Bank voor Handel. Strangely, no one seemed to know who owned the Rotterdam-based bank, including UBC’s president.
May wrote in his report of August 16 1941: “Union Banking Corporation, incorporated August 4 1924, is wholly owned by the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My investigation has produced no evidence as to the ownership of the Dutch bank. Mr Cornelis [sic] Lievense, president of UBC, claims no knowledge as to the ownership of the Bank voor Handel but believes it possible that Baron Heinrich Thyssen, brother of Fritz Thyssen, may own a substantial interest.”
May cleared the bank of holding a golden nest egg for the Nazi leaders but went on to describe a network of companies spreading out from UBC across Europe, America and Canada, and how money from voor Handel travelled to these companies through UBC.
By September May had traced the origins of the non-American board members and found that Dutchman HJ Kouwenhoven – who met with Harriman in 1924 to set up UBC – had several other jobs: in addition to being the managing director of voor Handel he was also the director of the August Thyssen bank in Berlin and a director of Fritz Thyssen’s Union Steel Works, the holding company that controlled Thyssen’s steel and coal mine empire in Germany.
Within a few weeks, Homer Jones, the chief of the APC investigation and research division sent a memo to the executive committee of APC recommending the US government vest UBC and its assets. Jones named the directors of the bank in the memo, including Prescott Bush’s name, and wrote: “Said stock is held by the above named individuals, however, solely as nominees for the Bank voor Handel, Rotterdam, Holland, which is owned by one or more of the Thyssen family, nationals of Germany and Hungary. The 4,000 shares hereinbefore set out are therefore beneficially owned and help for the interests of enemy nationals, and are vestible by the APC,” according to the memo from the National Archives seen by the Guardian.
Red-handed
Jones recommended that the assets be liquidated for the benefit of the government, but instead UBC was maintained intact and eventually returned to the American shareholders after the war. Some claim that Bush sold his share in UBC after the war for $1.5m – a huge amount of money at the time – but there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. No further action was ever taken nor was the investigation continued, despite the fact UBC was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family eight months after America had entered the war and that this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler’s rise to power.
The most tantalising part of the story remains shrouded in mystery: the connection, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC) and Auschwitz.
Thyssen’s partner in United Steel Works, which had coal mines and steel plants across the region, was Friedrich Flick, another steel magnate who also owned part of IG Farben, the powerful German chemical company.
Flick’s plants in Poland made heavy use of slave labour from the concentration camps in Poland. According to a New York Times article published in March 18 1934 Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while “American interests” held the rest.
The US National Archive documents show that BBH’s involvement with CSSC was more than simply holding the shares in the mid-1930s. Bush’s friend and fellow “bonesman” Knight Woolley, another partner at BBH, wrote to Averill Harriman in January 1933 warning of problems with CSSC after the Poles started their drive to nationalise the plant. “The Consolidated Silesian Steel Company situation has become increasingly complicated, and I have accordingly brought in Sullivan and Cromwell, in order to be sure that our interests are protected,” wrote Knight. “After studying the situation Foster Dulles is insisting that their man in Berlin get into the picture and obtain the information which the directors here should have. You will recall that Foster is a director and he is particularly anxious to be certain that there is no liability attaching to the American directors.”
But the ownership of the CSSC between 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland and 1942 when the US government vested UBC and SAC is not clear.
“SAC held coal mines and definitely owned CSSC between 1934 and 1935, but when SAC was vested there was no trace of CSSC. All concrete evidence of its ownership disappears after 1935 and there are only a few traces in 1938 and 1939,” says Eva Schweitzer, the journalist and author whose book, America and the Holocaust, is published next month.
Silesia was quickly made part of the German Reich after the invasion, but while Polish factories were seized by the Nazis, those belonging to the still neutral Americans (and some other nationals) were treated more carefully as Hitler was still hoping to persuade the US to at least sit out the war as a neutral country. Schweitzer says American interests were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The Nazis bought some out, but not others.
The two Holocaust survivors suing the US government and the Bush family for a total of $40bn in compensation claim both materially benefited from Auschwitz slave labour during the second world war.
Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, began a class action in America in 2001, but the case was thrown out by Judge Rosemary Collier on the grounds that the government cannot be held liable under the principle of “state sovereignty”.
Jan Lissmann, one of the lawyers for the survivors, said: “President Bush withdrew President Bill Clinton’s signature from the treaty [that founded the court] not only to protect Americans, but also to protect himself and his family.”
Lissmann argues that genocide-related cases are covered by international law, which does hold governments accountable for their actions. He claims the ruling was invalid as no hearing took place.
In their claims, Mr Goldstein and Mr Gingold, honorary chairman of the League of Anti-fascists, suggest the Americans were aware of what was happening at Auschwitz and should have bombed the camp.
The lawyers also filed a motion in The Hague asking for an opinion on whether state sovereignty is a valid reason for refusing to hear their case. A ruling is expected within a month.
The petition to The Hague states: “From April 1944 on, the American Air Force could have destroyed the camp with air raids, as well as the railway bridges and railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. The murder of about 400,000 Hungarian Holocaust victims could have been prevented.”
The case is built around a January 22 1944 executive order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt calling on the government to take all measures to rescue the European Jews. The lawyers claim the order was ignored because of pressure brought by a group of big American companies, including BBH, where Prescott Bush was a director.
Lissmann said: “If we have a positive ruling from the court it will cause [president] Bush huge problems and make him personally liable to pay compensation.”
The US government and the Bush family deny all the claims against them.
In addition to Eva Schweitzer’s book, two other books are about to be published that raise the subject of Prescott Bush’s business history. The author of the second book, to be published next year, John Loftus, is a former US attorney who prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the 70s. Now living in St Petersburg, Florida and earning his living as a security commentator for Fox News and ABC radio, Loftus is working on a novel which uses some of the material he has uncovered on Bush. Loftus stressed that what Prescott Bush was involved in was just what many other American and British businessmen were doing at the time.
“You can’t blame Bush for what his grandfather did any more than you can blame Jack Kennedy for what his father did – bought Nazi stocks – but what is important is the cover-up, how it could have gone on so successfully for half a century, and does that have implications for us today?” he said.
“This was the mechanism by which Hitler was funded to come to power, this was the mechanism by which the Third Reich’s defence industry was re-armed, this was the mechanism by which Nazi profits were repatriated back to the American owners, this was the mechanism by which investigations into the financial laundering of the Third Reich were blunted,” said Loftus, who is vice-chairman of the Holocaust Museum in St Petersburg.
“The Union Banking Corporation was a holding company for the Nazis, for Fritz Thyssen,” said Loftus. “At various times, the Bush family has tried to spin it, saying they were owned by a Dutch bank and it wasn’t until the Nazis took over Holland that they realised that now the Nazis controlled the apparent company and that is why the Bush supporters claim when the war was over they got their money back. Both the American treasury investigations and the intelligence investigations in Europe completely bely that, it’s absolute horseshit. They always knew who the ultimate beneficiaries were.”
“There is no one left alive who could be prosecuted but they did get away with it,” said Loftus. “As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averill Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany.”
Loftus said Prescott Bush must have been aware of what was happening in Germany at the time. “My take on him was that he was a not terribly successful in-law who did what Herbert Walker told him to. Walker and Harriman were the two evil geniuses, they didn’t care about the Nazis any more than they cared about their investments with the Bolsheviks.”
What is also at issue is how much money Bush made from his involvement. His supporters suggest that he had one token share. Loftus disputes this, citing sources in “the banking and intelligence communities” and suggesting that the Bush family, through George Herbert Walker and Prescott, got $1.5m out of the involvement. There is, however, no paper trail to this sum.
The third person going into print on the subject is John Buchanan, 54, a Miami-based magazine journalist who started examining the files while working on a screenplay. Last year, Buchanan published his findings in the venerable but small-circulation New Hampshire Gazette under the headline “Documents in National Archives Prove George Bush’s Grandfather Traded With the Nazis – Even After Pearl Harbor”. He expands on this in his book to be published next month – Fixing America: Breaking the Stranglehold of Corporate Rule, Big Media and the Religious Right.
In the article, Buchanan, who has worked mainly in the trade and music press with a spell as a muckraking reporter in Miami, claimed that “the essential facts have appeared on the internet and in relatively obscure books but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes”.
Buchanan suffers from hypermania, a form of manic depression, and when he found himself rebuffed in his initial efforts to interest the media, he responded with a series of threats against the journalists and media outlets that had spurned him. The threats, contained in e-mails, suggested that he would expose the journalists as “traitors to the truth”.
Unsurprisingly, he soon had difficulty getting his calls returned. Most seriously, he faced aggravated stalking charges in Miami, in connection with a man with whom he had fallen out over the best way to publicise his findings. The charges were dropped last month.
Biography
Buchanan said he regretted his behaviour had damaged his credibility but his main aim was to secure publicity for the story. Both Loftus and Schweitzer say Buchanan has come up with previously undisclosed documentation.
The Bush family have largely responded with no comment to any reference to Prescott Bush. Brown Brothers Harriman also declined to comment.
The Bush family recently approved a flattering biography of Prescott Bush entitled Duty, Honour, Country by Mickey Herskowitz. The publishers, Rutledge Hill Press, promised the book would “deal honestly with Prescott Bush’s alleged business relationships with Nazi industrialists and other accusations”.
In fact, the allegations are dealt with in less than two pages. The book refers to the Herald-Tribune story by saying that “a person of less established ethics would have panicked … Bush and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman informed the government regulators that the account, opened in the late 1930s, was ‘an unpaid courtesy for a client’ … Prescott Bush acted quickly and openly on behalf of the firm, served well by a reputation that had never been compromised. He made available all records and all documents. Viewed six decades later in the era of serial corporate scandals and shattered careers, he received what can be viewed as the ultimate clean bill.”
The Prescott Bush story has been condemned by both conservatives and some liberals as having nothing to do with the current president. It has also been suggested that Prescott Bush had little to do with Averill Harriman and that the two men opposed each other politically.
However, documents from the Harriman papers include a flattering wartime profile of Harriman in the New York Journal American and next to it in the files is a letter to the financial editor of that paper from Prescott Bush congratulating the paper for running the profile. He added that Harriman’s “performance and his whole attitude has been a source of inspiration and pride to his partners and his friends”.
The Anti-Defamation League in the US is supportive of Prescott Bush and the Bush family. In a statement last year they said that “rumours about the alleged Nazi ‘ties’ of the late Prescott Bush … have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated … Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser.”
However, one of the country’s oldest Jewish publications, the Jewish Advocate, has aired the controversy in detail.
More than 60 years after Prescott Bush came briefly under scrutiny at the time of a faraway war, his grandson is facing a different kind of scrutiny but one underpinned by the same perception that, for some people, war can be a profitable business.
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1 share of UBC was worth $750k in 1951
jake,
But what did the Bush family know about their Nazi connection and when did they know it? As senior managers of Brown Brothers Harriman, they had to have known that their American clients, such as the Rockefellers, were investing heavily in German corporations, including Thyssen’s giant Vereinigte Stahlwerke. As noted historian Christopher Simpson repeatedly documents, it is a matter of public record that Brown Brother’s investments in Nazi Germany took place under the Bush family stewardship.
When war broke out was Prescott Bush stricken with a case of Waldheimers disease, a sudden amnesia about his Nazi past? Or did he really believe that our friendly Dutch allies owned the Union Banking Corporation and its parent bank in Rotterdam? It should be recalled that in January 1937, he hired Allen Dulles to “cloak” his accounts. But cloak from whom? Did he expect that happy little Holland was going to declare war on America? The cloaking operation only makes sense in anticipation of a possible war with Nazi Germany. If Union Bank was not the conduit for laundering the Rockefeller’s Nazi investments back to America, then how could the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank end up owning 31% of the Thyssen group after the war?
It should be noted that the Thyssen group (TBG) is now the largest industrial conglomerate in Germany, and with a net worth of more than $50 billion dollars, one of the wealthiest corporations in the world. TBG is so rich it even bought out the Krupp family, famous arms makers for Hitler, leaving the Thyssens as the undisputed champion survivors of the Third Reich. Where did the Thyssens get the start-up money to rebuild their empire with such speed after World War II?
The enormous sums of money deposited into the Union Bank prior to 1942 is the best evidence that Prescott Bush knowingly served as a money launderer for the Nazis. Remember that Union Banks’ books and accounts were frozen by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian in 1942 and not released back to the Bush family until 1951. At that time, Union Bank shares representing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of industrial stocks and bonds were unblocked for distribution. Did the Bush family really believe that such enormous sums came from Dutch enterprises? One could sell tulip bulbs and wooden shoes for centuries and not achieve those sums. A fortune this size could only have come from the Thyssen profits made from rearming the Third Reich, and then hidden, first from the Nazi tax auditors, and then from the Allies.
The Bushes knew perfectly well that Brown Brothers was the American money channel into Nazi Germany, and that Union Bank was the secret pipeline to bring the Nazi money back to America from Holland. The Bushes had to have known how the secret money circuit worked because they were on the board of directors in both directions: Brown Brothers out, Union Bank in.
Moreover, the size of their compensation is commensurate with their risk as Nazi money launderers. In 1951, Prescott Bush and his father in law each received one share of Union Bank stock, worth $750,000 each. One and a half million dollars was a lot of money in 1951. But then, from the Thyssen point of view, buying the Bushes was the best bargain of the war.
The bottom line is harsh: It is bad enough that the Bush family helped raise the money for Thyssen to give Hitler his start in the 1920’s, but giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war is treason. The Bush’s bank helped the Thyssens make the Nazi steel that killed allied soldiers. As bad as financing the Nazi war machine may seem, aiding and abetting the Holocaust was worse. Thyssen’s coal mines used Jewish slaves as if they were disposable chemicals. There are six million skeletons in the Thyssen family closet, and a myriad of criminal and historical questions to be answered about the Bush family’s complicity. ___
First published September, 2000
This article is provided courtesy of Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz and Tetrahedron Publishing Group http://www.tetrahedron.org
http://www.tetrahedron.org/articles/new_world_order/bush_nazis.html
jake,
I’m just saying do some research…that is all.
Good find GW.
I remember reading that Guardian article once…very enlightening/scary/etc. Makes you realize that you really don’t know half the shit that really goes down between companies/governments/behind closed doors, etc.
GW– I’m just saying it’s all unfounded. There’s no proof that Harriman Brothers, never mind “the eeevil Bush Family (mooohoohahahah!) “funded the nazi war machine.”
Harriman Brothes was an international investment bank — like GS today — it’s not unusual that they had large international clients. They worked with them until they could not anymore because we came to be at war with the country they resided in. Prior to that, they were just another client.
How the bankers are supposed to know about the “master plan” when not even our intelligence agencies knew about it is beyond me. There were literally THOUSANDS of international relationships between what was then “Nazi Germany” and many western countries/companies, including the US and Britain. They had nothing to do with ideology. At the time, not many people (except the communists, who wanted INTERNATIONAL socialism, and so hated national socialism) gave a shit.
Guess what? It was a different world then. Fascist dictatorships were a dime a dozen, and preferable business partners to the commie ones (who tended not to pay their bills).
Just saying, get some perspective about what the world was like then.. and now.
Right now, we’re doing business with Chinese communists that are just as bad as the Nazis were in 1936. Will they become the Nazis of 1943? Who the fuck knows, but in the meantime, business is carried on.
Stop wasting your time with conjectural agenda’d bullshit, and pay attention to what is going on now, so history is not repeated. This kind of crap is one step up from Masonic conspiracy lore.
__
Yes, and I’m sure The Guardian had a really strong historical pedagogic reason they were pushing the Prescott Bush Nazi conspiracy angle.
Because we know they’d never go out of their way to try to embarrass the Bush family for political agenda reasons.
_
Nah…pish-posh…newspapers are never biased! Nor do they have political agendas! No sir-ree!
But they do have the best website of all the US or UK newspapers…
jake,
You could be right. I’m not certain, but I feel there is too much coincedence and I guess circumstancial evidence.
The more I learn the more I’m “losing my religion.”
You know just like the lines have been blurred between left and right so is the line between international banking and governmets of superpowers.
It all seems to be one giant matrix.
I still have a problem with China and its support of the Sudanese gov.
Did you look at Chemagrow?
How about the blood line relation of Cheney, Bush, & Obama?