- WASHINGTON -- After 60
years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media,
newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and
Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of
President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S.
banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine
from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against
Bush and his "enemy national" partners.
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- The documents also show that Bush and his
colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the
Treasury, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German
industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in
the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler's rise to power by the
subversion of democratic principle and German law.
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- Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate
that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger
brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert
Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, continued their
dealings with the German industrial tycoon for nearly a year after the
U.S. entered the war.
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- No Story?
-
- For six decades these historical facts have gone
unreported by the mainstream U.S. media. 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. This
story has also escaped the attention of "official" Bush biographers,
Presidential historians and publishers of U.S. history books covering
World War II and its aftermath.
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- The White House did not respond to phone calls
seeking comment.
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- The Summer of '42
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- The unraveling of the web of Bush-Harriman-Thyssen
U.S. enterprises, all of which operated out of the same suite of
offices at 39 Broadway in New York under the supervision of Prescott
Bush, began with a story that ran simultaneously in the New York
Herald-Tribune and Washington Post on July 31, 1941. By then, the U.S.
had been at war with Germany for nearly eight months.
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- "Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank,"
declared the front-page Herald-Tribune headline. The lead paragraph
characterized Fritz Thyssen as "Adolf Hitler's original patron a
decade ago." In fact, the steel and coal magnate had aggressively
supported and funded Hitler since October 1923, according to Thyssen's
autobiography, I Paid Hitler. In that book, Thyssen also acknowledges
his direct personal relationships with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels
and Rudolf Hess.
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- The Herald-Tribune also cited unnamed sources who
suggested Thyssen's U.S. "nest egg" in fact belonged to "Nazi bigwigs"
including Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, or even Hitler
himself.
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- Business is Business
-
- The "bank," founded in 1924 by W. Averell Harriman
on behalf of Thyssen and his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. of
Holland, was Union Banking Corporation (UBC) of New York City.
According to government documents, it was in reality a clearing house
for a number of Thyssen-controlled enterprises and assets, including
as many as a dozen individual businesses. UBC also bought and shipped
overseas gold, steel, coal, and U.S. Treasury bonds. The company's
activities were administered for Thyssen by a Netherlands-born,
naturalized U.S. citizen named Cornelis Lievense, who served as
president of UBC. Roland Harriman was chairman and Prescott Bush a
managing director.
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- The Herald-Tribune article did not identify Bush or
Harriman as executives of UBC, or Brown Brothers Harriman, in which
they were partners, as UBC's private banker. A confidential FBI memo
from that period suggested, without naming the Bush and Harriman
families, that politically prominent individuals were about to come
under official U.S. government scrutiny as Hitler's plunder of Europe
continued unabated.
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- After the "Hitler's Angel" article was published
Bush and Harriman made no attempts to divest themselves of the
controversial Thyssen financial alliance, nor did they challenge the
newspaper report that UBC was, in fact, a de facto Nazi front
organization in the U.S.
-
- Instead, the government documents show, Bush and his
partners increased their subterfuge to try to conceal the true nature
and ownership of their various businesses, particularly after the U.S.
entered the war. The documents also disclose that Cornelis Lievense,
Thyssen's personal appointee to oversee U.S. matters for his
Rotterdam-based Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V., via UBC for
nearly two decades, repeatedly denied to U.S. government investigators
any knowledge of the ownership of the Netherlands bank or the role of
Thyssen in it. Brown Brothers Harriman sent letters to the government
seeking reconsideration of the seizures by using false
information.
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- UBC's original group of business associates included
George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather,
who had a relationship with the Harriman family that began in 1919. In
1922, Walker and W. Averell Harriman traveled to Berlin to set up the
German branch of their banking and investment operations, which were
largely based on critical war resources such as steel and coal.
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- The Walker-Harriman-created German industrial
alliance also included partnership with another German titan who
supported Hitler's rise, Friedrich Flick, who partnered with Thyssen
in the German Steel Trust that forged the Nazi war machine. For his
role in using slave labor and his own steel, coal and arms resources
to build Hitler's war effort, Flick was convicted at the Nuremberg
trials and sentenced to prison.
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- The Family Business
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- In 1926, after Prescott Bush had married Walker's
daughter, Dorothy, Walker brought Bush in as a vice president of the
private banking and investment firm of W.A. Harriman & Co., also
located in New York. Bush became a partner in the firm that later
became Brown Brothers Harriman and the largest private investment bank
in the world. Eventually, Bush became a director of and stockholder in
UBC.
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- However, the government documents note that Bush,
Harriman, Lievense and the other UBC stockholders were in fact
"nominees," or phantom shareholders, for Thyssen and his Holland bank,
meaning that they acted at the direct behest of their German
client.
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- Seized
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- On October 20, 1942, under authority of the Trading
with the Enemy Act, the U.S. Congress seized UBC and liquidated its
assets after the war. The seizure is confirmed by Vesting Order No.
248 in the U.S. Office of the Alien Property Custodian and signed by
U.S. Alien Property Custodian Leo T. Crowley.
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- In August, under the same authority, Congress had
seized the first of the Bush-Harriman-managed Thyssen entities,
Hamburg-American Line, under Vesting Order No. 126, also signed by
Crowley. Eight days after the seizure of UBC, Congress invoked the
Trading with the Enemy Act again to take control of two more
Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses - Holland-American Trading Corp.
(Vesting Order No. 261) and Seamless Steel Equipment Corp. (Vesting
Order No. 259).
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- The documents from the Archives also show that the
Bushes and Harrimans shipped valuable U.S. assets, including gold,
coal, steel and U.S. Treasury bonds, to their foreign clients overseas
between 1931-33, as Hitler engineered his rise to power.
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- Still No Story?
-
- Since 1942, the information has not appeared in any
U.S. news coverage of any Bush political campaign, nor has it been
included in any of the major Bush family biographies. It was, however,
covered extensively in George H.W. Bush: The Unauthorized Biography,
by Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. Chaitkin's father served as an
attorney in the 1940s for some of the victims of the
Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.
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- The book gave a detailed, accurate accounting of the
Bush family's long Nazi affiliation, but no mainstream U.S. media
entity reported on or even investigated the allegations, despite
careful documentation by the authors. Major booksellers declined to
distribute the book, which was dismissed by Bush supporters as biased
and untrue. Its authors struggled even to be reviewed in reputable
newspapers. That the book was published by Lyndon LaRouche's
organization undoubtedly made it easier to dismiss, but does not
change the facts.
-
- The essence of the story has been posted for years
on various Internet sites, including BuzzFlash.com and
TakeBackTheMedia.com, but no online media seem to have independently
confirmed it.
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- In the 1990s, former U.S. Justice Department Nazi
war crimes prosecutor John Loftus, now honorary president of the
Florida Holocaust Museum, wrote a book and launched a web site
(<>www.john-loftus.com) which did breakthrough reporting,
including establishing the link between Prescott Bush, Consolidated
Silesian Steel Corporation and forced labor at Auschwitz. Although the
widely-respected Loftus established a successful international
speaking career with his information, no U.S. newspaper or major TV
news program acknowledged his decade of work, nor did he ever see many
of the recently released documents.
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- Meanwhile, the mainstream media have apparently made
no attempt since World War II to either verify or disprove the
allegations of Nazi collaboration against the Bush family. Instead,
they have attempted to dismiss or discredit such Internet sites or
"unauthorized" books without any journalistic inquiry or research into
their veracity.
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- Loyal Defenders
-
- The National Review ran an essay on September 1 by
their White House correspondent Byron York, entitled "Annals of
Bush-Hating." It begins
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- mockingly: "Are you aware of the murderous history
of George W. Bush - indeed, of the entire Bush family? Are you aware
of the president's Nazi sympathies? His crimes against humanity? And
do you know, by the way, that George W. Bush is a certifiable moron?"
York goes on to discredit the "Bush is a moron" IQ hoax, but fails to
disprove the Nazi connection.
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- The more liberal Boston Globe ran a column September
29 by Reason magazine's Cathy Young in which she referred to
"Bush-o-phobes on the Internet" who "repeat preposterous claims about
the Bush family's alleged Nazi connections."
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- Poles Tackle the Topic
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- Newsweek Polska, the magazine's Polish edition,
published a short piece on the "Bush Nazi past" in its March 5, 2003
edition. The item reported that "the Bush family reaped rewards from
the forced-labor prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp,"
according to a copyrighted English-language translation from Scoop
Media (<>www.scoop.co.nz). The story also reported the seizure
of the various Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.
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- Still Not Interested
-
- Major U.S. media outlets, including ABC News, NBC
News, CNN, The New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los
Angeles Times and Miami Herald, as well as Knight-Ridder Newspapers,
have repeatedly declined to investigate the story when information
regarding discovery of the documents was presented to them beginning
Friday, August 29. Newsweek U.S. correspondent Michael Isikoff, famous
for his reporting of big scoops during the Clinton-Lewinsky sexual
affair of the 1990s, declined twice to accept an exclusive story based
on the documents from the archives.
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- Aftermath
-
- In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S.
Senate, with no press accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past.
There is no record of any U.S. press coverage of the Bush-Nazi
connection during any political campaigns conducted by George Herbert
Walker Bush, Jeb Bush, or George W. Bush, with the exception of a
brief mention in an unrelated story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune in
November 2000 and a brief but inaccurate account in The Boston Globe
in 2001.
-
- ---
- John Buchanan is an award-winning and
internationally published journalist and investigative reporter with
33 years of experience in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Miami.
His work has appeared in more than 50 newspapers, magazines and books.
He can be reached by e-mail at: jtwg@bellsouth.net.
-
- This article was forwarded
- courtesy of Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz
- and Tetrahedron Publishing Group
- 206 North 4th Avenue, Suite 147
- Sandpoint, Idaho 83864
-
- <http://www.tetrahedron.org/>http://www.tetrahedron.org
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- Toll free order line: 888-508-4787;
- Office telephone: 208-265-2575;
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