The Real Origins of the Bush Name, Brand and Family Wealth

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.

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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.

Former Federal Prosecutor John Loftus confirms the Bush-Nazi scandal

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Copyright October 31. 2003 (Reprinted under FAIR USE Doctrine)

 

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Some of our most famous American families, including the Bushes, made their fortunes from the Holocaust. Before I tell this awful story, I have to admit that I am a Democrat, but I quite like this President. He is not the sharpest tool in the shed,but he has a good heart, and the good sense not to follow in his father's footsteps."W" has some good people around him who keep a firewall in the White House against his father's oil cronies.

 

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In terms of Republican politics, "W"is a rebel. Morally, George W. Bush is the polar opposite of his grandfather and great grandfather(the "W" stands for Walker) who caused such havoc in the world with their Nazi investments. One cannot blame "W" for what his grandfather did, anymore than one can blame Jack Kennedy because his father bought Nazi stocks. What most people do not know is that Joseph Kennedy bought his Nazi stocks from Prescott Bush.Every great family has its scandal.

 

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The Bush family's scandal is that they funded Hitler and profited from the Holocaust. It is quite possible that "W" (and his boyhood friend William Stamps Farrish, now US Ambassador to Britain) have tilted towards Israel perhaps because they wished to atone for the sins of their fathers. (Farrish's father committed suicide over his father's connections to the Bush-Nazi scandal.) Whatever the reason for the rebellion of the grandchildren, this Bush is quite a different man than his forbears. I like him and wish him well. But liking this Bush does not excuse my duty as a historian to tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.

 

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There was a great deal of skepticism ten years ago when I first wrote about the Bush-Nazi scandal in my book, "The Secret War Against the Jews." Its historical validity has now been confirmed by the ground breaking work of reporter John Buchanan. In October 2003, Buchanan unearthed the recently released Bush-Thyssen files in the US National Archives. These long buried US government files demonstrate that the Bush family stayed on the corporate boards of Nazi front groups even after they knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were helping the financial cause of the Third Reich.

 

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It was all about the money. Nazi Germany is where the Bush family fortune came from, and where the Harrimans, and the Rockefellers increased their fortunes to obscene proportions. Of course some of them were quite rich to begin with. The Harriman railroad monopoly helped create the Rockefeller oil monopoly in the 1800's. Their despicable price fixing schemes earned them the press label "the Robber Barons."

 

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My favoriteRepublican Teddy Roosevelt ruined their rapacious profits with his anti-monopoly and anti-trust legislation. The Robber Barons bribed Congress (it happens) into passing a loophole, the Web-Pomerene Act of 1918 which legalized cartels and monopolies outside the borders of the United States. This loophole law let the Robber Barons loose to prey on a helpless world already ravaged by the human and and financial cost of WWI. Averil Harriman (patriarch of the famous Democratic family) promptly broke another American law by secretly financing the Bolsheviks while American, British and WhiteRussian troops were still fighting against the infant communist revolution. (TheFBI "ARCOS" files on Harriman's connections with the Soviets are quite a read). Harriman bribed Lenin into letting him take over the Czar's cartels,which exported managanese, iron ore and other raw materials. Harriman shipped the Russian raw materials to his German partners, the Thyssens, who had been secretly bought out by the Rockefellers.

 

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The Rockefeller's lawyers, the Dulles Brothers, had deliberately and systematically bankrupted the German economy with the Versaille Treaty. German currency was almost worthless after WWI, and so the Dulles brother's favorite clients, the Rockefellers,were able to buy the stock of nearly every German company for a song. The great sucking sound that preceded the Great Depression was the whistling of Wall Street money out of America into Germany, Russia (and as a side deal, Saudi Arabia).

 

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Two generations later, we are still paying for it. The Robber Barons did not call it an international crime. They called it synergy. Harriman's Soviet cartels would deliver the raw materials, Rockfeller's high-tech German companies (the Thyssens) would process the manganese into steel for Harriman's railroads. To save transportation costs, the Robber Barons looked for a middle ground in eastern Poland for a future factory site. It had to be in the coal fields of Silesia, on the banks of the Vistula river, where a canal could be dug to ship materials in cheaply from Russia.

 

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The Polish town was named Oswieczim, later known to the world by its German name: Auschwitz. It was not a killing factory then, although slave labor was always contemplated for the maximum profit factor. Auschwitz was designed to process Silesian coal into tar additives necessary for Russian aviation fuel. It was a high tech German chemical factory built to balance out Harriman's Russian-to-Germany export trade. The Rockefeller-Harriman front company that financed Auschwitz was called Brown Brothers Harriman. It is still around today.

 

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Our President's great grandfather, Herbert Walker, founded the company, and appointed his impecunious son-in-law PrescottBush to the boards of several holding companies, all of which became Nazi fronts.The Walkers and Bushes never really liked the Nazis, anymore than Harriman liked the communists. To the robber barons, they were just dogs on a leash. One day the dogs broke their chains, and Hitler and Stalin got loose. Fifty million people died as a result of a bad investment.

 

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The Robber Barons saw it coming. Their lawyers, the Dulles brothers, had a contingency plan. They had established three banks, one in Germany, one in Holland, and one in New York (the Union Banking Corporation, headed by the ever-useful son-in-law Prescott Bush). No matter who won World war II, the corporate stocks would be shifted around to whichever bank was in a neutral country when the war was over. After WW II, the Dulles brothers' shell game deceived a gullible and war-weary world. The "neutral" Dutch bank reclaimed their German assets as "stolen"by the Nazis, and the whole merry fraud continued.

 

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Prescott Bush got his Union Bank back from the US Government in 1951, despite its seizure in 1942 as a Nazi front. Prescott Bush and father-in-law Walker were paid two shares worth about $1.5 million in 1951 dollars. It was a petty payoff for a job well done. Nearly 4,000 shares (98% of the Union Bank holdings) were held by Roland Harriman in trust for the Rockefellers. That's about three billion in 1951 dollars, more than 30 billion dollars in today's money. Most of it was reinvested in post-war Germany where they made even more obscene profits. After all, Germany was just as cash starved after World War II as they were after World War I. It was just another cycle in the Robber Baron's spreadsheet.

 

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Everyone made money off the Holocaust, except of course the Jews and the Allied soldiers. A few decades later things had quieted down and all the Nazi money finally came home to Wall Street. By 1972, one of Rockfeller's assets, the Chase Manhattan bank in New York, secretly owned 38% of the Thyssen company, according to internal Thyssen records in my custody. Not a bad payoff for the Robber Barons.

 

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The Auschwitz investment paid off handsomely. The Thyssen-Krupp corporation is now the wealthiest conglomerate in Europe. WWII is over. The Germans won. Also in the 1970's, Brown Brothers Harriman, perhaps coincidentally, convinced the ever pliant New York State Banking Commission to issue a regulation permitting them to shred all their records for the Nazi period.

 

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The Robber Barons, unlike the Swiss bankers, knew how to cover their tracks. There were, of course, exceptions. Von Kouewenhoven, director of the Dutch Bank, discovered the secret Thyssen-Nazi connection after the war, and foolishly went to New York to warn his old friend Prescott Bush. His body was found two weeks later. It was reported with a straight face that he died of a heart attack.

 

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A dear friend of mine, former American secret agent William E. Gowen, played a principal role in unravelling the entire Bush-Nazi scandal. Gowen confirmed that years after Von Kouenhowen's death, another Dutch investigator, a journalist named Eddie Roever, also suffered a convenient heart attack just as he was about to confront Baron Heinrich von Thyssen-BjornaMissa at his palatial London home, across from Margaret Thatchers. Margaret Thatcher may not have known (or maybe she did) that her neighbor Baron Heinrich's brother was the infamous Nazi, Fritz Thyssen, who served Brown BrothersHarriman at the heart of the Nazi war machine.

 

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The Dulles Brothers hired ghost writers for Fritz's mea culpa book "I Financed Hitler." To this day, gullible American media believe that Fritz Thyssen turned against Hitler in disgust at the last moment before WWII. Now that is spin! The truth is that Prescott's Union Bank loaned the money to the Dutch Bank that loaned Hitler the money to build his first Nazi headquarters, the Braun Haus in Munich.

 

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The Thyssen's factories built the Bismark, the rail lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka, and sent the rest of their steel to their cartel partners, Flick and Krupp. Together, these war criminals made the bullets and the bombs that killed our parents' generation. They got away with it. It is not surprising that their grandchildren are ashamed of how their families made their money. The only surprise is that the American media is still afraid to go to the US national archives and look at the files that John Buchanan found. But then,I am not surprised at all.

 

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Here is what I wrote nearly ten years ago in "The Secret War Against the Jews": THE BUSH-DULLES-NAZI CONNECTION:

 

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"George Bush's problems were inherited from his namesake and maternal grandfather, George Herbert 'Bert' Walker, a native of St. Louis, who founded the banking and investment firm of G. H. Walker and Company in 1900. Later the company shifted from St. Louis to the prestigious address of 1 Wall Street. . . . "Walker was one of Hitler's most powerful financial supporters in the United States. The relationship went all the way back to 1924, when Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist, was financing Hitler's infant Nazi party.

 

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As mentioned in earlier chapters, there were American contributors as well. "Some Americans were just bigots and made their connections to Germany through Allen Dulles's firm of Sullivan and Cromwell because they supported Fascism. The Dulles brothers, who were in it for profit more than ideology, arranged American investments in Nazi Germany in the 1930s to ensure that their clients did well out of the German economic recovery. . . . "Sullivan & Cromwell was not the only firm engaged in funding Germany.

 

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According to 'The Splendid Blond Beast,' Christopher Simpson's seminal history of the politics of genocide and profit, Brown Brothers, Harriman was another bank that specialized in investments in Germany. The key figure was Averill Harriman,a dominating figure in the American establishment. . . . "The firm originally was known as W. A. Harriman & Company. The link between Harriman & Company's American investors and Thyssen started in the 1920s, through the Union Banking Corporation, which began trading in 1924.

 

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In just one three-year period, the Harriman firm sold more than $50 million of German bonds to American investors. 'Bert' Walker was Union Banking's president, and the firm was located in the offices of Averill Harriman's company at 39 Broadway in New York. "

 

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In 1926 Bert Walker did a favor for his new son-in-law, Prescott Bush. It was the sort of favor families do to help their children make a start in life, but Prescott came to regret it bitterly. Walker made Prescott vice president of W. A. Harriman. The problem was that Walker's specialty was companies that traded with Germany.

 

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As Thyssen and the other German industrialists consolidated Hitler's political power in the 1930s, an American financial connection was needed. According to our sources, Union Banking became an out-and-out Nazi money-laundering machine.. . . "In [1931], Harriman & Company merged with a British-American investment company to become Brown Brothers, Harriman. Prescott Bush became one of the senior partners of the new company, which relocated to 59 Broadway, while Union Banking remained at 39 Broadway. But in 1934 Walker arranged to put his son-in-law on the board of directors of Union Banking. "Walker also set up a deal to take over the North American operations of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, a cover for I.G. Farben's Nazi espionage unit in the United States. The shipping line smuggled in German agents, propaganda, and money for bribing American politicians to see things Hitler's way. The holding company was Walker's American Shipping & Commerce, which shared the offices at 39 Broadway with Union Banking.

 

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In an elaborate corporate paper trail, Harriman's stock in American Shipping & Commerce was controlled by yet another holding company, the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, run out of Walker's office. The directors of this company were Averill Harriman, Bert Walker, and Prescott Bush. . . . ". . . In a November 1935 article in Common Sense, retired marine general Smedley D. Butler blamed Brown Brothers, Harriman for having the U.S. marines act like 'racketeers' and 'gangsters' in order to exploit financially the peasants of Nicaragua.. . . ". . . A 1934 congressional investigation alleged that Walker's 'Hamburg-Amerika Line subsidized a wide range of pro-Nazi propaganda efforts both in Germany and the United States.' Walker did not know it, but one of his American employees, Dan Harkins, had blown the whistle on the spy apparatus to Congress.

 

 

Harkins, one of our best sources, became Roosevelt's first double agent . . . [and] kept up the pretense of being an ardent Nazi sympathizer, while reporting to Naval Intelligence on the shipping company's deals with Nazi intelligence. "Instead of divesting the Nazi money," continue the authors, "Bush hired a lawyer to hide the assets. The lawyer he hired had considerable expertise in such underhanded schemes. It was Allen Dulles. According to Dulles's client list at Sullivan & Cromwell, his first relationship with Brown Brothers, Harriman was on June 18, 1936.

 

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In January 1937 Dulles listed his work for the firm as 'Disposal of Stan [Standard Oil] Investing stock.' "As discussed in Chapter 3, Standard Oil of New Jersey had completed a major stock transaction with Dulles's Nazi client, I.G. Farben. By the end of January 1937 Dulles had merged all his cloaking activities into one client account: 'BrownBrothers Harriman-Schroeder Rock.'

 

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Schroeder, of course, was the Nazi bank on whose board Dulles sat. The 'Rock' were the Rockefellers of Standard Oil,who were already coming under scrutiny for their Nazi deals. By May 1939 Dulles handled another problem for Brown Brothers, Harriman, their 'Securities Custodian Accounts.' "If Dulles was trying to conceal how many Nazi holding companies Brown Brothers, Harriman was connected with, he did not do a very good job. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, word leaked from Washington that affiliates of Prescott Bush's company were under investigation for aiding the Nazis in time of war. . . . ". . . The government investigation against Prescott Bush continued.

 

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Just before the storm broke, his son, George, abandoned his plans to enter Yale and enlisted in the U.S. Navy. It was, say our sources among the former intelligence officers,a valiant attempt by an eighteen-year-old boy to save the family's honor. "Young George was in flight school in October 1942, when the U.S. government charged his father with running Nazi front groups in the United States. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, all the shares of the Union Banking Corporation were seized, including those held by Prescott Bush as being in effect held for enemy nationals. Union Banking, of course, was an affiliate of Brown Brothers, Harriman,and Bush handled the Harrimans' investments as well. "Once the government had its hands on Bush's books, the whole story of the intricate web of Nazi front corporations began to unravel.

 

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A few days later two of Union Banking's subsidiaries -- the Holland American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation -- also were seized. Then the government went after the Harriman Fifteen Holding Company, which Bush shared with his father-in-law,Bert Walker, the Hamburg-Amerika Line, and the Silesian-American Corporation.

 

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The U.S. government found that huge sections of Prescott Bush's empire had been operated on behalf of Nazi Germany and had greatly assisted the German war effort."(1) EDWIN PAULEY "Try as he did," continue the authors, "George Bush could not get away from Dulles's crooked corporate network, which his grandfather and fatherhad joined in the 1920s. Wherever he turned, George found that the influence of the Dulles brothers was already there. Even when he fled to Texas to become a successful businessman on his own, he ran into the pirates of Wall Street. "One of Allen Dulles's secret spies inside the Democratic party later became George Bush's partner in the Mexican oil business. Edwin Pauley, a California oil man, was . . . one of Dulles's covert agents in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations . . . a 'big business' Democrat. . . ."

 

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Among the key posts held by Pauley were: treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, director of the Democratic convention in 1944 and, after Truman's election, Truman appointed him the "Petroleum Coordinator of Lend-Lease Supplies for the Soviet Union and Britain." Just after the end of World War II, "in April 1945 Truman appointed Pauley as the U.S. representative to the Allied Reparations Committee, with the rank of ambassador," as well as "industrial and commercial advisor to the Potsdam Conference, 'where his chief task was to renegotiate the reparations agreements formulated at Yalta.' As one historian noted, the 'oil industry has always watched reparations activities carefully.' There was a lot of money involved, and much of it belonged to the Dulles brothers' clients." At the same time, report Loftus and Aarons, "the Dulles brothers were still shifting Nazi assets out of Europe for their clients as well as for their own profit. They didn't want the Soviets to get their hands on these assets or even know that they existed.

 

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Pauley played a significant role in solving this problem for the Dulles brothers. The major part of Nazi Germany's industrial assets was located in the zones occupied by the West's forces. As Washington's man on the ground, Pauley managed to deceive the Soviets for long enough to allow Allen Dulles to spirit much of the remaining Nazi assets out to safety. . . . "Pauley, a key player in the plan to hide the Dulles brothers' Nazi assets, then moved into another post where he could help them further.

 

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After successfully keeping German assets in Fascist hands, Pauley was given the job of 'surveying Japan's assets and determining the amount of its war debt.' Again, it was another job that was crucial to the Dulles clique's secret financial and intelligence operations." (2) After Pauley retired from government work he went back to being an independent oilman.

 

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Loftus and Aarons state that: "In 1958 he founded Pauley Petroleum which:. . . teamed up with Howard Hughes to expand oil production in the Gulf of Mexico." Pauley Petroleum discovered a highly productive offshore petroleum reserveand in 1959 became involved in a dispute with the Mexican Government, which considered the royalties from the wells to be too low. "According to our sources in the intelligence community, the oil dispute was really a shakedown of the CIA by Mexican politicians. Hughes and Pauley were working for the CIA from time to time, while advancing their own financial interests in the lucrative Mexican oil fields. Pauley, say several of our sources, was the man who invented an intelligence money-laundering system in Mexico, which was later refined in the 1970s as part of Nixon's Watergate scandal.

 

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At one point CIA agents used Pemex, the Mexican government's oil monopoly, as a business cover at the same time Pemex was being used as a money laundry for Pauley's campaign contributions. As we shall see, the Mexican-CIA connection played an important part in the development of George Bush's political and intelligence career. . . ."Pauley, say the 'old spies,' was the man who brought all the threads of the Mexican connection together. He was Bush's business associate, a frontman for Dulles's CIA [Allen Dulles was CIA director then], and originator of the use of Mexican oil fronts to create a slush fund for Richard Nixon's various campaigns. . . . "Although it is not widely known, Pauley, in fact, had been a committed, if'secret,' Nixon supporter since 1960.

 

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It should be recalled that Nixon tried to conceal his Mexican slush fund during the Watergate affair by pressuring the CIA into a 'national security' cover-up. The CIA, to its credit, declinedto participate. Unfortunately, others were so enmeshed in Pauley's work for Nixon that they could never extricate themselves. According to a number of our intelligence sources, the deals Bush cut with Pauley in Mexico catapulted him into political life.

 

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In 1960 Bush became a protege of Richard Nixon, who was then running for presidentof the United States. . . . "The most intriguing of Bush's early connections was to Richard Nixon, who as vice president had supervised Allen Dulles's covert planning for the Bay of Pigs [invasion]. For years it has been rumored that Dulles's client, George Bush's father, was one of the Republican leaders who recruited Nixon to run for Congress and later convinced Eisenhower to take him on as vice president. There is no doubt that the two families were close.

 

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George Bush described Nixon as his 'mentor.' Nixon was a Bush supporter in his very first tilt at politics, during his unsuccessful run for the Senate in 1964, and turned out again when he entered the House two years later. "After Nixon's landslide victory in 1972, he ordered a general house cleaning on the basis of loyalty. 'Eliminate everyone,' he told John Ehrlichman about reappointments, 'except George Bush. Bush will do anything for our cause.'. . . According to Bush's account, the president told him that 'the placeI really need you is over at the National Committee running things.'

 

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So, in 1972, Nixon appointed George Bush as head of the Republican National Committee. "It was Bush who fulfilled Nixon's promise to make the 'ethnic'emigres a permanent part of Republican politics. In 1972 Nixon's State Department spokesman confirmed to his Australian counterpart that the ethnic groups were very useful to get out the vote in several key states.

 

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Bush's tenure as head of the Republican National Committee exactly coincided with Laszlo Pasztor's 1972 drive to transform the Heritage Groups Council into the party's official ethnic arm. The groups Pasztor chose as Bush's campaign allies were the emigre Fascists whom Dulles had brought to the United States. . . . ". . . Nearly twenty years later, and after expose's in several respectable newspapers, Bush continued to recruit most of the same ethnic Fascists, includingPasztor, for his own 1988 ethnic outreach program when he first ran for president."

 

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According to our sources in the intelligence community," state the authors,"it was Bush who told Nixon that the Watergate investigations might start uncovering the Fascist skeletons in the Republican party's closet. Bush himself acknowledges that he wrote Nixon a letter asking him to step down. The day after Bush did so, Nixon resigned. "Bush had hoped to become Gerald Ford's vice president upon Nixon's resignation, but he was appointed U.S. ambassador to the UN. Nelson Rockefeller became vice president and chief damage controller. He formed a special commission in an attempt to preempt the Senate's investigation of the intelligence community.

 

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The Rockefeller Commission into CIA abuses was filled with old OPC [Dulles'sOffice of Policy Coordination] hands like Ronald Reagan, who had been the front man back in the 1950s for the money-laundering organization, the Crusade for Freedom,which was part of Dulles's Fascist 'freedom fighters' program."(3) In 1988, Project Censored, a news media censorship research organization, awarded the honor of "Top Censored story" to the subject of George Bush. The article revealed "how the major mass media ignored, overlooked or undercovered at least ten critical stories reported in America's alternative press that raised serious questions about the Republican candidate, George Bush, dating from his reported role as a CIA 'asset' in 1963 to his Presidential campaign's connection with a network of anti-Semites with Nazi and fascist affiliations in 1988."(4)

 

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NOTES: GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH

 

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1.The Secret War Against the Jews, pp. 357-361

 

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2.Ibid., pp. 362-364

 

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3.Ibid., pp. 365-371

 

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4.The 1993 Project Censored Yearbook: The News That Didn't Make The News - And Why, Project Censored; Dr. Carl Jensen, Director., pp. 230.