> mart wrote:
>
> Forward from mart
>
> Guardian (U.K) "How Bush's grandfather
> helped Hitler's rise to power"
>
>
> * See also http://www.twf.org/News/Y2003/1010-BushNazi.html
> for other and more extensive Bush-Nazi related news articles and
> exposes. *
>
> mart
> =================================================
>
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1312540,00.html
>
> The Guardian
> Saturday September 25, 2004
>
>
> How Bush's grandfather helped
> Hitler's rise to power
>
> Rumours of a link between the US first family and the
> Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the
> Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that
> culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy
> Act are still being felt by today's president
>
>
> Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan
> Campbell in Washington
>
>
> 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
> i nvestigation 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 naton 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.
>
My reply,
Anyone doubting the tremendous degree to which the ideology of Bush
mirrors that of Hitler needs to read my book entitled READING HITLER,
RECOUNTING BUSH on my website at:
http://www.geocities.com/klomckin/Chaps.1.html#READING
It has one quote after another from the speeches and writings of Hitler
to prove as much.
for the cause,
Klo
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