A Nazi in the (pocket) is worth four in the Bush (family)
Part One - Part II ‘Frauds-R-Us’
Prescott Bush, granpa of Dubya
The Nazi’s American Banker
What is interesting about the history of the Bush family are the connections; Avril Harriman, Allen Dulles, the Rockefellers (the start of the oil connection), James Baker III, Gulf Oil, Pennzoil, Osama bin Laden…on and on it goes. A lapse of memory?
By William Bowles05/07/03: (Information Clearing House) It’s as well to remember that the Web never forgets, at least the US pres should take note of this fact and be careful of his utterances and how they can come back to haunt him. In fact four generations of Bush family history and too many skeletons in too many closets to count are to be found on the Web.
And given all the ‘pullpit pounding’ (more of which below) by ol’ Duyba and his minions, over the dubious moral character of Saddam and his cronies, much of which has underpinned the justification for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it’s as well to compare the two sets of rogues. Not surprisingly, there’s little to choose between the two except that, in the case of the Bush gang, they have a ‘pedigree’ in perfidy which extends back almost a century and four generations that makes Saddam look positively angelic by comparison.
Prescott Bush – setting a family exampleIn a previous piece (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3243.htm) a quote I used mentioned Prescott Bush the present pres’s granpa (http://www.americanpolitics.com/20030210Koop.html) so I decided to do a little researching to see what other dirty little secrets the Bush family have hidden in the dark recesses of the WWW and lo and behold, there’s a load of stuff out there (7,630 links to be precise, according to good ol’ google just on granpa Prescott Bush).
Geronimo!It’s 1918 and, well you know students, they’re always up to innocent pranks. It seems Grandpa Bush set his grandson some fine family precedents starting with digging up Geronimo’s skull,
http://www.post-gazette.com/columnists/20000923roddy.asp"In 1918, Prescott Bush and two companions crept into the cemetery near Fort Sill and pried open the grave of Geronimo.
The head was taken out, spiffed up and forwarded to New Haven, where it was given pride of place for goofy rituals that have been attended by generations of Bushes and a veritable army of powerful types."
The Apache nation (what was left of it anyway) was not amused. Okay, we’ll forgive granpa Bush his ‘juvenile pranks’ but it seems that this set the scene for the rest of his miserable life until his death in 1972 from carcinoma of the lung.
From skulls to Zyklon B (and back again)But it seems that great-granpa George Walker was also in on the business of making money out of death (like great-granpa like great grand-son),
Banking on FascismIt just doesn’t stop does it, as Prescott Bush, son of George continued in the ‘grand tradition’ of skullduggery by also doing deals with the Nazis,"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/
What is interesting about the history of the Bush family are the connections; Avril Harriman, Allen Dulles, the Rockefellers (the start of the oil connection), James Baker III, Gulf Oil, Pennzoil, Osama bin Laden…on and on it goes. It looks like this’ll have to be part one of an on-going series on the Bush dynasty and their dirty dealings."On October 20, 1942, the US Alien Property Custodian, under the "Trading With the Enemy Act," seized the shares of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), of which Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder. The largest shareholder was E. Roland Harriman. (Bush was also the managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, a leading Wall Street investment firm.)
"The UBC was established to send American capital to Germany to finance the reorganization of its industry under the Nazis. Their leading German partner was the notorious Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, who wrote a book admitting much of this called "I Paid Hitler."
"Among the companies financed was the Silesian-American Corporation, which was also managed by Prescott Bush, and by his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, who supplied Dub-a-Ya with his name. The company was vital in supplying coal to the Nazi war industry. It too was seized as a Nazi-front on November 17, 1942. The largest company Bush's UBC helped finance was the German Steel Trust, responsible for between one-third and one-half of Nazi iron and explosives.
"Prescott Bush was also a director of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, (this one owned largely by Roland's brother, Averell Harriman), which owned about a third of the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, the rest owned by Friedrich Flick, (a member of Himmler's "Circle of Friends" who donated to the S.S.)."Source: http://www.lpdallas.org/features/draheim/dr991216.htm
Double Dutch?The story of steel magnate and billionaire bankroller of the Nazis, Fritz Thyssen and his Bush family connection is so incredible, that it deserves to be turned into a movie (obviously not by Hollywood). It all starts with John Loftus, a former U.S.Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor who is the source of the following,
They were trying to find out what had happened to Thyssen’s billions but without success. Why?"From 1945 until 1949, one of the lengthiest and, it now appears, most futile interrogations of a Nazi war crimes suspect began in the American Zone of Occupied Germany…. [The interrogation of] [m]ultibillionaire steel magnate Fritz Thyssen-the man whose steel combine was the cold heart of the Nazi war machine."
There are so many twists and turns to this story, that this is not the place to to go into all the labyrinthine links between the Nazis, the Bush Family and the CIA (via Allen Dulles) or indeed, a host of other corporate connections. But this final quote from the same source, gives you an idea of just how much money is involved,"What the Allied investigators never understood was that they were not asking Thyssen the right question. Thyssen did not need any foreign bank accounts because his family secretly owned an entire chain of banks. He did not have to transfer his Nazi assets at the end of World War II, all he had to do was transfer the ownership documents - stocks, bonds, deeds and trusts--from his bank in Berlin through his bank in Holland to his American friends in New York City,Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker. Thyssen's partners in crime were the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States [my emph. WB].
…
"The British and American interrogators may have gravely underestimated Thyssen but they nonetheless knew they were being lied to. Their suspicions focused on one Dutch Bank in particular, the Bank voor Handel enScheepvaart, in Rotterdam. This bank did a lot of business with the Thyssens over the years. In 1923, as a favor to him, the Rotterdam bank loaned the money to build the very first Nazi party headquarters in Munich.
"If the investigators realized that the US intelligence chief in postwar Germany, Allen Dulles, was also the Rotterdam bank's lawyer, they might have asked some very interesting questions. They did not know that Thyssen was Dulles' client [my emph. WB] as well. Nor did they ever realize that it was Allen Dulles's other client, Baron Kurt Von Schroeder who was the Nazi trustee for the Thyssen companies which now claimed to be owned by the Dutch [my emph. WB]. The Rotterdam Bank was at the heart of Dulles' cloaking scheme, and he guarded its secrets jealously.
…
"[T]he Dutch connection remained unexplored until 1994 when I published the book "The Secret War Against the Jews." As a matter of historical curiosity, I mentioned that Fritz Thyssen (and indirectly, the Nazi Party) had obtained their early financing from Brown Brothers Harriman [my emph. WB], and its affiliate, the Union Banking Corporation. Union Bank, in turn, was the Bush family's holding company for a number of other entities, including the "Holland American Trading Company."Source: http://www.baltech.org/lederman/bush-nazi-fortune-2-09-02.html
For the full story please go to the link above."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."
Crocodile tearsAll of which makes the following quote from Dubya all the more sickening,
Like granpa like grand-son? Well given where Dubya got his money from, and his continuing in the ‘grand tradition of the Bush gang, I’m feeling quite biblical about things, so I thought following,Short diversionWould be useful. I know there will be some among you who think I’ve just got it in for the Bushes, so in my wanderings over the Web, I came across this little gem fromhttp://www.townhall.com/bookclub/herskowitz.html"In April 1999, [then] Texas Governor George W. Bush proclaimed a week of remembrance for the Holocaust. He said, "I urge Texans to never forget the inhumanity of those who perpetrated the Holocaust, and reflect upon our own humanity and our responsibility to respect all peoples."Source: http://www.disinfo.com/pages/dossier/id195/pg1/
This paean to the life of Prescott Bush, by a conservative writer is a salutory warning to us all. I quote,
"Duty, Honor, Country
The Life and Legacy of Prescott BushBy Mickey Herskowitz
I could go on quoting, but I’m afraid I’ll throw up. Check it out for yourself at http://www.townhall.com/bookclub/herskowitz.html. Townhall.com is, by the way, "the first truly interactive community on the Internet to bring Internet users, conservative public policy organizations, congressional staff, and political activists together under the broad umbrella of "conservative" thoughts, ideas and actions.""He [Prescott Bush] was a unifier, not a divider. And he was of such high integrity [sic] that behind the scenes was where he was at his best. He was a man of great faith. His grandfather was a minister whose faith and integrity were fully ingrained in the Bush family. Prescott always emphasized honesty, charity, fairness and proactive dedication to God, family and country."
From a review by Susan Kurz.
There’s none so blind as those that refuse to see.
From Eugenicist to anti-abortionistNot content with digging up the ancestors, supporting Fascism,laundering Nazi money through a Dutch-based bank, selling weapons to the mullahs of Iran, trading guns for drugs, doing business deals with Osama bin Laden, the Bush family in the form of ol’ granpa Prescott was an early supporter of the Eugenics movement (or racial purity, to give it its real name). And a rather embarassing connection it is too, as Bush Snr discovered,
The Bush story is such a fascinating history of capitalist corruption and power that it needs to be presented to a public that is consistently lied to, not only by the corporate media but by our so-called leaders. In Part Two, I’m going to give you the low-down on the Bush family’s involvement in the scams and dealings of the Reagan years, the Iran-Contra scandal and one of the biggest rip-offs in history, the savings and loan scandal, which cost the US taxpayer literally trillions of dollars. Yeah, you read right, trillions!"…And the Birth Control League was there, which had long trumpeted the need for eugenical births--fewer births for parents with "inferior" bloodlines. Prescott [Bush’s] partner Tighe was a Connecticut director of the league, and the Connecticut league's medical advisor was eugenics advocate Dr. Winternitz of Yale Medical School.
Now in 1950, people who knew something about Prescott Bush knew that he had very unsavory roots in the eugenics movement. There were then, just after the anti-Hitler war, few open advocates of sterilization of "unfit" or "unnecessary" people. (That would be revived later, with the help of General Draper and his friend George Bush
Then, very late in the 1950 senatorial campaign, Prescott Bush was publicly exposed for being an activist in that section of the old fascist eugenics movement. Prescott Bush lost the election by about 1,000 out of 862,000 votes
In his foreword to a population control propaganda book, George Bush wrote about that 1950 election: "My own first awareness of birth control as a public policy issue came with a jolt in 1950 when my father was running for United States Senate in Connecticut. Drew Pearson, on the Sunday before Election day, ‘revealed’ that my father was involved with Planned Parenthood.... Many political observers felt a sufficient number of voters were swayed by his alleged contacts with the birth controllers to cost him the election...."Source: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/2412/eugenics/Bush.html
Part II ‘Frauds-R-Us’
Copyright © 2003, William Bowles.
Bush/Nazi Link Continued
By John Buchanan and Stacey Michaelfrom The New Hampshire Gazette
Vol. 248, No. 3, November 7, 2003
After the seizures in late 1942 of five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, failed to divest himself of more than a dozen “enemy national” relationships that continued until as late as 1951, newly-discovered U.S. government documents reveal.
Furthermore, the records show that Bush and his colleagues routinely attempted to conceal their activities from government investigators.
Bush’s partners in the secret web of Thyssen-controlled ventures included former New York Governor W. Averell Harriman and his younger brother, E. Roland Harriman. Their quarter-century of Nazi financial transactions, from 1924-1951, were conducted by the New York private banking firm, Brown Brothers Harriman.
The White House did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Although the additional seizures under the Trading with the Enemy Act did not take place until after the war, documents from The National Archives and Library of Congress confirm that Bush and his partners continued their Nazi dealings unabated. These activities included a financial relationship with the German city of Hanover and several industrial concerns. They went undetected by investigators until after World War Two.
At the same time Bush and the Harrimans were profiting from their Nazi partnerships, W. Averell Harriman was serving as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s personal emissary to the United Kingdom during the toughest years of the war. On October 28, 1942, the same day two key Bush-Harriman-run businesses were being seized by the U.S. government, Harriman was meeting in London with Field Marshall Smuts to discuss the war effort.
Denial and Deceit
While Harriman was concealing his Nazi relationships from his government colleagues, Cornelius Livense, the top executive of the interlocking German concerns held under the corporate umbrella of Union Banking Corporation (UBC), repeatedly tried to mislead investigators, and was sometimes supported in his subterfuge by Brown Brothers Harriman.
All of the assets of UBC and its related businesses belonged to Thyssen-controlled enterprises, including his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam, the documents state.
Nevertheless, Livense, president of UBC, claimed to have no knowledge of such a relationship. “Strangely enough, (Livense) claims he does not know the actual ownership of the company,” states a government report.
H.D Pennington, manager of Brown Brothers Harriman and a director of UBC “for many years,” also lied to investigators about the secret and well-concealed relationship with Thyssen’s Dutch bank, according to the documents.
Investigators later reported that the company was “wholly owned” by Thyssen’s Dutch bank.
Despite such ongoing subterfuge, U.S. investigators were able to show that “a careful examination of UBC’s general ledger, cash books and journals from 1919 until the present date clearly establish that the principal and practically only source of funds has been Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart.”
In yet another attempt to mislead investigators, Livense said that $240,000 in banknotes in a safe deposit box at Underwriters Trust Co. in New York had been given to him by another UBC-Thyssen associate, H.J. Kouwenhoven, managing director of Thyssen’s Dutch bank and a director of the August Thyssen Bank in Berlin. August Thyssen was Fritz’s father.
The government report shows that Livense first neglected to report the $240,000, then claimed that it had been given to him as a gift by Kouwenhoven. However, by the time Livense filed a financial disclosure with U.S. officials, he changed his story again and reported the sum as a debt rather than a cash holding.
In yet another attempt to deceive the governments of both the U.S. and Canada, Livense and his partners misreported the facts about the sale of a Canadian Nazi front enterprise, La Cooperative Catholique des Consommateurs de Combustible, which imported German coal into Canada via the web of Thyssen-controlled U.S. businesses.
“The Canadian authorities, however, were not taken in by this maneuver,” a U.S. government report states. The coal company was later seized by Canadian authorities.
After the war, a total of 18 additional Brown Brothers Harriman and UBC-related client assets were seized under The Trading with the Enemy Act, including several that showed the continuation of a relationship with the Thyssen family after the initial 1942 seizures.
The records also show that Bush and the Harrimans conducted business after the war with related concerns doing business in or moving assets into Switzerland, Panama, Argentina and Brazil – all critical outposts for the flight of Nazi capital after Germany’s surrender in 1945. Fritz Thyssen died in Argentina in 1951.
One of the final seizures, in October 1950, concerned the U.S. assets of a Nazi baroness named Theresia Maria Ida Beneditka Huberta Stanislava Martina von Schwarzenberg, who also used two shorter aliases. Brown Brothers Harriman, where Prescott Bush and the Harrimans were partners, attempted to convince government investigators that the baroness had been a victim of Nazi persecution and therefore should be allowed to maintain her assets.
“It appears, rather, that the subject was a member of the Nazi party,” government investigators concluded.
At the same time the last Brown Brothers Harriman client assets were seized, Prescott Bush announced his Senate campaign that led to his election in 1952.
Investigation Investigated?
In 1943, six months after the seizure of UBC and its related companies, a government investigator noted in a Treasury Department memo dated April 8, 1943 that the FBI had inquired about the status of any investigation into Bush and the Harrimans.
“I gave ‘a memorandum’ which did not say anything about the American officers of subject,” the investigator wrote. “(Another investigator) wanted to know whether any specific action had been taken by us with respect to them.”
No further action beyond the initial seizures was ever taken, and the newly-confirmed records went unseen by the American people for six decades.
What Does It All Mean?
So why are the documents relevant today?
“The story of Prescott Bush and Brown Brothers Harriman is an introduction to the real history of our country,” says L.A. art book publisher and historian Edward Boswell. “It exposes the money-making motives behind our foreign policies, dating back a full century. The ability of Prescott Bush and the Harrimans to bury their checkered pasts also reveals a collusion between Wall Street and the media that exists to this day.”
Sheldon Drobny, a Chicago entrepreneur and philanthropist who will soon launch a liberal talk radio network, says the importance of the new documents is that they prove a long pattern of Bush family war profiteering that continues today via George H.W. Bush’s intimate relationship with the Saudi royal family and the bin Ladens, conducted via the super-secret Carlyle Group, whose senior advisers include former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III.
In the post-9/11 world, Drobny finds the Bush-Saudi connection deeply troubling. “Trading with the enemy is trading with the enemy,” he says. “That’s the relevance of the documents and what they show.”
Lawrence Lader, an abortion rights activist and the author of more than 40 books, says “the relevance lies with the fact that the sitting President of the United States would lead the nation to war based on lies and against the wishes of the rest of the world.” Lader and others draw comparisons between President Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Hitler’s occupation of Poland in 1939 – the event that sparked World War Two.
However, others see an even larger significance.
“The discovery of the Bush-Nazi documents raises new questions about the role of Prescott Bush and his influential business partners in the secret emigration of Nazi war criminals, which allowed them to escape justice in Germany,” says Bob Fertik, co-founder of Democrats.com and an amateur ‘Nazi hunter.’ “It also raises questions about the importance of Nazi recruits to the CIA in its early years, in what was called Operation Paperclip, and Prescott Bush’s role in that dark operation.”
Fertik and others, including former Justice Department Nazi war crimes prosecutor John Loftus, a Constitutional attorney in Miami, and a former Veterans Administration official, believe Prescott Bush and the Harrimans should have been tried for treason.
What Next?
Now, say Fertik and Loftus, there should be a Congressional investigation into the Bush family’s Nazi past and its concealment from the American people for 60 years.
“The American people have a right to know, in detail, about this hidden chapter of our history,” says Loftus, author of The Secret War Against the Jews. “That’s the only way we can understand it and deal with it.”
For his part, Fertik is pessimistic that even a Congressional investigation can thwart the war profiteering of the present Bush White House. “It’s impossible to stop it,” he says, “when the worst war profiteers are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who operate in secrecy behind the vast powers of the White House.”
—
John Buchanan is a journalist and magazine writer based in Miami Beach. He can be reached by e-mail at jtwg@bellsouth.net.
Stacey Michael is a New Orleans-based journalist and the author of Religious Conceit. His most recent book is Weapons of Mass Dysfunction: The Art of “Faith-Based” Politics, due in early 2004. He can be reached by email at staceymichael@religiousconceit.com.
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