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