Gunner wrote:


The founder of the Kennedy dynasty was a Nazi sympathizer.

The founder of the Bush dynasty was also a Nazi sympathizer.


Actually..no, Bush wasnt. He worked for a company that had business
with German companies. But so did IBM, Ford, Studebaker, Shell Oil,
and many thousands of other companies.




Incorrect. His situation was unusual. The company he worked for was a
covert holding company for Fritz Thyssen and Bush wasn't just an
employee, he was a director.


Here is a good synopsis of the situation:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/...312540,00.html

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
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 horse****. 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.