THE BUSH FAMILY AND NAZI GERMANY

The Bush family played a central role in the financing and arming of Adolf Hitler before he assumed power in Germany. It helped to build up the armaments factories of the Nazi war machine. In the first years of the war the Bush family profited from slave labor in the mineral mines of Auschwitz. It helped develop the theory of "racial superiority." It united the Bush family with Nazi Germany. --by Peter Mertens, 3 October, 2003



Part I. How Steel Baron Thyssen and Bush's Grandfather made Hitler Great



At the end of the First World War, August Thyssen, the greatest millionaire entrepeneur in Germany, saw his steel empire in danger. In the "neutral" Netherlands he opened the Bank of Shipping and Trading in Rotterdam. Thus he could channel his war booty from the August Thyssen Bank in Berliln in timely fashion despite the claims for damage /i.e., reparations/ of the Versailles Treaty. Old August gave 100 million dollars and his industrial empire in the Ruhr region to his son Fritz. They scored in 1923 with the ban on Adolf Hitler, the man who could rescue German industry from the insurgent worker class. The steel baron met Adolf Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff and channelled 100,000 gold marks as a contribution to the early NSDAP.

But Hitler's party found far more funding necessary to defeat the Communist movement. The war profits in Rotterdam were insufficient. And thus Thyssen wanted to establish an American bank as well. In 1922 he met Averell Harriman, the head of the investment firm W.A. Harriman and Co., in Berlin. Harriman and Thyssen agreed to establish a bank for Thyssen in New York. Business friends of Harriman would act as the directors, together with Thyssen's agent H.J. Kouvenhoven who moved to the United States, according to an official investigation report in 1942.



German Armament Manufacturers Appeal to the Bush Family



So after Berlin and Rotterdam, Thyssen achieved a foothold in the United States. In early 1924 Kouvenhoven, Director of the Bank of Shipping and Trading, travelled to New York where he, together with Averell Harriman and George "Bert" Walker of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), agreed to establish on Broadway the same bank at the very same address as Harriman and Co. Behind the scenery the Union Banking Corporation was the property of the Rotterdamse Bank, which was in its turn the property of Fritz Thyssen. On January 10, 1925, the August Thyssen firms won a loan of 12 million dollars from another American bank, Dillon, Read and Co. Dillon was an old friend of Sam Bush, the great-grandfather of the current American president. His bank was used by Standard Oil, Ford, General Electric, DuPont and IIT to finance Hitler. The German steel industry, led by Fritz Thyssen and Friedrich Flick, combined to form the United Steel Works with American dollars. "There was a division of labor: Thyssen's own intimate knowledge of politics and related matters was led by the Walker-Bush organization; the United Steel Works, on the contrary, carried on its bank functions through Dillon Read."

On 1 May 1926 George Walker decided to give the vice-presidency of Harriman and Co. to his son-in-law, Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, Jr. In 1931 Harriman and Co. merged with a British investment company, Brown Brothers . Harriman and Co. acquired a significent portion of a Polish mining company, the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation. Two-thirds of the corporation became the property of Friedrich Flick, a member of Heinrich Himmler's circle of friends. He used a part of his profits to finance the terrorist Schutzstaffel (SS).
Prescott Bush assumed the responsibility of supervising the United Steelworks of Thyssen and Flick, which continued to finance Hitler until he came to power. In 1932 Thyssen organized a gathering with Hitler in the Park Hotel in Duesseldorf, where he persuated the great industrial big-shots from the Ruhr region to support the Hitler's line. The steel magnates represented the pulsing heart of German war industry: United Steel Works produced 50.8% of the iron, 41.4% of steel plates, 35% of explosives and 22.1% of the steel wire of all Nazi Germany.
Great-grandfather and grandfather Bush had a great ride. They invested in Nazi Germany through Brown Brothers and Harriman, and transferred the armaments profits back into the United States through the UBC bank of Thyssen. In 1934, the profits attained hundreds of millions which also were transmitted to New York through Rotterdam. In the meantime Prescott Bush became managing director of UBC. "The Bush family know very well that Brown Brothers was a gold canal to Nazi Germany and that Union Bank was a secret pipeline to bring Nazi funds through The Netherlands to America again," wrote John Loftus, former prosecutor of the US Department for Nazi War Crimes.

Part II. Slave Labor in the Polish Mines for Prescott Bush

Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation was established in the Polish city of Oswiecim, one of the richest mineral regions in Poland. In 1934 the Polish government accused the company of Flick and Bush of fraud, fictitious accouonting and tax evasion. Great-grandfather Bush concluded a compromise that year with the Polish government. But Consolidated Steel continued to ship the minerals out of Poland with which the Panzers, aircraft and explosives were prepared which were dropped on the same Poles five years later.
It was precisely in Oswiecim that Hitler erected the concentration camp in 1939 that would become known by the German name for the little town, Auschwitz. After the end of 1941 the concentration camp was also supplied with slave labor under Himmler's SS. The "healthy" prisoners worked as slaves in the mines and factories of I.G. Farben and Consolidated Steel. During the war, Thyssen and Flick sold Consolidated Steel completely to UBC. The company was rechristened as the Silesian American Corporation and came under the total control of Harriman and manager Prescott Bush. Grandfather Bush and Harriman pocketed the blood-money from thousands of slaves that worked in the mines of Auschwitz.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 the American government enacted the Trading with the Enemy Act, the law that prohibited trafficking with the foe. On Oct. 20, 1942, all the components of the Union Banking Corporation were seized, including those of Harriman and Prescott Bush. The government asserted that Bush's bank "...was holding the profits of the Thyssen family and property of the members of a certain enemy nation." Harriman and Bush were indicted as collaborators. A month later, the American government also took over the Silesian American corporation. But the corporation continued to operate and Prescott Bush exercised his functions until 1943, thanks to the protective hand of the lawyer Allen Dulles, the man who later directed the CIA. On the death of Fritz Thyssen in 1951, the shareholders in Brown Brothers Harriman got their blood money back. Prescott Bush received 1.3 million dollars for his portion of UBC and in the same year he helped his son, George Herbert Walker Bush, to invest in the petroleum sector also. With this money George Bush senior directed the Bush-Overby Development Company, active in the oil business and oil patents. And two years later he created the Zapata Offshore Oil Company, the firm that drilled the first oil wells off the coast of Kuwait, and later, as the Pennzoil Company, owned undertakings in Qatar and Egypt. With the blood-money from the Nazis, the Bush family entered the petroleum sector, the royal palace in Kuwait, and the first Gulf War against Iraq.

--The Truth
Popular Edition for The Netherlands
Monday, 6 June 2005.

A lengthier treatment of the same subject may be found in Ben Aris and Duncan Campbell, "How Bush's Grandfather helped Hitler's Rise to Power," in The Guardian for Saturday, 25 September 2004. (8 pages)
The Zapata Corporation is the subject of an 8-page entry in Wikipedia.