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Bush's grandfather was director of bank seized by govt for affiliation with Nazi-funding...
Associated Press ^ | 10-17-03

Posted on 10/17/2003 4:32:00 PM PDT by Brian S

Edited on 04/13/2004 2:44:26 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]

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To: inquest
I'd be curious to know who made the decision to declassify them at this time, and what the decisionmaking process was.

I'd bet the decision to classify the info was made a few years ago, during the Monica years, and the decision was made by someone whose name I won't mention, but we all know and love her, NOT, to keep the information quiet until a time when it can possibly do damage to "W."

101 posted on 10/17/2003 6:07:17 PM PDT by Lucy Lake
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To: teletech
If you don't like the threads I initiate, you are under no obligation to read them.
102 posted on 10/17/2003 6:07:45 PM PDT by Brian S (" In the United States, armed masses represent the foundation of political order.")
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To: Brian S
"Well gramps (or is it cramps)"

Man, you are articulate! By the way, it is "gramps" to you asshole!

103 posted on 10/17/2003 6:08:23 PM PDT by fuzzthatwuz
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To: Brian S
If you don't like the threads I initiate, you are under no obligation to read them

More NONSENSE!

104 posted on 10/17/2003 6:10:47 PM PDT by teletech (Have we dug up Saddam yet?)
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To: Brian S
Bush - Nazi Link Confirmed
By by John Buchanan
from The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 1, October 10, 2003

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 and FBI, 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 baron for nearly eight months 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 under the supervision of Prescott Bush, began with a story that ran in the New York Herald-Tribune on July 30, 1942. 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 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 and war 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.

UBC's original group of business associates included George Herbert Walker, 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 seven years in 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). In November, Congress seized the Nazi interests in Silesian-American Corporation, which allegedly profited from slave labor at Auschwitz via a partnership with I.G. Farben, Hitler's third major industrial patron and partner in the infrastructure of the Third Reich.

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 and war bonds, to their foreign clients overseas as Hitler geared up for his 1939 invasion of Poland, the event that sparked World War II.

That's One Way to Put It

Following the Congressional seizures of UBC and the other four Bush-Harriman-Thyssen enterprises, The New York Times reported on December 16, 1944, in a brief story on page 25, that UBC had "received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway." The Times story did not report that UBC had been seized by the U.S. government or that the new address was the U.S. Office of the Alien Property Custodian. The story also neglected to mention that the other UBC-related businesses had also been seized by Congress.

Still No Story?

Since then, 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 a Lyndon LaRouche's organization undoubtedly made it easier to dismiss, but does not change the facts.

The essence of the story been posted for years on various Internet sites, including BuzzFlash.com and TakeBackTheMedia.com, but no online media seem to have independently confirmed it.

Likewise, 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 (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, The New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times and Miami Herald, 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

After the seizures of the various businesses they oversaw with Cornelis Lievense and his German partners, the U.S. government quietly settled with Bush, Harriman and others after the war. Bush and Harriman each received $1.5 million in cash as compensation for their seized business assets.

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 a 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.
105 posted on 10/17/2003 6:12:12 PM PDT by dennisw (G_d is at war with Amalek for all generations)
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To: dennisw
Come on in Dennisw...the water is very, very warm! :)
106 posted on 10/17/2003 6:15:20 PM PDT by Brian S (" In the United States, armed masses represent the foundation of political order.")
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To: Brian S
Prescott Bush was one of the BEST senators Connecticut ever had - TOTALLY the opposite end of the scale from D(u)dd and LIEberman(/blatt/berg/styne/feld/whatever) - both functional toilet-paper-substitutes for the democrats (IMO, of course).
107 posted on 10/17/2003 6:15:21 PM PDT by solitas
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To: Brian S
Does not Economics trump politics? We trade with the Communist Chinese.
108 posted on 10/17/2003 6:15:22 PM PDT by AEMILIUS PAULUS (Further, the statement assumed)
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To: el_texicano
I can see the New York Times headlines now..."Bush Tied to the Origin of Sin!!!!

I don't think there are any "original" sins left, although Clinton tried hard to discover any new ones.

109 posted on 10/17/2003 6:15:46 PM PDT by Wilhelm Tell (Lurking since 1997!)
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To: RWR8189
Time for an expose on the Kennedy clan. The smear campaign has begun.
110 posted on 10/17/2003 6:17:10 PM PDT by truthandjustice1
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To: Brian S
The 4,000 Union Banking shares owned by the Dutch bank were registered in the names of the seven U.S. directors....Bush had one share.

(yawn)

111 posted on 10/17/2003 6:22:19 PM PDT by Lancey Howard
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To: grizzfan; inquest
classify = make that de-classify the info.
112 posted on 10/17/2003 6:24:19 PM PDT by Lucy Lake
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To: AEMILIUS PAULUS
Economics trumps (geo)politics in the minds of Western checker players. In the minds of our chess player enemies, it does not. We were lucky to win WW-II, and did not do quite as well in the Cold War is claimed by many. Look at the resurgence of anti American cabals. Some within our own land. Is it not patriotic to point this out? Personally, I think we have more to learn from Von Clausewitz than from M. Friedman. That's not to say we should avert ourselves from learning from Adam Smith, and, Edmund Burke!
113 posted on 10/17/2003 6:42:43 PM PDT by GOP_1900AD (Un-PC even to "Conservatives!" - Right makes right)
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To: Brian S
Another attempt to smear PresBush. Ho-hum.

Sauce for the goose.

114 posted on 10/17/2003 6:46:11 PM PDT by Reagan Man (The few, the proud, the conservatives.)
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To: Nebullis
"Coming up: Mapplethorpe took nude pictures of George W. Bush! "

So that's who the person in the bullwhip photo is! ;)
115 posted on 10/17/2003 6:54:46 PM PDT by RatSlayer
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To: Brian S
Old story. Prescott Bush was not a nice guy. Neither was old man Kennedy. What counts is how their children and grandchildren turned out.
116 posted on 10/17/2003 6:57:14 PM PDT by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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To: dasboot
Agreed. Laying the foundations for the populace's foggy recall of Bush's 'Nazi' connections. Psyops 101 for a long term operation.
117 posted on 10/17/2003 6:57:20 PM PDT by WorkingClassFilth (DEFUND NPR & PBS - THE AMERICAN PRAVDA)
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To: arasina
This is so funny, I hardly know what to think. During the 2000 elections I debated a Dem at another site. She's a kook. Whenever she was desperate she always brought up George's Nazi grandpa and Skulls and Bones. This is bringing back memories. I guess they are getting desperate again.

There are several Democrats who were in Skulls and Bones too. Did 60 minutes report that as well?

118 posted on 10/17/2003 7:01:03 PM PDT by SpookBrat (There, but the for the grace of God, go I)
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To: wingnuts'nbolts
"Lindburgh thought facism the coming way"

Can anyone confirm this? Because the evidence I've seen so far only shows that he was an isolationist, not a facist.
119 posted on 10/17/2003 7:01:13 PM PDT by RatSlayer
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To: Poohbah
Ford, GM, Krupp all had connections with the Nazi party and supported them throughout the war with their production and war machines. One of the Krupps I talked to went to the University of Chicago prior to the war to learn the latest in metallurgy to take back to Germany. Any director of GM or Ford could be accused of Nazi leanings.

There is an interesting sidelight to the war that was observed by our troops in Germany. There was never a bombing run on any of these factories connected to our automakers and Krupp, even though they were involved in supporting the war effort of the Axis. People in high places wanted those factories intact when the war ended.

120 posted on 10/17/2003 7:01:35 PM PDT by meenie
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