Documents Show Bush and Hitler Link: Associated Press

Columbia, Missouri Daily Tribune ^ | Saturday, October 18, 2003 | Associated Press

[Poohbah]

In other breaking news, representatives of the Empire of Japan signed surrender documents aboard the USS Missouri...

Damn, they are getting desperate!

[Luke Skyfreeper]

Ooooh please...Even if his grandfather did finance the Nazis, does not make W a Nazis.

Um... as I understand this... ONE of Bush's two GRANDFATHERS, SIXTY YEARS AGO, was ONE OF A NUMBER OF OFFICIALS in an AMERICAN BANK that was OWNED BY ANOTHER BANK that was largely or mostly owned by someone else who WAS AN EARLY SUPPORTER (back in the days when all the magazines were doing style pieces on Hitler's fashionable mountain home) of Adolph Hitler.

OH MY GOD! HORRORS!

[alrea]

representatives of the Empire of Japan signed surrender documents aboard the USS Missouri...

the deck had been washed with soap made in a plant owned by a cousin of Bush

[kcamtx]

Seems I remember hearing about a family of bootleg Rum-runners who linked up with the mob and bought themselves a dynasty. (American style royalty)

[x]

This is old news. Any major US investment banks would have had investments in Germany, just as they now have investments in any number of unsavory regimes. Al Gore's father's dealings with Armand Hammer, who was heavily involved with the Soviet Union are another example of such connections, and are equally irrelevant to his son's or grandson's record.

BTW, Thyssen broke with Hitler and faced persecution and exile. His fate was still easier than that of millions of others, but things are more complicated than articles like this suggest.

FWIW, think of the commercial for Morgan Stanley, or whatever it calls itself today, with a broker saying, "It was not my dream ... It was what my client, the People's Republic of China wanted." Could anyone 40 or 50 years ago have imagined such a monstrosity? It's a pretty good indication of what the world of high finance must be like. But do they have to be so open about their lack of moral convictions or ingroup loyalties?

[Grampa Dave]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1003451/posts

HOW WE ARE LOSING WORLD WAR II
Life Magazine ^ | Jan/07/1946 | John Dos Passos


Posted on 10/18/2003 3:25 AM PDT by Dallas59


We are in a cabin deep down below decks on a Navy ship jam-packed with troops that’s pitching and creaking its way across the Atlantic in a winter gale. There is a man in every bunk. There’s a man wedged into every corner. There’s a man in every chair. The air is dense with cigarette smoke and with the staleness of packed troops and sour wool.

“Don’t think I’m sticking up for the Germans,” puts in the lanky young captain in the upper berth, “but…”

“To hell with the Germans,” says the broad-shouldered dark lieutenant. “It’s what our boys have been doing that worries me.”

The lieutenant has been talking about the traffic in Army property, the leaking of gasoline into the black market in France and Belgium even while the fighting was going on, the way the Army kicks the civilians around, the looting.

“Lust, liquor and loot are the soldier’s pay,” interrupts a red-faced major.

The lieutenant comes out with his conclusion: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” You hear these two phrases again and again in about every bull session on the shop. “Two wrongs don’t make a right” and “Don’t think I’m sticking up for the Germans, but….”

The troops returning home are worried. “We’ve lost the peace,” men tell you. “We can’t make it stick.”

A tour of the beaten-up cities of Europe six months after victory is a mighty sobering experience for anyone. Europeans. Friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. They cite the evolution of the word “liberation.” Before the Normandy landings it meant to be freed from the tyranny of the Nazis. Now it stands in the minds of the civilians for one thing, looting.

You try to explain to these Europeans that they expected too much. They answer that they had a right to, that after the last was America was the hope of the world. They talk about the Hoover relief, the work of the Quakers, the speeches of Woodrow Wilson. They don’t blame us for the fading of that hope. But they blame us now.

Never has American prestige in Europe been lower. People never tire of telling you of the ignorance and rowdy-ism of American troops, of out misunderstanding of European conditions. They say that the theft and sale of Army supplies by our troops is the basis of their black market. They blame us for the corruption and disorganization of UNRRA. They blame us for the fumbling timidity of our negotiations with the Soviet Union. They tell us that our mechanical de-nazification policy in Germany is producing results opposite to those we planned. “Have you no statesmen in America?” they ask.

The skeptical French press Yet whenever we show a trace of positive leadership I found Europeans quite willing to follow our lead. The evening before Robert Jackson’s opening of the case for the prosecution in the Nurnberg trial, I talked to some correspondents from the French newspapers. They were polite but skeptical. They were willing enough to take part in a highly publicized act of vengeance against the enemy, but when you talked about the usefulness of writing a prohibition of aggressive war into the law of nations they laughed in your face. The night after Jackson’s nobly delivered and nobly worded speech I saw then all again. They were very much impressed. Their manner had even changed toward me personally as an American. Their sudden enthusiasm seemed to me typical of the almost neurotic craving for leadership of the European people struggling wearily for existence in the wintry ruins of their world.

The ruin this war has left in Europe can hardly be exaggerated. I can remember the years after the last war. Then, as soon as you got away from the military, all the little strands and pulleys that form the fabric of a society were still knitted together. Farmers took their crops to market. Money was a valid medium of exchange. Now the entire fabric of a million little routines has broken down. No on can think beyond food for today. Money is worthless. Cigarettes are used as a kind of lunatic travesty on a currency. If a man goes out to work he shops around to find the business that serves the best hot meal. The final pay-off is the situation reported from the Ruhr where the miners are fed at the pits so that they will not be able to take the food home to their families.

“Well, the Germans are to blame. Let them pay for it. It’s their fault,” you say. The trouble is that starving the Germans and throwing them out of their homes is only producing more areas of famine and collapse.

One section of the population of Europe looked to us for salvation and another looked to the Soviet Union. Wherever the people have endured either the American armies or the Russian armies both hopes have been bitterly disappointed. The British have won a slightly better reputation. The state of mind in Vienna is interesting because there the part of the population that was not actively Nazi was about equally divided. The wealthier classes looked to America, the workers to the Soviet Union.

The Russians came first. The Viennese tell you of the savagery of the Russian armies. They came like the ancient Mongol hordes out of the steppes, with the flimsiest supply. The people in the working-class districts had felt that when the Russians came that they at least would be spared. But not at all. In the working-class districts the tropes were allowed to rape and murder and loot at will. When victims complained, the Russians answered, “You are too well off to be workers. You are bourgeoisie.”

When Americans looted they took cameras and valuables but when the Russians looted they took everything. And they raped and killed. From the eastern frontiers a tide of refugees is seeping across Europe bringing a nightmare tale of helpless populations trampled underfoot. When the British and American came the Viennese felt that at last they were in the hands of civilized people. But instead of coming in with a bold plan of relief and reconstruction we came in full of evasions and apologies.

U.S. administration a poor third We know now the tragic results of the ineptitudes of the Peace of Versailles. The European system it set up was Utopia compared to the present tangle of snarling misery. The Russians at least are carrying out a logical plan for extending their system of control at whatever cost. The British show signs of recovering their good sense and their innate human decency. All we have brought to Europe so far is confusion backed up by a drumhead regime of military courts. We have swept away Hitlerism, but a great many Europeans feel that the cure has been worse than the disease. [Emphasis mine]

The taste of victory had gone sour in the mouth of every thoughtful American I met. Thoughtful men can’t help remembering that this is a period in history when every political crime and every frivolous mistake in statesmanship has been paid for by the death of innocent people. The Germans built the Stalags; the Nazis are behind barbed wire now, but who will be next? Whenever you sit eating a good meal in the midst of a starving city in a handsome house requisitioned from some German, you find yourself wondering how it would feel to have a conqueror drinking out of your glasses. When you hear the tales of the brutalizing of women from the eastern frontier you think with a shudder of of those you love and cherish at home.

That we are one world is unfortunately a brutal truth. Punishing the German people indiscriminately for the sins of their leader may be justice, but it is not helping to restore the rule of civilization. The terrible lesson of the events of this year of victory is that what is happening to the bulk of Europe today can happen to American tomorrow.

In America we are still rich, we are still free to move from place to place and to talk to our friends without fear of the secret police. The time has come, for our own future security, to give the best we have to the world instead of the worst. So far as Europe is concerned, American leadership up to now has been obsessed with a fear of our own virtues. Winston Churchill expressed this state of mind brilliantly in a speech to his own people which applies even more accurately to the people of the U.S. “You must be prepared,” he warned them, “for further efforts of mind and body and further sacrifices to great causes, if you are not to fall back into the rut if inertia, the confusion of aim and the craven fear of being great.”

[alrea]

Now it begins, the democrat's dirtiest political camapign in history. The criminal enterprise will sacrifice this nation to regain power over the remains. Note that it is again the AP aiding and abetting this destruction campaign for their masters at the DNC.

NPR was pretty positive about Bush yesterday. We were quite surprised.

[Grampa Dave]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1003379/posts

THE PRESENT SITUATION IN GERMANY

Digest of a meeting with Allen W. Dulles at the Council on Foreign Relations, December 3, 1945

Germany today is a problem of extraordinary complexity. For two and one-half years the country has been a political and economic void in which discipline was well-maintained. There is no dangerous underground operating there now although some newspapers in the United States played up such a story. The German leaders, of course, could not admit defeat and today the attitude of the people is not so much a feeling of shame and guilt as one of having been let down by their leaders.

Economically and industrially, Germany has scraped the bottom of the barrel, and there are few shops with anything to sell. As soon as you attempt to get Germany to tick and to make arrangements for a government, the lack of men becomes apparent at once. Most men of the caliber required suffer a political taint. When we discover someone whose ability and politics are alike acceptable, we usually find as we did in one case that the man has been living abroad for the past ten years and is hopelessly out of touch with the local situation. We have already found out that you can't run railroads without taking in some Party members.

Labels are always arbitrary and sometimes they effectively mask what lies underneath. For example, citizens A, B, C, and D who didn't care about politics one way or the other were told they had to join the Nazi Party in order to make up the proper quota in the factory in which they worked. The consequences of refusal being what they were, they joined the Party. I know of one instance where two brothers tossed a coin to see which one would join the SS. I mention these things not because I think any substantial number of Germans were opposed to the Party but rather to point out how misleading and decisive a label can be. Furthermore we had altogether too many rules and regulations dealing with the Germans to make an adequate supply of men available to us. There were 126 categories of Germans excluded from any activity or from posts in German administration. Take, for example, the case of a man who owned zinc and coal mines in Upper Silesia. He was a bitter and proven anti-Nazi and a man of undoubted courage and integrity. I was not permitted to use him because he came under category 106, being classified as a war economy supervisor.

We tried hard to find financial advisers, but most of the bankers who had been in Germany in the Twenties and Thirties had by this time been liquidated. I found a banker in the prisoner's cage who had been arrested on an automatic charge because in the early part of the war he had been appointed custodian for the property of an alien, a post he later resigned. I am told that during the period of his responsibility he discharged his trust with scrupulous honesty. I had to bring his case before the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington before I was permitted to use him. Then there was Doctor Sauerbruch, one of the leading surgeons in Berlin. Him, also, I found in a cage. It took a cable to London from Washington to get his case straightened out and get him released for useful service, and this had no sooner been done when a few days later the British rearrested him because he came under some other category.

In our zone we arrested 70,000 people. There was no such thing as a habeas corpus and there was no forum to which one could apply for a hearing, although later on we did set up a tribunal of sorts. I do not blame our people too much for this state of affairs. After all, we could not examine each case individually in the early days when the chief task was to occupy Germany in the most effective manner.

The present political set-up in Germany is based on the agreements reached at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam. Tehran was made when Churchill felt somewhat shaky. The arrangement did not include the French zone, which was added later. But regardless of its genesis, by and large the scheme is almost entirely unworkable. We have chopped up Baden, Württemburg, and Hesse into artificial zones. In the case of Saxony, the Russian zone cuts off the American and British zones from their counterparts there. It is difficult to see how the Allies could have done otherwise inasmuch as the Russians would not consent to British and American domination of Germany and the Americans and British likewise refused to consider letting Russia get an advantage. Even so, very little progress is being made toward the centralization of the various services. To complicate matters, the French have been saying that they could not set up an administration in the zone assigned to them until they knew what disposition was going to be made of the Rhine and the Ruhr.

In the zone under Russian control the application of Soviet doctrines is thus far confined largely to paper. The Russians are finding it a little difficult to mix collectivist doctrines, including the nationalization of banks, a new system of land tenure, and the creation of a small farmer class, with the set up as it existed under the Nazis and more broadly under a capitalist economy.

We, ourselves, have excellent men on the job. I have the highest regard for Clay, and Eisenhower is a genius as a diplomat and administrator.* Yet I am inclined to think that the problems inherent in the situation are almost too much for us. Our people in Germany are unduly fearful of criticism in the United States. For example, the road between Frankfurt and Wiesbaden is so full of holes that it is almost impossible to drive over it, and one cannot cross the Main between those two places because all the bridges are down. But no repairs are made since the Army feels certain it would be criticized for "restoring the German war potential."

Industry in Germany is at its lowest ebb except for some coal mining in the Ruhr. The minute one considers what industries should be allowed to function and how best to prime the pump in order to set them going, some very real and serious difficulties appear.

So far as the treatment of industry in various zones is concerned, the Russian policy is particularly hard to fathom. It is hard to say whether the Russians really intend to tear down the zone for the purpose of building up Russia, but there is some evidence pointing that way. The Russians have torn up all the double tracks, they are keeping all able-bodied German prisoners, and they have taken East a great many industrialists, bankers, scientists, and the like.

Russian standing in their zone is low. Russian troops are living off the land, and have looted far more than anyone else. They have gone about Berlin looting workers' houses in very much the same way they did in Hungary. This seems to indicate that in both localities the Communist party is not very strong. At any rate, the Russians have seen the West and vice versa.

In the zone being turned over to Poland there is a good deal of buck passing. It is difficult to say what is going on, but in general the Russians are acting little better than thugs. They have wiped out all the liquid assets. No food cards are issued to Germans, who are forced to travel on foot into the Russian zone, often more dead than alive. An iron curtain has descended over the fate of these people and very likely conditions are truly terrible. The promises at Yalta to the contrary, probably 8 to 10 million people are being enslaved. Unquestionably Germany should be punished. In this instance, however, I think there will remain a legacy of bitterness which will not bode well for the future.

I have already said that the problem of Germany very nearly defies a successful solution. The question is: What can we do? The first step is to get together in dealing with what is at bottom a common problem. Next, we must find people we can use. We might use the churches which did not knuckle under to Hitler, although it is questionable in the minds of some people whether churches should get into politics. We might also consider the survivors of the affair of July 20* and see what material the trade unions can furnish. Finally, we can screen the prisoners of war.

The women will not be much help to us, although in theory they could be. A saying now current in Germany is that today most of the able-bodied men are women. Hitler had an enormous hold over them and Eva Braun's existence appeared to be unknown to most of them. They are extremely bitter. Altogether the problem deserves very careful study.

I think it may well become necessary for us to change the form of our occupation. Thus far there has been very little disturbance or misbehavior on the part of our troops. I think we ought to use small, highly mechanized units and put our reliance on planes. These forces I would quarter outside of the cities, lest their presence create a talking point for German propaganda against the occupation.

Trying to arrive at figures in order to set up a standard of living in Germany is a difficult and almost hopeless problem, and one perhaps beyond the ingenuity of man. And yet we must somehow find a solution.

Germany ought to be put to work for the benefit of Europe and particularly for the benefit of those countries plundered by the Nazis. If we do not find some work for the Germans and if we do not solve the refugee problem,* the Germans will have their revenge in one form or another though it takes a hundred years.


Q: Would you tell us something about the food situation?

A: In the American zone the standard is 1,500 calories daily; but this figure has not been realized. Both we and the British will have to import food if the Germans are to stay alive. Sixty percent of the population of Germany is in the French, British, and American zones which produce only about forty percent of the food. In the Russian zone some of the food there is being diverted by the Russians to their own uses. ...

Q: There is a groundswell in the United States in favor of letting American voluntary agencies help in the feeding and rehabilitation of Germany. What do you think of the idea?

A: This poses a great problem because of the multiplicity of agencies. I discussed this matter with Eisenhower and I think perhaps it can be worked out. I don't know how soon it will be possible to make individual remittances to Germany. ...

Q: What are the prospects for setting up a central administration in Germany?

A: Until the Russians get out -- and there is no indication that they intend to -- there can be no central administration. Hence I think it will be necessary to attempt to build up local government, not in the sense of trying to divide Germany but to provide some means of administration. ...

Q: When will there be civilian administration in the American zone?

A: The Army doesn't like the job and I don't blame them in the least. When we get civilian administration depends on what plans are being made in Washington. Thus far I have heard nothing to indicate that such plans exist.


*Editors' note. An unsuccessful 1944 coup attempt by anti-Hitler elements in the German army and military intelligence.

*Editors' note. At the time, Generals Lucius Clay and Dwight Eisenhower were the deputy military governor and military governor of Germany, respectively.

*Editors' note. The country was then flooded with millions of ethnic Germans displaced from territories to the east.




Copyright 2003 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

[Peach]

And didn't the Harriman's finance Gore, Sr. move into politics?

[Peach]

And, from another Freeper and another article there is an even more tenuous connection between Bush and Hitler:

Prescott Bush, the current president's grandfather, didn't even work at the bank. He was just a member of the Board of Directors. Many prominent people are on multiple boards. Most of the time, appointing a prominent person to a board amounts to little more than an honorific.


As a member of the board of Union Banking, Bush was three or more companies removed from the Thyssen group of businesses. Union Banking was owned by Bank Voor Handel, a Dutch bank described in the AP piece as "closely affiliated" with a German conglomerate, United Steel Works. The latter company was a part of the Thyssen group of businesses, which the AP piece describes as an "empire."


More importantly, the implied "link" between Prescott Bush and Hitler through Thyssen is buried in the AP's 7th paragraph. Apparently, seven of the U.S. directors of the Union Banking board held 4000 shares of the bank's stock. Prescott Bush held exactly ONE share.


Then, to poke even further holes in their own smear, Salant goes on to write that Fritz Tyssen broke with the Nazis in 1938. That was the year before WWII broke out in Europe. Tyssen split with them over their persecution of Catholics and Jews. In other words, although he may have supported them early on, Tyssen wasn't a Nazi. When he learned the truth about them, he heroically bucked them at a time when they were the biggest and most dangerous power in Europe. In fact, he spent about four years in a Nazi prison during the war.

[sonsofliberty2000]

Whoopadeedooo!

Next!

New on Patriot Paradox: 10 Most Dangerous Liberals List: Weekly at Patriot Paradox

[jetson]

[sgtbono2002]

They already tried this ploy with Schwarzeneggar and it didnt work then either.

[MHGinTN]

I just wish you were here to mop up the coffee you just caused to spew all over my desk! Wonderful come-back, 'muir'.

[Sabertooth]

Let's see the AP go after the Nazi/"palestinian" connections.

[sargon]

The innuendo which many seek to promote in this article is a fallacious, totalitarian notion known as "corruption of blood."

The principle espoused is that if someone is guilty of something, their family members are also guilty by association.

A very old propaganda technique...

[Peach]

I should have pinged you earlier to my #31 where I used your excellent research into Bush's grandfather's tenuous connection to Hitler.

[SandRat]

I'm sure that AP will be discussing Joe Kennnedy, ...

Oh yes, ... the AP and Terrible McAwfuful will lay it all out how Joe Kennedy got recalled by FDR as ambassador to the Court of St. James for being a NAZI supporter to keep FDR from being embarassed by having Papa Joe declared persona-non-Grata by England. They will also give up all the donations from the Ford Foundation since Old Man Ford was a rabid anti-semite and a NAZI supporter.

Yeah right, when pigs fly on their own!

[Bubba_Leroy]

Not only that, but Bush has a Kevin Bacon number of 3.

George W. Bush was in Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election (2002) with Peter Coyote
Peter Coyote was in Written in Blood (2002) with Steve Rankin
Steve Rankin was in Trapped (2002) with Kevin Bacon