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sept 26, 2004
The
Ticking Bomb
@ The Heart Of
The Bush Campaign Has Finally
Surfaced In The Overground
Press!!!!!!
NO EXCUSES NOW FOR THE US MEDIA
TO IGNORE
Bush-Hitler!
less than 3 weeks after
UP!205
pushed out the
bush-hitler
connection (again) in the hope that a cornered kerry would finally mortar
it into the american presidential election, it’s started to
happen!!!
the story has FINALLY broken in a
national UK daily!
The
Guardian!
Rumours of a link
between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for
decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events
that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are
still being felt by today's president.
THIS
ONE CAN SWING IT, FOLKS!
NOW EACH & EVERYONE OF US MUST
PERMEATE THE INTERNET BY SPREADING
THE ARTICLE TO ALL GROUPS AND LISTS
SO THAT IT
CANNOT
BE IGNORED!
fraser.
UP!
HOW BUSH'S
GRANDFATHER
HELPED
HITLER'S
RISE TO POWER
The Guardian. Saturday September 25, 2004
by Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1312540,00.html
Rumours of a
link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated
for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of
events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy
Act are still being felt by today's president.
George Bush's
grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and
shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the
financial backers of Nazi Germany.
The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the
US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director
was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.
His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were
seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60
years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany
against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to
a hum of pre-election controversy.
The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor
to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for
prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
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 horseshit. 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.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
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