An anonymous coward writes:

"Bush-Nazi Link Confirmed"
John Buchanan, New Hampshire Gazette,

October 10, 2003

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). 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