- Pacific
Bush-Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951
Federal Documents
by John Buchanan and Stacey Michael,
Exclusive to The New Hampshire Gazette, Vol. 248, No. 3, November 7, 2003
Founded in 1756, The New Hampshire Gazette is The Nation's Oldest Newspaper
http://NHGazette.com
After the seizures in late 1942 of
five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, Prescott
Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, failed to divest himself of more than a
dozen "enemy national" relationships that continued until as late as 1951,
newly-discovered U.S. government documents reveal.
Furthermore, the records show that Bush and his colleagues routinely attempted to conceal
their activities from government investigators.
Bush's partners in the secret web of Thyssen-controlled ventures included former New York
Governor W. Averell Harriman and his younger brother, E. Roland Harriman. Their
quarter-century of Nazi financial transactions, from 1924-1951, were conducted by the New
York private banking firm, Brown Brothers Harriman.
The White House did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Although the additional seizures under the Trading with the Enemy Act did not take place
until after the war, documents from The National Archives and Library of Congress confirm
that Bush and his partners continued their Nazi dealings unabated. These activities
included a financial relationship with the German city of Hanover and several industrial
concerns. They went undetected by investigators until after World War Two.
At the same time Bush and the Harrimans were profiting from their Nazi partnerships, W.
Averell Harriman was serving as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's personal emissary to
the United Kingdom during the toughest years of the war. On October 28, 1942, the same day
two key Bush-Harriman-run businesses were being seized by the U.S. government, Harriman
was meeting in London with South African Field Marshall Smuts to discuss the war effort.
Denial and Deceit
While Harriman was concealing his Nazi relationships from his government colleagues,
Cornelius Livense, the top executive of the interlocking German concerns held under the
corporate umbrella of Union Banking Corporation (UBC), repeatedly tried to mislead
investigators, and was sometimes supported in his subterfuge by Brown Brothers Harriman.
All of the assets of UBC and its related businesses belonged to Thyssen-controlled
enterprises, including his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam, the documents
state.
Nevertheless, Livense, president of UBC, claimed to have no knowledge of such a
relationship. "Strangely enough, (Livense) claims he does not know the actual
ownership of the company," states a government report.
H.D Pennington, manager of Brown Brothers Harriman and a director of UBC "for many
years," also lied to investigators about the secret and well-concealed relationship
with Thyssen's Dutch bank, according to the documents.
Investigators later reported that the company was "wholly owned" by Thyssen's
Dutch bank.
Despite such ongoing subterfuge, U.S. investigators were able to show that "a careful
examination of UBC's general ledger, cash books and journals from 1919 until the present
date clearly establish that the principal and practically only source of funds has been
Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart."
In yet another attempt to mislead investigators, Livense said that $240,000 in banknotes
in a safe deposit box at Underwriters Trust Co. in New York had been given to him by
another UBC-Thyssen associate, H.J. Kouwenhoven, managing director of Thyssen's Dutch bank
and a director of the August Thyssen Bank in Berlin. August Thyssen was Fritz's father.
The government report shows that Livense first neglected to report the $240,000, then
claimed that it had been given to him as a gift by Kouwenhoven. However, by the time
Livense filed a financial disclosure with U.S. officials, he changed his story again and
reported the sum as a debt rather than a cash holding.
In yet another attempt to deceive the governments of both the U.S. and Canada, Livense and
his partners misreported the facts about the sale of a Canadian Nazi front enterprise, La
Cooperative Catholique des Consommateurs de Combustible, which imported German coal into
Canada via the web of Thyssen-controlled U.S. businesses.
"The Canadian authorities, however, were not taken in by this maneuver," a U.S.
government report states. The coal company was later seized by Canadian authorities.
After the war, a total of 18 additional Brown Brothers Harriman and UBC-related client
assets were seized under The Trading with the Enemy Act, including several that showed the
continuation of a relationship with the Thyssen family after the initial 1942 seizures.
The records also show that Bush and the Harrimans conducted business after the war with
related concerns doing business in or moving assets into Switzerland, Panama, Argentina
and Brazil - all critical outposts for the flight of Nazi capital after Germany's
surrender in 1945. Fritz Thyssen died in Argentina in 1951.
One of the final seizures, in October 1950, concerned the U.S. assets of a Nazi baroness
named Theresia Maria Ida Beneditka Huberta Stanislava Martina von Schwarzenberg, who also
used two shorter aliases. Brown Brothers Harriman, where Prescott Bush and the Harrimans
were partners, attempted to convince government investigators that the baroness had been a
victim of Nazi persecution and therefore should be allowed to maintain her assets.
"It appears, rather, that the
subject was a member of the Nazi party," government investigators concluded.
At the same time the last Brown Brothers Harriman client assets were seized, Prescott Bush
announced his Senate campaign that led to his election in 1952.
Investigation Investigated?
In 1943, six months after the seizure of UBC and its related companies, a government
investigator noted in a Treasury Department memo dated April 8, 1943 that the FBI had
inquired about the status of any investigation into Bush and the Harrimans.
"I gave (a fellow investigator) a memorandum which did not say anything about the
American officers of subject," the investigator wrote. "(The other investigator)
wanted to know whether any specific action had been taken by us with respect to
them."
No further action beyond the initial seizures was ever taken, and the newly-confirmed
records went unseen by the American people for six decades.
What Does It All Mean?
So why are the documents relevant today?
"The story of Prescott Bush and Brown Brothers Harriman is an introduction to the
real history of our country," says L.A. art publisher and historian Edward Boswell.
"It exposes the money-making motives behind our foreign policies, dating back a full
century. The ability of Prescott Bush and the Harrimans to bury their checkered pasts also
reveals a collusion between Wall Street and the media that exists to this day."
Sheldon Drobny, a Chicago entrepreneur and philanthropist who will soon launch a liberal
talk radio network, says the importance of the new documents is that they prove a long
pattern of Bush family war profiteering that continues today via George H.W. Bush's
intimate relationship with the Saudi royal family and the bin Ladens, conducted via the
super-secret Carlyle Group, whose senior advisers include former U.S. Secretary of State
James A. Baker III.
In the post-9/11 world, Drobny finds the Bush-Saudi connection deeply troubling.
"Trading with the enemy is trading with the enemy," he says. "That's the
relevance of the documents and what they show."
Lawrence Lader, an abortion rights activist and the author of more than 40 books, says
"the relevance lies with the fact that the sitting President of the United States
would lead the nation to war based on lies and against the wishes of the rest of the
world." Lader and others draw comparisons between President Bush's invasion of Iraq
and Hitler's occupation of Poland in 1939 - the event that sparked World War Two.
However, others see an even larger significance.
"The discovery of the Bush-Nazi documents raises new questions about the role of
Prescott Bush and his influential business partners in the secret emigration of Nazi war
criminals, which allowed them to escape justice in Germany," says Bob Fertik,
co-founder of Democrats.com. "It also raises questions about the importance of Nazi
recruits to the CIA in its early years, in what was called Operation Paperclip, and
Prescott Bush's role in that dark operation."
Fertik and others, including former Justice Department Nazi war crimes prosecutor John
Loftus, a Constitutional attorney in Miami, and a former Veterans Administration official,
believe Prescott Bush and the Harrimans should have been tried for treason.
What Next?
Now, say Fertik and Loftus, there should be a Congressional investigation into the Bush
family's Nazi past and its concealment from the American people for 60 years.
"The American people have a right to know, in detail, about this hidden chapter of
our history," says Loftus, author of The Secret War Against the Jews. "That's
the only way we can understand it and deal with it."
For his part, Fertik is pessimistic that even a Congressional investigation can thwart the
war profiteering of the present Bush White House. "It's impossible to stop it,"
he says, "when the worst war profiteers are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who
operate in secrecy behind the vast powers of the White House."
John Buchanan is a journalist and
magazine writer based in Miami Beach.
He can be reached by email at: jtwg@bellsouth.net
Stacey Michael is a New Orleans-based journalist and the author of Religious Conceit. His
most recent book is Weapons of Mass Dysfunction: The Art of "Faith-Based"
Politics, due in early 2004.
He can be reached by email at: staceymichael@religiousconceit.com
Related Links:
President's Family
Had Links To Bank With Ties To Hitler Supporter
by Jonathan Salant, Washington D.C., October 21, 2003
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/20/1066631359649.html
"To Achieve One World
Government it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism,
their loyalty to family traditions and national identification." (Brock Chisholm - Director of the World Health Organization)
"A society whose citizens refuse to see and investigate the facts, who refuse to
believe that their government and their media will routinely lie to them and fabricate a
reality contrary to verifiable facts, is a society that chooses and deserves the Police
State Dictatorship it's going to
get." (Ian Williams Goddard)
The fact is that "political correctness" is all about creating uniformity. Individualism is one of the biggest obstacles in the way of the New World Order. They want a public that is predictable and conditioned to do as it's told without asking questions.
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." Thomas Jefferson