Record­ed Octo­ber 3, 2004

FTR#479 MP3

NB: This stream con­tains both FTR #s 479 and 480 in sequence. Each is a 30 minute broad­cast.

Revis­it­ing a sub­ject well known to vet­er­an lis­ten­ers, this pro­gram exam­ines more research into the Bush family’s links to Nazi indus­try. In par­tic­u­lar, recent dis­clo­sures have led to a law­suit by two Auschwitz sur­vivors against the Bush fam­i­ly that claims that the Bush­es prof­it­ed from slave labor in the Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camps. Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est is the fact that one of the Bush-relat­ed businesses—Consolidated Sile­sian Steel Company—was the ben­e­fi­cia­ry of slave labor from Auschwitz. Lis­ten­ers inter­est­ed in the Bush/Nazi indus­try link will be pleased to note that three books are soon to be pub­lished about that sub­ject.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Review of the Brown Broth­ers Har­ri­man link to the Thyssen fam­i­ly; review of the Thyssen group’s estab­lish­ment of for­eign sub­sidiaries to mask their assets; the liq­ui­da­tion of the Nazi-linked UBC and how it helped boost the Bush family’s already con­sid­er­able wealth; an order by Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt from Jan­u­ary of 1944 that is the legal foun­da­tion of the plain­tiffs’ suit against the Bush fam­i­ly; proof that the Bush family’s dis­claimers of knowl­edge of the Nazi links of their com­pa­nies are disin­gen­u­ous.

1. Begin­ning the dis­cus­sion of the law­suit, the Guardian arti­cle that com­pris­es the sub­ject mate­r­i­al of the pro­gram, the broad­cast frames the basic top­ic of the Bush family’s links to Nazi indus­try. (For more about this subject—covered at length in the For The Record series—see [among oth­er pro­grams] FTR#’s 273, 332, 370, 406, 435, 475, 481.) Be sure to view the actu­al de-clas­si­fied gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments on this sub­ject. 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 labor­ers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-elec­tion con­tro­ver­sy.”
(“How Bush’s Grand­fa­ther Helped Hitler’s Rise to Pow­er” by Ben Aris and Dun­can Camp­bell; The Guardian; 9/25/2004; p. 1.)

2. “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 behav­ior has been bub­bling under the sur­face for some time. There has been a steady inter­net chat­ter about the ‘Bush/Nazi’ con­nec­tion . . . . 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 also has been sug­gest­ed that the mon­ey he made from these deal­ings helped to estab­lish the Bush fam­i­ly for­tune and set up its polit­i­cal dynasty.” (Idem.)

3. The pro­gram presents infor­ma­tion about the law­suit filed by two Holo­caust sur­vivors and sev­er­al forth­com­ing books about the sub­ject: “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.” (Idem.)

4. The pro­gram high­lights the links between the Thyssens and the Harriman/Walker/Bush businesses–the Union Bank­ing Cor­po­ra­tion in par­tic­u­lar. (These links have been dis­cussed many times on the pro­gram, and are detailed in the FTR shows men­tioned above. For that rea­son, they will not be dis­cussed at great length in the sup­ple­men­tal text to this descrip­tion.) “ . . . 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 1930’s 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.” (Idem.)

5. High­light­ing one of the issues that pre­cip­i­tat­ed the law­suit by the Auschwitz sur­vivors, the broad­cast men­tions Bush’s links to the Con­sol­i­dat­ed Sile­sian Steel Company—located near Auschwitz “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 tan­ta­liz­ing 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 labor from the con­cen­tra­tion camps, includ­ing Auschwitz. The own­er­ship of CSSC changed hands sev­er­al times in the 1930’s, 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.” (Ibid.; p. 2.)

6. “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.” (Idem.)

7. “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.” (Idem.)

8. “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.’” (Idem.)

9. “Prescott Bush . . . 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 soci­ety. . . . 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.” (Idem.)

10. One of the most sig­nif­i­cant pieces of infor­ma­tion con­cerns the func­tion UBC was to per­form for the Thyssen busi­ness empire: an off­shore finan­cial haven into which the Thyssen assets could be secret­ed in the event they were threat­ened dur­ing anoth­er war. In FTR#’s 273, 370, 435, 481, we viewed the Bush family’s links to the post­war flight cap­i­tal pro­gram real­ized by the Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion. “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 $125.00 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 1920’s, 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.” (Idem.)

11. The arti­cle high­lights Fritz Thyssen’s sup­port for Hitler: “By the time Fritz Thyssen inher­it­ed the busi­ness empire in 1926, Germany’s eco­nom­ic recov­ery was fal­ter­ing. After hear­ing Adolf Hitler speak, Thyssen became mes­mer­ized 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 Scheep­vaart in Rot­ter­dam.” (Ibid.; p. 3.)

12. “By the late 1930’s, 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 $8 mil­lion worth of gold, of which $3million 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 $3 mil­lion, drop­ping to $1 mil­lion only on a few occa­sions. . . .” (Idem.)

13. “ . . . There was noth­ing ille­gal in doing busi­ness with the Thyssens through­out the 1930’s 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 though 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 June 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.” (Idem.)

14. “There is no dis­pute over the fact that the US gov­ern­ment seized a string of assets con­trolled by BBH-includ­ing UBC and SAC [Sul­li­van & Cromwell]—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 attaché 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.” (Idem.)

15. “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 Livense, 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 trav­eled to these com­pa­nies through UBC.” (Idem.)

16. “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.” (Idem.)

17. “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.” (Ibid.; p. 4.)

18. The liq­ui­da­tion of UBC appears to have yield­ed $1.5 mil­lion to the Bush family—a great deal of mon­ey in the ear­ly 1950’s. “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 $1.5 million—a huge amount of mon­ey at the time. . . No fur­ther action was ever tak­en nor was the inves­ti­ga­tion con­tin­ued, despite the fact UBC was caught red-hand­ed oper­at­ing an Amer­i­can shell com­pa­ny for the Thyssen fam­i­ly eight months after Amer­i­can had entered the war and that this was the bank that had part­ly financed Hitler’s rise to pow­er. The most tan­ta­liz­ing part of the sto­ry remains shroud­ed in mys­tery: the con­nec­tion, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Con­sol­i­dat­ed Sile­sian Steel Com­pa­ny (CSSC) and Auschwitz.” (Idem.)

19. More about the Bush family’s involve­ment with CSSC. In addi­tion to the Flick fam­i­ly (steel-mak­ing cronies of the Thyssens), “Amer­i­can inter­ests” owned part of CSSC. As indi­cat­ed in the arti­cle, CSSC made lib­er­al use of sla

ve labor from the Pol­ish con­cen­tra­tion camps. “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 labor 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-1930’s. 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 nation­al­ize 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.’” (Idem.)

20. The issue of CSSC, slave labor and the Bush family’s lia­bil­i­ty for the company’s actions is cov­ered in a book just pub­lished in Ger­many: “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, [Ameri­ka und der 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.” (Idem.)

21. More about the law­suit: “The two Holo­caust sur­vivors suing the US gov­ern­ment and the Bush fam­i­ly for a total of $40 bil­lion in com­pen­sa­tion claim both mate­ri­al­ly ben­e­fit­ed from Auschwitz slave labor 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 Liss­man, 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.’ Liss­man 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.” (Ibid.; p. 5.)

22. Bas­ing their law­suit on an order by Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt to do every­thing pos­si­ble to save Euro­pean Jews, the plain­tiffs con­tend that BBH and oth­er pow­er­ful com­pa­nies brought pres­sure to neu­tral­ize Roosevelt’s direc­tive. “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.’” (Idem.)

23. “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. Liss­man 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.” (Idem.)

24. “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 70’s. 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 . . . 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. [Empha­sis added.]” (Idem.)

25. For­mer pros­e­cu­tor John Lof­tus negates Bush fam­i­ly apol­o­gists who claim the Bush­es didn’t know who the ulti­mate ben­e­fi­cia­ries of their actions were: “ ‘This was the mech­a­nism by which Hitler was fund­ed to come to pow­er, this was the mech­a­nism by which the Third Reich’s defense 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 real­ized that now the Nazis con­trolled the par­ent 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 belie that, it’s absolute horse­shit. They always knew who the ulti­mate ben­e­fi­cia­ries were.’” (Ibid.; pp. 5–6.)

26. More about the Bush family’s finan­cial ben­e­fit from the UBC liq­ui­da­tion: “ ‘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. . . .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 Pre

scott, got $1.5 mil­lion out of the involve­ment. . .” (Ibid.; p. 6.)