Recorded October 9, 2004
This program presents John Buchanan, the journalist who uncovered recent information adding to the growing body of knowledge about the Bush family’s involvement with Nazi industry. In addition to discussion of Prescott Bush’s participation in the Nazi flight capital program that moved the Third Reich’s funds out of Europe and into neutral countries after World War II, the program sets forth John Buchanan’s harrowing experience at the hands of vengeful government officials looking to punish him for his efforts. Another important discovery concerns John’s uncovering of the fact that Prescott Bush, Sr. was an early financier of the Liberty League, a domestic fascist organization that plotted to overthrow President Roosevelt in 1934.
Program Highlights Include: Description of the establishment by listeners to this program of a website that features the declassified documents about the Bush family’s involvement with Nazi industry; John’s discussion of a law suit against the Bush family by two Auschwitz survivors; further revelations concerning the Bush-connected Hamburg-Amerika line’s pro-Nazi activities in the United States; a successful wager John undertook with The Guardian (a British paper) betting that they could not impugn the authenticity of the documents he had uncovered.
1. This interview highlights John Buchanan’s political odyssey, undertaken to uncover the truth of the Bush family’s involvement with Nazi industry. In FTR#435, we examined John’s magnificent articles written for The New Hampshire Gazette about the Bush family’s Third Reich connections. Most important of the revelations contained in Buchanan’s articles is the disclosure that Prescott Bush (Sr.) continued his involvement with the Nazi money machine after World War II. Specifically, he continued to deal with individuals and institutions that were moving Nazi monies out of Germany and into neutral countries between the years of 1945 and 1951. This places Bush squarely in the Bormann flight capital milieu, about which we have spoken so often. (The text of the New Hampshire Gazette articles is reproduced in the description for FTR#435. The declassified documents themselves are available online.)
2. The substance of the Bush family’s involvement with Nazi industry can be found in the broadcasts cited immediately above. Mr. Emory feels it would be pointless to restate the details, in that they have been presented so often before. FTR#479 contains the most recent treatment of the subject. This program will only highlight aspects of the research that have not been discussed previously.
3. Among the points raised by Mr. Buchanan is the fact that after his articles were printed in The New Hampshire Gazette, almost no news organizations would follow up on the story. The Guardian engaged in a friendly wager with Mr. Buchanan, that no one could impugn the authenticity of the documents he had uncovered. John notes that recently two Auschwitz survivors have filed a $40 billion suit against the Bush family because some of their investments utilized slave labor. In particular, Mr. Buchanan notes that the Bush family had some stock in the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, which used slave labor at Auschwitz.
4. John relates how a group of listeners in the Midwest (high school students and their teacher) obtained copies of the documents he had uncovered and put them on the web, with copyrighted introductions that he had written. Mr. Emory notes that if teenagers can do something this brave, heroic and important, adult listeners should be able to do more.
5. Next, John presents a harrowing tale of some of the official retribution to which he was subjected because of his investigations. Detained by two people misrepresenting themselves as “Secret Service Agents,” John was told he was being investigated for allegedly threatening the life of the President of the United States. No concrete proof was given (as he had done no such thing), but they nonetheless demanded, and received, access to all of John’s personal records and contacts. After that, he was detained in Florida and told he had threatened the life of someone he had never met and whose name was not presented to him. He was then told that his public defender had lost his file and that he was in deep trouble. He would probably be convicted, according to the legal authorities. Fortunately, a benefactor came to his assistance and he was released and exonerated.
6. Mr. Buchanan then relates some information that he had just gleaned from the files of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee. In those files, he found that the Hamburg-Amerika Line, one of the most prominent of the Bush family’s Nazi businesses, was financing a Nazi newspaper in the United States and supporting the establishment of a full-blown Nazi movement in this country.
7. Among the most substantively interesting of John’s recent discoveries is the fact that Prescott Bush was an early financier of the Liberty League, a domestic fascist organization that was the primary element in the 1934 fascist plot to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
8. The program reviews a passage from Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile about the Nazis’ preparations for their postwar underground revival.
“ . . . Dr. Scheid also affirmed, ‘The ground must now be laid on the financial level for borrowing considerable sums from foreign countries after the war.’ As an example of the kind of support that had been most useful to Germany in the past, Dr. Scheid cited the fact that ‘patents for stainless steel belonged to the Chemical Foundation, Inc. New York, and the Krupp Company of Germany, jointly, and that of the United States Steel Corporation, Carnegie, Illinois, American Steel & Wire, National Tube, etc., were thereby under an obligation to work with the Krupp concern.’ He also cited the Zeiss Company, the Leica Company, and the Hamburg-Amerika line as typical firms that had been especially effective in protecting German interests abroad. He gave New York addresses to the twelve men.”
Now that the general topic of overthrowing the government is set to dominate US headlines for months to come with Trump’s latest indictment, along with calls for the urgent need to learn these lessons to avoid repeating history, it’s worth noting that this is also a great time for a collective review of all the past such lessons that were never actually learned. Like, obviously, all the still unresolved political assassinations of the 1960s. But there’s also the nearly forgotten 1934 Business Plot against FDR. A plot that has a number of parallels with the January 6 plot, especially when that plot is recognized as extending far being Trump’s administration and included the extensive support of the Council for National Policy (CNP)‘s network of operatives.
And that brings us to the following short 2007 piece in Harpers by Scott Horton that mentions a then-recent BBC interview of John Buchanan discussing the 1934 Business Plot. This is the same interview where Buchanan speculated that a secret deal arranged between the FDR administration and the coup plotters after the plot was revealed — where the industrialists would drop their opposition to the New Deal in exchange for not being tried for treason — was the reason the plot was never aggressively pursued by the government and press.
The following Harpers piece doesn’t discuss that aspect of the interview. Instead, it mentions another fascinating fun fact about that chapter in history: while the names of most of the coup plotters were kept under wraps, Prescott Bush’s name was one of those that leaked. As Horton notes, this was at the same time that Prescott Bush was deeply involved with the Hamburg-America line and the industrial financing of the Third Reich. So the family with connections to almost every intelligence-related political scandal of the 20th century, was also involved with the 1934 Business Plot. Because of course.
It’s a remarkable piece of history that is so obscure it’s basically never been forgotten because it was never really learned in the first place. That’s part of the significance of this short 2007 Harpers report by Scott Horton: it’s one of the only places in print where this remarkable history is actually laid out, with another place being Buchanan’s FTR interview in October 2004 where he discussed Prescott’s role as an early financier of the Liberty League, the organization through which the Business Plot manifested. But other than that, this incredible piece of history has otherwise never really been discussed. So with America’s history of coup attempts — or coup successes in the case of JFK’s assassination — it seems like now might be a good time for America to finally actually learn about how Prescott Bush — one of the most significant political figures in the 20th century — staged a failed coup attempt, got away with it, and went on to build one of the most powerful political dynasties in the history of country:
“The Congressional committee kept the names of many of the participants under wraps and no criminal action was ever brought against them. But a few names have leaked out. And one is Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the incumbent president. Prescott Bush was of course deep into the business of the Hamburg-America Lines, and had tight relations throughout this period with the new Government that had come to power in Germany a year earlier under Chancellor Aldoph Hitler. It appears that Bush was to have formed a key liaison for the group with the new German government.”
It seems like the kind of history that could captivate American audiences. And yet, somehow, these incredible historic details were just completely ignored. Don’t forget that Prescott’s grandson was president in 2007, when Buchanan gave that BBC interview. How was this not bigger news? Who knows how American failed to absorb this information, but it happened. So, while the line between ‘better later than never’ and ‘too late’ can be fuzzy at times, in the spirit of ‘better later than never’ it’s going to be worth keeping in mind that this forgotten history is still extremely relevant history. Arguably more relevant than ever now that we’ve allowed that history to fester in secret for a few generations.
@Pterrafractyl–
The late Jules Archer mentioned Prescott Bush, Sr.‘s participation in the coup plot in FTR#602.
https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-602-the-plot-to-seize-the-white-house-interview-with-jules-archer/
Keep up the great work!
Best,
Dave