Sara­so­ta Her­ald-Tri­bune

The pres­i­dent of the Flori­da Holo­caust Muse­um said Sat­ur­day that George W. Bush’s grand­fa­ther derived a por­tion of his per­son­al for­tune through his affil­i­a­tion with a Nazi-con­trolled bank.

John Lof­tus, a for­mer pros­e­cu­tor in the Jus­tice Depart­men­t’s Nazi War Crimes Unit, said his research found that Bush’s grand­fa­ther, Prescott Bush, was a prin­ci­pal in the Union Bank­ing Corp. in Man­hat­tan in the late 1930s and the 1940s. Lead­ing Nazi indus­tri­al­ists secret­ly owned the bank at that time, Lof­tus said, and were mov­ing mon­ey into it through a sec­ond bank in Hol­land even after the Unit­ed States declared war on Ger­many. The bank was liq­ui­dat­ed in 1951, Lof­tus said, and Bush’s grand­fa­ther and great-grand­fa­ther received $1.5 mil­lion from the bank as part of that dis­so­lu­tion.

“That’s where the Bush fam­i­ly for­tune came from: It came from the Third Reich,” Lof­tus said.

Lof­tus made his remarks dur­ing a speech as part of the Sara­so­ta Read­ing Fes­ti­val. The author of “Unholy Trin­i­ty: The Vat­i­can, The Nazis and the Swiss Banks,” Lof­tus doc­u­ment­ed the Swiss bank accounts that har­bored funds con­fis­cat­ed from Holo­caust vic­tims and the par­tic­i­pa­tion of Ital­ian priests in smug­gling Nazi war crim­i­nals to safe haven in Cana­da, Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca and the Unit­ed States after the war.

Although he said he had a file of paper­work link­ing the bank and Prescott Bush to Nazi mon­ey, Lof­tus did not pro­vide that doc­u­men­ta­tion Sat­ur­day.

Lof­tus point­ed out that the Bush fam­i­ly would not be the only Amer­i­can polit­i­cal dynasty to have ties to the “wrong side of World War II.” The Rock­e­fellers had finan­cial con­nec­tions to Nazi Ger­many, he said.

Lof­tus also remind­ed his audi­ence that John F. Kennedy’s father, an avowed iso­la­tion­ist and for­mer ambas­sador to Great Britain, prof­it­ed dur­ing the 1930s and ’40s from Nazi stocks that he owned.

“No one today blames the Democ­rats because Jack Kennedy’s father bought Nazi stocks,” Lof­tus said. Still, he said, it is impor­tant to under­stand these his­tor­i­cal con­nec­tions for what they tell us about pol­i­tics today. The World War II expe­ri­ence points out how easy it was then — and remains today — to hide mon­ey in multi­na­tion­al funds.

That mon­ey flows into Amer­i­can pol­i­tics today, he said, from “a series of multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions behav­ing like pirates. They don’t care about ide­ol­o­gy; they care about mon­ey.”

Lof­tus’ speech left many in tears.

“I am absolute­ly shocked,” said Nan­cy Krauss of Pun­ta Gor­da. “I wish this would have come out before the elec­tion. My hus­band vot­ed for Bush. I don’t think he would have vot­ed for him if he would have known.”.