Online
Edition

Founded in 1756 by D. Fowle
Editor: S.
Fowle

NEWS

Cartoons
Chickenhawks
Editorial
Local
News
National
News
Vintage
News
Flag
Police
Letters
Media
Watch
Videos
SUPPORT US

Subscribe
Advertise
Buy our
Stuff
Make a
Donation
Policies
ABOUT US

History
Join the
Fun
Latest
Issue
Masthead
Subscribe
ET CETERA

Action
Friends
Search
the Archives

National News

“Bush -
Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951” - Federal
Documents
By John Buchanan and Stacey Michael
from The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248,
No. 3, November 7, 2003

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 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 memorandum' which did not say anything
about the American officers of subject," the investigator wrote.
"(Another 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 book 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 and an amateur 'Nazi
hunter.' "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
e-mail at [email-masked].

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
[email-masked].

SEARCH

E-mail this
article

Tell us your
thoughts

Home     About The NH
Gazette    Subscribe
Advertise
Policies
Contact the
Editor

Founded in 1756, The New Hampshire Gazette is The Nation's Oldest
Newspaper™, combining independent thought
with a commitment to freedom
of the press and featuring the popular Republican Chickenhawks
Database.The
Gazette is proud to be an alternative news source for America
and anyone else who cares to read.

Copyright © The New Hampshire
Gazette, 2003. All rights reserved.
Reproductions of any part of this
Web site only with the express permission of The NH Gazette.

Website design by Primal Media.