In article <bpcbe7$2pdh$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, John Wilmerding says...
On Sunday, November 16, 2003, John Buchanan <jtwg@bellsouth.net>
wrote:
Now that an acclaimed Presidential historian -- and 1998 GHW Bush
biographer -- has validated the importance of our reporting, it
will be interesting to see what the "mainstream" media does, not
to mention the "alternative" media.
Will The New York Times, ABC News and CNN -- not to mention AlterNet
and New Times (my hometown weekly) -- try to pretend like Mr. Parmet
has not written and disseminated this? Can they still think this
isn't "news" of national import? Will they continue the cover-up,
or get on the trail to the truth?
Not a bad way to start the new week, I'd say, with more to come ...
definitely a big win for freedom of the press, eh?
Keep the faith. Thanks.
John Buchanan <jtwg@bellsouth.net> _ _ _
This has just been published on History News Network:
http://hnn.us/articles/1811.html
Herbert Parmet is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at
the City University of New York, and the author of 'George Bush:
The Life of a Lone Star Yankee' (1997), and Eisenhower and the
American Crusades (1972).
What Should We Make of the Charge Linking the Bush Family Fortune
to Nazism?
by Herbert Parmet
[Editor's Note: Over the course of the past month several articles
have been published on the Internet and in a handful of print
publications that raised questions about the financial ties between
the founder of the Bush dynasty and certain Nazi businessmen. We
wondered what to make of the story, and asked Herbert Parmet to
investigate. This is his report.]
John Buchanan is a free-lance journalist with a mission. He intends
to alert the media, and all who will listen, about how Prescott
Bush, the progenitor of two presidents, was in league with some of
Hitlers willing helpers. Minimized or totally dismissed by the
public, the story was revived from its World War II roots by Webster
Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin in their 'George Bush: The Unauthorized
Biography' (1992), and given a strong additional push in John Loftuss
sensationalist 'The War Against the Jews' (1994).
Allegations involving the father of what has become the Bush dynasty
relate to his association with Brown Brothers Harriman and Company:
http://www.bbh.com/
.. the Wall Street investment banking firm, which evolved from a 1931 merger of W. A. Harriman and Company and Brown Brothers, which was brought together by George Herbert Walker, president of the former, and his son-in-law, Prescott.
The younger Bush, by then, was one of the seven directors of Brown
Brothers Harriman, a board that included W. Averell Harriman and
his brother Roland.
Buchanans charges of a Bush-Nazi past are hard to ignore, largely
because of his passion as a true-believer and an effective series
of articles in a highly independent New England publication. His
enthusiasm for getting at the truth of all this has been further
emboldened by Loftus, who has suggested that Prescott Bush should
have been tried for treason, because they continued to support
Hitler after the U.S. entered the war. Loftus, who describes himself
as a former prosecutor with the U.S. Justice Departments Nazi-hunting
unit, has added the reassurance that he could have made the case.
Treasury and Justice department files, including what was then the
Office of Alien Property, declassified as recently as September,
do indeed show that the U. S. government acted to seize numerous
assets held by Harriman affiliated companies. After the war,
Buchanan has written, a total of 18 additional Brown Brothers
Harriman and UBC-related [Union Banking Corporation] client assets
were seized under the Trading With the Enemy Act, which Franklin
D. Roosevelt signed right after Pearl Harbor.
George Herbert (Bert) Walkers relationship with Averell Harriman
went back to 1919, reported Buchanan, when both went to Paris to
set up the German branch of their banking and investment operations,
which were largely based on critical war resources such as steel
and coal. Other corporate entities, all with ties to similar German
interests, were then created by UBC, which had Prescott Bush on its
board - most notably, the Hamburg-American Line, the Holland-American
Trading Corporation, and the Seamless Steel Corporation. On October
12, 1920, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat headlined Ex-St. Louisan
Forms Giant Ship Merger, explaining that Bert Walker was the moving
power behind the merger of two big financial houses in New York,
which will place practically unlimited capital at the disposal of
the new American-German shipping combine. In the summer and fall
of 1942, Congress, under the authority of the Trading With the Enemy
Act, seized the first group of entities, the UBC , the Holland-American
Trading Corporation, and the Hamburg-American Line. Buchanans
diligence has discovered that the latter reportedly smuggled Nazi
spies into the U.S. before the war, and encouraged U.S. Patriots
to travel to Germany and proselytize for Hitler in the early 1930s.
Much of this is confirmed by the new documentation. The UBC was
not a bank at all but in reality a clearing house for many assets
and enterprises held by Fritz Thyssen, a German steel magnate:
http://www.thyssenkrupp.com/
.. who has written about his role in helping to finance the Third Reich. Located close to Bushs 59 Wall Street office, it was founded in 1924 by W. Averell Harriman on behalf of Thyssen and his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N. V. of Holland. The UBC was seized by the United States under Vesting Order 248 on October 20, 1942, and, according to Buchanan, Bush and Harriman later received $1.5 million in compensation. Similar vesting orders leading to the divestiture of enemy national assets continued until well after the war. (A total of ten such vesting orders that indicate the firms investments are in the files in my possession.) Other holdings, associated with Bush, are more problematical, such as the relationship with the Silesian Holding Corporation and Consolidated Silesian Steel, which was bought from Thyssen in 1931.
In 1943, after press reports that the Polish mining interest was
employing forced labor by using prisoners from the Auschwitz
concentration camp, we are informed that Prescott Bush distanced
himself from UBC and had even engaged in the collection of funds
for the victims of the war in his role as president of the National
War Fund. He had, in fact, taken over as head of the United Service
Organizations soon after Pearl Harbor, raising millions for the
National War Fund, according to Mickey Herskowitz, Prescotts recent
biographer.
The declassified papers confirm questionable transactions in violation
of the Trading With the Enemies Act, but, as with all examinations
of corporate malfeasance, more is needed to establish individual
responsibility. Buchanan himself, when pressed for more details
about Auschwitz, was uncharacteristically hesitant. Consolidated
Silesian was the only direct link to the notorious death camp. A
file in the Library of Congress confirms the business part of the
relationship, but does not give any financial details. More
secretive, says Buchanan, is where the cloaking arrangement with
Sullivan and Cromwell [most often associated with its best-known
partner, John Foster Dulles] and Schroeder Rock, which is the
Schroeder Bank and the Rockefeller family trust and investment
arrangement - that links to the Rockefeller dealings (which John
Loftus has written about) to the New York banks, some of which had
to do with I. G. Farben through City National Bank of New York in
back of thos e transactions. Buchanan contends that there are also
records involving the City National Bank, which he cites as definitely
the hot-blood area for all the Nazi money, especially I. G. Farben
and Hermann Schmidt, the infamous managing director of I. G. Farben,
which was represented in court by Dulless Sullivan and Cromwell.
Their relationship with German enterprises, m
reover, began during
the years of Germanys Weimar Republic, well before Hitler's rise.
An international investment banking firm, they also did business
with the Soviets during the 1920s (which was not in violation of
any statute), and, all in all, with forty-five different countries.
Their correspondent relationships spanned the world and numbered
some five thousand, according to Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas's
The Wise Men, transactions that hardly were confined to Nazis or
the Soviet Union.
Still, following the money trail is a tricky matter. Loftus points
out that the Weimar government, pressed to pay their reparations
bill, had to borrow gold from Sullivan and Cromwells American
clients, and that some 70 percent of the gold that flowed into
Germany during the 1930's came from U. S. Investors, and heavily
>from clients of the Dulles firm. An internal government memo on
August 18, 1941, also noted that the UBC had made extensive purchases
of gold amounting to over eight million dollars, most of which was
then shipped to Europe, presumably Germany. That transaction,
speculated J. W. Pehle, an assistant to the secretary of the treasury,
may have been the basis for rumors that Fritz Thyssen has large
gold deposits hoarded in the United States. His own examination
of the UBC books and ledgers, however, showed that all of the
purchases have been satisfactorily accounted for.
In view of all the financial transactions involving Germany during
this period, the role of that major Jewish banking family, the
Warburgs (which also did business with the Harriman group),
demonstrates some of the realities of the flow of capital. The
Warburgs, backed by such American groups as Bnai Brith and the
American Jewish Committee, demanded in 1934, according to Tarpley
and Chaitkin, that American Jews not agitate against the Hitler
government or participate in any pro-Nazi boycott. Such denial
about Nazi objectives was not unusual at the time. Aryan laws, at
that point in German history, were still less tangible than the
marketplace.
Understandably, the American media has indeed been skittish about
the Bush-Nazi story. The association of the Tarpley-Chaitkin book
with the organization headed by the Lyndon LaRouche organization
(published by the Executive Intelligence Review of Washington, a
LaRouchian press) has not been helpful, to say the least. Nor has
the sensationalist tone and dubious message of Loftuss 'The War
Against the Jews.' One prominent critic of the administration in
Washington, journalist Joe Conason, while acknowledging that the
involvement of Prescott Sr. and other members of the American
business aristocracy with Nazi-era industry was shameful, protests
that neither his offenses, nor the Republican Partys politics of
personal destruction, can justify using such [smear] tactics.
Imputing Nazi sympathies to the President or his family ought to
be beneath his adversaries. After a story on the allegations
appeared in the Polish edition of Newsweek, it was spiked by the
news magazine s American version. Major U.S. outlets, Buchanan
contends, have also bypassed a chance to investigate the story when
information regarding discovery of the documents was presented to
them. Although carried by the Associated Press, few members picked
it up. One that did, Newsday on New Yorks Long Island, ran it under
the headline Bush Ancestors Bank Seized by Govt.
A notable exception to the skepticism about Buchanan has been the
New Hampshire Gazette. Published as a fortnightly in Portsmouth
with a circulation of some seven thousand and owned and edited by
journalist Steven Fowle, a descendant of the Daniel Fowle who first
brought it out in 1756 (making it, the nations oldest newspaper),
it has, to date, run two Buchanan stories plus his interview with
John Loftus. Fowle, called by a writer for the St. Petersburg
Times, an example of Yankee Spunk, explained that he thought it
vital to gauge to what extent the Bush family fortune was derived
>from the Nazis. If its true, it ought to be said, he emphasized,
and its not my fault that its ugly.
Asked to account for the skittishness of most of the media, he
responded by doubting that the presidents staff would care much
about revelations in his paper, and added that most of the other
media outlets dont have the courage to stick their necks out if it
involves challenging power. The only trouble with that is that
challenging power is their job.
Conason, of course, is right. But, at least to some extent, it did
happen, even if the details are far from clear. As with all such
examples of infatuation with power, or the control of power, or the
interests of sheer survival, the story should be told. As John F.
Kennedy once said, let the chips fall where they may.
The most judicious and succinct appraisal of all this was offered
by Christopher Simpson ten years ago in a book called The Splendid
Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century:
"By 1944 and 1945, leaders of major German companies such as automaker
Daimler Benz, electrical manufacturers AEG and Siemans, and most
of Germanys large mining, steelmaking, chemical, and construction
companies found themselves deeply compromised by their exploitation
of concentration camp labor, theft, and in some cases complicity
in mass murder. They committed those crimes not so much out of
ideological conviction, but more often as a means of preserving
their influence within Germanys economy and society. For much of
the German economic elite, their cooperation in atrocities was
offered to Hitlers government in exchange for its aid in maintaining
their status."
All this, especially considering the number of American businesses
that were engaged in the German market, says more about finance and
capitalism than about ideology. It is a story of power, totalitarianism
on one hand, and sheer greed and economic survival on the other -
and with no relationship to morality. We need to do more than
merely sift through the essence of Buchanan's assertions, as troubling
as they may be, to appreciate the value of his labors, and wonder
at the contribution to public knowledge of Steven Fowles maverick
newspaper.
What all this means for the reputation of Prescott Bush's descendants
should be as relevant as Joseph P. Kennedys for his descendants,
just as it was for the connection of the Dulleses with Sullivan and
Cromwell. Similar associations did not keep John Foster Dulles
>from becoming secretary of state or his brother Allen from heading
the C.I.A. Nor did it stop Averell Harriman from becoming governor
of New York.
================================== CERJ@igc.org
wilmerding@earthlink.net -------------------------------------------
John Wilmerding, Convener and List Manager Coalition for
Equity-Restorative Justice (CERJ) 217 High Street, Brattleboro, VT,
USA ZIP: 05301-6073 Phone: 1-802-254-2826 CERJ was founded
in New York in May, 1997.
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reinvent justice using methods that are fair; that conserve, restore,
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