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How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s
rise to power
By Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington
Sept. 25 — 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
the imminent publication of three books on the subject.
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 new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show
that even after the US 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 has
also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped
to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.
Documents reveal that the firm Prescott Bush worked for, Brown Brothers
Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist Fritz
Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s 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 the US entered the war.
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 1930s, 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.
Bush was a founding member of UBC and the incorporation documents list
him as one of seven directors.
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 1920s, 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.
Fritz Thyssen inherited the business empire in 1926. He joined the Nazi
party in December 1931. He stepped in several times to bail out the
struggling party.
By the late 1930s, 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.
There was nothing illegal in doing business with the Thyssens throughout
the 1930s 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 then 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 July 30, 1942 when
the New York Herald-Tribune ran an article entitled “Hitler’s
Angel Has $3 million 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.
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.
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.
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 Consolidated Silesian
Steel Company while “American interests” held the rest.
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 the US in 2001, but the case was thrown out.
In their claims, Goldstein and 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 case is built around a Jan. 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.
The US government and the Bush family deny all the claims against them.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Civil rights commission hears indigenous
peoples at border
By Brenda Norrell
Nogales, Arizona, Sept. 24— The US Commission on Civil Rights
heard reports of the abuse of indigenous peoples by US Border Patrol
agents, now under Homeland Security, and the climate of fear in the
US that has increased militarization, intimidation and racial profiling
at the international border.
“Personally my life is in danger for making this statement,”
Ofelia Rivas, Tohono O’odham, told the US Civil Rights Commission’s
Arizona State Advisory Committee during two days of hearings in Nogales.
Because there is a swarm of tribal and federal agents around O’odham,
Rivas said O’odham fear for their lives when coming forward with
the truth.
Describing a climate of oppression on Tohono O’odham lands in Arizona
and Sonora, Mexico, Rivas said O’odham are denied unrestricted
free passage across the international border, which dissects O’odham
lands.
O’odham are halted while attending annual ceremonies in Mexico
and the United States, during pilgrimages to sacred sites for offerings,
and when collecting ceremonial items. Forced to carry documents and
subjected to frequent stops, searches and the threat of deportation,
she said O’odham cannot freely collect medicinal plants or conduct
personal business.
Rivas said O’odham civil rights and religious rights are violated
by US Border Patrol agents on traditional routes crossing this border.
“The Border Patrol, as well as the Mexican military, is well aware
that the O’odham use these traditional routes.” Yet, she said,
O’odham find military-issue metal spikes in their road and are
threatened with physical and verbal abuse as they cross in their ancestral
homeland.
Rivas and her family allege they were verbally and physically abused
by the Border Patrol in July 1999, while traveling home after a kehina
ceremony at her mother’s village in Arizona. When stopped by agents,
Rivas was asked what her citizenship was and she responded that she
was O’odham.
Rivas said the Border Patrol agent then “unclipped his weapon and
pointed it at my head.” He then threatened to throw her on the
ground, handcuff and deport her.
“I said, ‘Where would you deport me to, because northern Mexico
is also O’odham territory,’” she told the Civil Rights
hearing.
While living in fear of police and agents, O’odham live in fear
of the drug cartels and human traffickers known as coyotes that cross
their lands, threaten them and stash drugs in remote areas. All the
while, O’odham along the border live without safe drinking water,
paved roads and other basic needs.
Rivas said Homeland Security is fast-tracking development that is destroying
the quality of life, including the proposed vehicle barrier that will
interfere with traditional O’odham routes of travel. She said traditional
and ceremonial people are not included by the Tohono O’odham Nation
when making decisions and entering into agreements with the federal
government. She said traditional O’odham remain uninformed by their
tribal government.
Meanwhile, O’odham territory is increasingly militarized.
Rivas said those who speak out are targeted. One O’odham woman
who questioned the current policies was awoken in the middle of the
night by a team of officers dressed in black bursting into her home,
wearing hoods and carrying weapons. They falsely accused her of stashing
drugs. “They later admitted it was a mistake. It was intimidation,”
Rivas said.
Rivas echoed the Civil Rights testimony of government officials from
both the United States and Mexico when she said the current flawed immigration
policies have led to more crime and more deaths in the desert.
“Migration is a natural process; there were no problems until the
militarization of this area,” Rivas told the Civil Rights hearing.
The US Border Patrol was represented at the Civil Rights hearing by
George Lopez, assistant chief patrol agent of the Border Patrol. He
described Border Patrol efforts to protect the border and save lives
under Homeland Security initiatives.
Lopez said agents are fighting terrorism at the border.
Civil rights advisory board member Isabel Garcia, attorney and director
of Pima County Legal Defenders Office in Tucson, pointed out that the
current record number of deaths of border crossers increased after the
US government instituted its current policies, beginning with Operation
Gatekeeper.
The new policies have forced border crossers into more remote areas
and increased the number of deaths.
When questioned further about the Border Patrol’s role in the recent
death of an immigrant while in custody, Lopez declined to answer the
question. Lopez said it was not the US Border Patrol, but ICE (Homeland
Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement) that would have
to answer the question.
Lopez also responded to questions about vigilantes and white supremacists,
who have been assaulting and detaining border crossers at gunpoint.
Lopez said when the US Border Patrol finds this situation, a report
is made to the county sheriff and county officials must determine whether
to prosecute persons engaged in these tactics.
Source: Indian Country Today
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