This
article appeared in the April 13, 2001 issue of the Boston-based Jewish
Advocate.
It was
credited in Michael Moore’s book “Stupid White Men.”
For an
archive of my other articles, please visit www.SusieD.com.
"That's where the Bush family fortune came from: It
came from the Third Reich"
-- US
Justice Department Nazi War Crimes Prosecutor John Loftus
The Bush
Family – Third Reich Connection
Fact?
Fabrication?
By Susie
Davidson
Advocate
Correspondent
Maybe
you’ve heard about it. Maybe it wouldn’t surprise you.
Maybe you’re just curious.
But three
books, varied newspaper series, court records, convictions and correspondence
attest to a definite link between the Bush family and the Nazis.
The
Sarasota Herald Tribune, in November 2000, reported the president of the
Florida Holocaust Museum’s statement that George W. Bush's grandfather had
derived a portion of his personal fortune through his affiliation with a
Nazi-controlled bank.
US
Justice Department Nazi War Crimes Prosecutor John Loftus, who authored
many books on St. Martin’s including "Unholy Trinity: The Vatican,
The Nazis and the Swiss Banks" (1992) and along with Mark Aarons,
"The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the
Jewish People" (1994) and an upcoming one on Jonathan Pollard), was also
quoted: "That's where the Bush family fortune came from: It came from the
Third Reich." Dirty dealings are chronicled in Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin’s entirely downloadable "George Bush: The
Unauthorized Biography".
Here’s
the deal, so to speak.
Prescott
Bush, W’s grandfather, was a principal in New York’s Union Banking
Corporation from the late 1930’s-1940’s. This bank was owned
by key Nazi industrialists, who funneled money into it through another bank
located in Holland. "Union Banking," says Toby Rogers, who
wrote a five part series last year on Bush-Nazi ties for the Greenwich Village
Gazette series, "became an ‘out and out Nazi money-laundering
machine.’ "
In 1942,
when George Sr. was an 18-year-old naval pilot in training, the US government
under FDR ordered Prescott’s banking operations seized under the Trading
With the Enemy Act, as Prescott and Sam Bush were tried for treason. The stocks of three Nazi executives, Prescott Bush, and three
associates were vested.
Nonetheless,
when the bank was liquidated in 1951, W’s grandfather and
great-grandfather each received $1.5 million in proceeds. This
is what is believed made up the bulk, if not all, of the Bush family
fortune. The powerful partners in these ignoble ventures are reputedly
those who boosted the Bushes into the CIA and government positions.
Other
actions followed; the US government seized three more Nazi front
organizations run by the bank. However, they were too late; Bush’s
family had already centrally financed and armed Hitler and the Nazi war
industries.
The web of
secret operations, dirty deals and cronyism detailed in the above books can be
recounted only briefly here. William Stamps Farish, president of Standard
Oil, later known as Exxon, opened up the Auschwitz slave labor camp with
Chairman Walter C. Teagle (a pal of Henry Ford) in collaboration with I.G.
Farben on June 14, 1940. Jews, used to produce artificial rubber and
gasoline from coal, were worked to near death and then murdered. Farish’s
grandson, W.S. Farish III, served as George Bush’s money manager.
Farish later formed the Humble Oil Company of Texas.
Neil Bush,
of BCCI fame, was named after Neil Dresser, business associate of Standard.
The roster of Prescott Bush
business associates, from his father-in-law George Herbert Walker (one of
Hitler’s biggest US supporters), Fritz Thyssen ($1M Hitler financier
later convicted in Nuremberg), Averell Harriman (Mussolini negotiator, supplier
of $50M in German bonds to US investors), Brown Brothers execs (long
involved in slave cotton trading), Kurt von Schroeder (treasurer of Nazi Party
private armies), John Foster Dulles (international attorney for dozens of Nazi
enterprises and later Republican US Secretary of State, helping propel
Prescott into Senatorhood), reads like a Hitler CEO board meeting.
Of course,
the Bushes were not alone. The Rockefellers and Kennedys also profited
from financial dealings with Nazis. It has always been all too easy to
hide money in multinational funds. "They behave like pirates,"
says Loftus. "They don’t care about ideology; they care about
money."
But the
Bush Nazi sympathies continued after the war.
The
Washington Jewish Week, on Sept. 8, 1988, condemned several of George Bush
Sr.’s campaign’s Ethnic Advisory Committee members as "well
known anti-Semites and pro-fascists." Quoted were Henry Siegman,
executive director of the AJC, Albert Vorspan of the Union of American Hebrews,
Michael Miller of the JCRC and Abraham Foxman of the ADL, who cited Jerome
Brentar, who associated with Holocaust denial groups, Ignatius Billinsky,
involved with Nazi apologists, Florian Galdau, described by Simon Wiesenthal as
"the leader of a Romanian pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic movement in NYC",
Philip Guarino, another known anti-Semite, and Laszlo Pasztor, an official in
the Hugarian government anti-Semitic agency Arrow Cross. Alan Dershowitz
jumped in.
Their
pressure paid off; eight Nazi sympathizers subsequently resigned from the Bush
committee (four, not surprisingly, were back working for the party by 1989).
Another
persistent rumor, long circulated around Yale University and discussed by Ron
Rosenbaum in September 1977’s Esquire magazine, is the presence of
Hitler’s silverware among hidden relics of the Skull and Bones
society. In varied interviews of Bonesmen, this has never been
definitively denied.
George
Upson Waller, a contemporary of George Sr., changed the subject when
asked. "Someone told me Maureen Dowd wrote an article about GW
Bush’s substance abuse in his youth. I said I didn’t realize
he had enough substance to abuse."
A
link? You decide.