21 November 2003
Awhile back I touched on the connection between the Nazis and the Bush family fortune as part of the review of the book “The People as Enemy“. And I also referred extensively to it in “Frauds ‘R’ US” as well. Then a big piece was published in the New Hampshire Gazette a couple of weeks ago, after some new files were released after an FOIA application managed to squeeze it out of the bureaucracy. Well the guy who wrote the Gazette story, John Buchanan, mailed me the other day complaining that the mass media just don’t want to know about it. Here’s the press release he sent me, followed by my ‘Banking on Nazis II’.
On Wednesday, November 19, 2003 John Buchanan jtwg@bellsouth.net wrote:
A Call To Action For An Important Journalistic-Historical Project By John Buchanan
On September 17, I became the first journalist in U.S. history to independently confirm and report in a reputable newspaper — The New Hampshire Gazette, founded in 1756 and the oldest paper in America — the Nazi past of the Bush family, via its 27-year business relationship with Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen from 1924 until 1951. Both Prescott Bush, the grandfather of George W. Bush, and George Herbert Walker, his maternal great-grandfather, were part of the partnership, under the banner of the private bank Brown Brothers Harriman.
Beginning in August 1942, those Nazi-front business assets were seized by the U.S. government under The Trading with the Enemy Act. The seizures continued until 1951, when Thyssen, the financial architect of The Third Reich, died in Argentina. It was the liquidation of those Nazi assets after Thyssen’s death that were the foundation of the Bush family fortune.
Last March, Newsweek Polska, the magazine s Polish edition, published a brief but shocking story that linked the Bush fortune directly to slave labor at Auschwitz. The U.S. edition, as I reported in my first NHG story on October 10: http://www.nhgazette.com… spiked the story for reasons that have never been accounted for by Newsweek.
Since my discovery of the actual documents, many of which were only declassified and approved for public release on September 14 (four days before I got to the archives) virtually every major news organization in the U.S. has refused to investigate the Bush-Nazi story or even examine the documents. The list includes The New York Times, ABC News, Washington Post, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, Miami Herald, CNN, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
Despite the failure of the mainstream media to acknowledge my historic scoop, Associated Press put the story out to the world over the weekend of October 17-19, and it ran in major international newspapers including The Guardian (UK), Jerusalem Times and Ha’aretz (Israel), Hindustan Times (India), Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) and The Moscow Times (Russia).
However, liberal Bush-bashing columnist and author Joe Conason, author of ‘Big Lies,’ dismissed the Nazi allegations as a smear against President George W. Bush in The New York Observer. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau then weighed in with a Sunday Doonesbury. The Moscow Times ran a Prescott Bush Nazi parody. Howard Kurtz addressed my reporting and lack of wider coverage in his Washington Post media column.
Then, on November 17, noted Presidential biographer and Bush biographer Herbert Parmet put things into perspective with an essay at The History News Network at George Mason University:
“We need to do more,” Parmet wrote, “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 Fowle’s maverick newspaper.”
It is in that spirit that this undertaking is made. This is a challenge to deliver on his challenge to give wider voice to the facts.
Steve Fowle, the editor and publisher of The New Hampshire Gazette, and I are asking that interested journalists, editors, researchers and historians join us so that we, with our limited resources, can aggressively and accurately follow the Bush-Nazi story to its conclusion.
Specifically, we intend to prove the Bush family connection to slave labor at Auschwitz with documentary evidence and living sources.
In addition, we intend to prove that the Bush family fortune did indeed originate as blood money from its support of totalitarian, non-Democratic regimes that included Hitler, the Bolsheviks, Mussolini and Stalin.
The even larger issue, however, is whether this newly-confirmed information matters to the American people, the Congress and the media or not. We submit, based on the international reaction to date to my first three articles in the Gazette, that the American people have a right to know, on a major story national basis, of this troubling and until now secret chapter of U.S. history.
Do you agree? If you do, we must include your voice in the first media action we will soon be bringing (a barrage of incoming phone calls and e-mails demanding fair coverage of this story) in order to get the attention of the major news outlets.
If you agree the story is important, we also need your support in asking that Congress investigate the 60-year media cover-up of the Bush family history and its implications for the present and future.
If you do not agree the Bush-Nazi connection is important and relevant, please say so and state your reasoning. We welcome all opinions and points of view, including those of media and news executives from both the mainstream and alternative presses, on all sides of the debate.
Most important, however, we need to get to work on the next stories in the NHG. Please let me know what resources and/or contacts you can contribute, or what advice you have on how best to proceed with the systematic reporting of this information.
The critical story element now is the Auschwitz connection. To research and report that part of the story with the same document-supported, unimpeachable credibility as the first articles will be difficult at best. Please let me know your best ideas for pursuing it, both in the U.S. as well as Germany and Poland.
I will keep you all posted on developments over the coming days and weeks as the story develops and finds a wider audience, both here and abroad.
Ultimately, I trust, it is the American people and the people of the world not the media or politicians who will determine whether this discovery is truly important or not, and if so, why. For myself, I believe it is vitally important and terribly relevant.
I look forward to your insights, discoveries, revelations and reactions.
Thank you for your interest and support.
John Buchanan jtwg@bellsouth.net
TOM Journalist & Investigative Reporter
Banking on the Nazis II By William Bowles
I’ll shortly be doing a review of a book I’ve been sent called “Fleshing out Skull & Bones” that has an in-depth chapter on the same story, a story that needs to get as much exposure as possible. I believe that the connections are far more wide-ranging than even Buchanan’s piece reveals. In the story, by Toby Rogers that first appeared in Clamor Magazine May/June 2002 refers to the 1983 book by Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949. What follows is a précis of the chapter that along with other information, I hope to expand on further at a later date.
Along with the recently published documents long suppressed by the US government confirms the connections between Prescott Bush, Averell Harriman’s bank and the Thyssen/Flich armaments empire and the profits generated from the slave labour used at Auschwitz concentration camp. Moreover, the millions made by Prescott Bush out of the Nazi connection were placed into a blind trust by former president George Bush for his son, the current president in 1980. Bush Senior’s share came to around $1.5 million.
The father of Fritz Thyssen, August Thyssen started up Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam at the end of WWI. After the war ended Fritz’s younger brother Baron Thyssen Bornemisza de Kaszon moved to Rotterdam and took over the running of the bank.
Railroad baron EH Harriman gave his son Averell Harriman an investment firm WA Harriman and Company, based in New York City. In 1922 Averell Harriman went to Berlin and set up a branch of the company there.
By 1923 the Germany economy was buggered and there had been a succession of Communist uprisings that was scaring the big capitalists shitless. Thyssen was introduced to Hitler by General Ludendorff and a meeting took place in Munich where Hitler told them that the Nazi party was broke and needed money to fight the ‘Communist/Jewish conspiracy’. Thyssen gave Hitler 100,000 gold marks (around $25,000) and a number of other big capitalists also donated money.
In 1924, the Thyssens through Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart opened the Union Banking Corporation. In the same year Hendrick J Kouwenhoven, the MD of the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart travelled to New York and together with Averell Harriman, they opened the New York branch of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC).
Walker and Harriman’s firm sold around $50,000,000 of German bonds through the 1920s, profiting from the recovering German economy. Meanwhile Frtiz Thyssen formed the United Steel Works, the biggest industrial conglomerate in Germany. Thyssen also brought Freidich Flich (iron and steel) and another Hitler backer onboard.
In the same year (1926) George Herbert Walker bought his son-in-law Prescott Bush into the company, making him vice president of Harriman and Co. Walker hired Bush to supervise the new Thyssen/Flich United Steel works. One company in their empire was called the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation and another the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company both located in Poland near the future Auschwitz concentration camp.
Meanwhile Hitler’s Nazi Party was broke once more, so in 1928 he approached Fritz Thyssen again and hit him up for a huge sum of money (estimates run between 250,000 and 1,000,000 German marks) to buy Barlow Palace in Munich and turn it into the Nazi Party Headquarters.
Then came the Depression and Harriman & Co merged with a London company, Brown/Shipley and Harriman & Co became Brown Brothers, Harriman. The firm moved to 59 Wall Street but the Union Banking Corporation remained at 39 Broadway. Averell Harriman and Prescott Bush formed a new company, Harriman 15 Corporation. One of the companies Harriman 15 Corp owned 1/3rd of the stock in was Consolidated Silesian Steel Company. The other 2/3rds was owned by Freidrich Flich.
In 1932 Fritz Thyssen joined the Nazi Party and by 1934 with Hitler firmly in power, he contracted the Thyseen/Flich empire to rebuild the German military machine. Thyssen and Flick were making money hand over fist and so was UBC in New York. Prescott Bush was made managing director of UBC and handled the day-to-day operations of the Thyssen/Flich empire. Then in 1934 the Polish government threatened to takeover the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation and the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company for non-payment of taxes and other corrupt practices. Bush hired John Foster Dulles to paper over the ripoff. But in 1939 Hitler invaded Poland and of course the takeover never occurred.
One of the reasons Auschwitz was built in Upper Silesia was because it was located near the vast coal deposits and one of the companies that employed the slave labour from Aushwitz was the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation. Then Thyssen and Flich sold Consolidated to UBC and under the total control of Harriman and Bush it became the Silesian American Corporation.
Not only did Prescott Bush’s company employ slave labour, it also made the steel that killed Allied soldiers during WWII. Following the war, Prescott liquidated all the assets of UBC and related companies and used some of the ill-gotten gains to finance his bid for senate and some of it to finance Bush Senior’s first company, Overby Development Company. The blind trust setup by Bush Senior was managed by his old buddy, William Farish Junior who on March 25th, 1942 pleaded “no contest” to conspiring with Nazi Germany while president of Standard Oil of New Jersey. Standard Oil opened a gasoline plant in Auschwitz in 1940.
The New Dark Age 