Prescott Bush, grandpa of Dubya

The Nazi's American Banker

What is interesting about the history of the Bush family are the connections; Avril Harriman, Allen Dulles, the Rockefellers (the start of the oil connection), James Baker III, Gulf Oil, Pennzoil, Osama bin LadenŠon and on it goes. 

A lapse of memory?

05/07/03: (Information Clearing House) It's as well to remember that the Web never forgets, at least the US pres should take note of this fact and be careful of his utterances and how they can come back to haunt him. In fact four generations of Bush family history and too many skeletons in too many closets to count are to be found on the Web.

And given all the 'pulpit pounding' (more of which below) by ol' Duyba and his minions, over the dubious moral character of Saddam and his cronies, much of which has underpinned the justification for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it's as well to compare the two sets of rogues. Not surprisingly, there's little to choose between the two except that, in the case of the Bush gang, they have a 'pedigree' in perfidy which extends back almost a century and four generations that makes Saddam look positively angelic by comparison.

Prescott Bush ­ setting a family example

In a previous piece a quote I used mentioned Prescott Bush the present pres's granpa so I decided to do a little researching to see what other dirty little secrets the Bush family have hidden in the dark recesses of the WWW and lo and behold, there's a load of stuff out there (7,630 links to be precise, according to good ol' google just on granpa Prescott Bush).

Geronimo!

It's 1918 and, well you know students, they're always up to innocent pranks. It seems Grandpa Bush set his grandson some fine family precedents starting with digging up Geronimo's skull,

"In 1918, Prescott Bush and two companions crept into the cemetery near Fort Sill and pried open the grave of Geronimo.

The head was taken out, spiffed up and forwarded to New Haven, where it was given pride of place for goofy rituals that have been attended by generations of Bushes and a veritable army of powerful types."

Source:

The Apache nation (what was left of it anyway) was not amused. Okay, we'll forgive granpa Bush his 'juvenile pranks' but it seems that this set the scene for the rest of his miserable life until his death in 1972 from carcinoma of the lung.

From skulls to Zyklon B (and back again)

But it seems that great-granpa George Walker was also in on the business of making money out of death (like great-granpa like great grand-son),

"George Walker, GW's great-grandfather, also set up the takeover of the Hamburg-America Line, a cover for I.G. Farben's Nazi espionage unit in the United States. In Germany, I.G. Farben was most famous for putting the gas in gas chambers; it was the producer of Zyklon B and other gasses used on victims of the Holocaust. The Bush family was not unaware of the nature of their investment partners. They hired Allen Dulles, the future head of the CIA, to hide the funds they were making from Nazi investments and the funds they were sending to Nazi Germany, rather than divest."

Source:

Banking on Fascism

It just doesn't stop does it, as Prescott Bush, son of George continued in the 'grand tradition' of skullduggery by also doing deals with the Nazis,

"On October 20, 1942, the US Alien Property Custodian, under the "Trading With the Enemy Act," seized the shares of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), of which Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder. The largest shareholder was E. Roland Harriman. (Bush was also the managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, a leading Wall Street investment firm.)

"The UBC was established to send American capital to Germany to finance the reorganization of its industry under the Nazis. Their leading German partner was the notorious Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, who wrote a book admitting much of this called "I Paid Hitler."

"Among the companies financed was the Silesian-American Corporation, which was also managed by Prescott Bush, and by his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, who supplied Dub-a-Ya with his name. The company was vital in supplying coal to the Nazi war industry. It too was seized as a Nazi-front on November 17, 1942. The largest company Bush's UBC helped finance was the German Steel Trust, responsible for between one-third and one-half of Nazi iron and explosives.

"Prescott Bush was also a director of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, (this one owned largely by Roland's brother, Averell Harriman), which owned about a third of the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, the rest owned by Friedrich Flick, (a member of Himmler's "Circle of Friends" who donated to the S.S.)."

Source:

What is interesting about the history of the Bush family are the connections; Avril Harriman, Allen Dulles, the Rockefellers (the start of the oil connection), James Baker III, Gulf Oil, Pennzoil, Osama bin LadenŠon and on it goes. It looks like this'll have to be part one of an on-going series on the Bush dynasty and their dirty dealings.

Double Dutch?

The story of steel magnate and billionaire bankroller of the Nazis, Fritz Thyssen and his Bush family connection is so incredible, that it deserves to be turned into a movie (obviously not by Hollywood). It all starts with John Loftus, a former U.S.Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor who is the source of the following,

"From 1945 until 1949, one of the lengthiest and, it now appears, most futile interrogations of a Nazi war crimes suspect began in the American Zone of Occupied GermanyŠ. [The interrogation of] [m]ultibillionaire steel magnate Fritz Thyssen-the man whose steel combine was the cold heart of the Nazi war machine."

They were trying to find out what had happened to Thyssen's billions but without success. Why?

"What the Allied investigators never understood was that they were not asking Thyssen the right question. Thyssen did not need any foreign bank accounts because his family secretly owned an entire chain of banks. He did not have to transfer his Nazi assets at the end of World War II, all he had to do was transfer the ownership documents - stocks, bonds, deeds and trusts--from his bank in Berlin through his bank in Holland to his American friends in New York City, Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker. Thyssen's partners in crime were the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States [my emph. WB].

"The British and American interrogators may have gravely underestimated Thyssen but they nonetheless knew they were being lied to. Their suspicions focused on one Dutch Bank in particular, the Bank voor Handel enScheepvaart, in Rotterdam. This bank did a lot of business with the Thyssens over the years. In 1923, as a favor to him, the Rotterdam bank loaned the money to build the very first Nazi party headquarters in Munich.

"If the investigators realized that the US intelligence chief in postwar Germany, Allen Dulles, was also the Rotterdam bank's lawyer, they might have asked some very interesting questions. They did not know that Thyssen was Dulles' client [my emph. WB] as well. Nor did they ever realize that it was Allen Dulles's other client, Baron Kurt Von Schroeder who was the Nazi trustee for the Thyssen companies which now claimed to be owned by the Dutch [my emph. WB]. The Rotterdam Bank was at the heart of Dulles' cloaking scheme, and he guarded its secrets jealously.

"[T]he Dutch connection remained unexplored until 1994 when I published the book "The Secret War Against the Jews." As a matter of historical curiosity, I mentioned that Fritz Thyssen (and indirectly, the Nazi Party) had obtained their early financing from Brown Brothers Harriman [my emph. WB], and its affiliate, the Union Banking Corporation. Union Bank, in turn, was the Bush family's holding company for a number of other entities, including the "Holland American Trading Company."

Source:

There are so many twists and turns to this story, that this is not the place to to go into all the labyrinthine links between the Nazis, the Bush Family and the CIA (via Allen Dulles) or indeed, a host of other corporate connections. But this final quote from the same source, gives you an idea of just how much money is involved,

"The enormous sums of money deposited into the Union Bank prior to 1942 is the best evidence that Prescott Bush knowingly served as a money launderer for the Nazis. Remember that Union Banks' books and accounts were frozen by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian in 1942 and not released back to the Bush family until 1951. At that time, Union Bank shares representing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of industrial stocks and bonds were unblocked for distribution. Did the Bush family really believe that such enormous sums came from Dutch enterprises? One could sell tulip bulbs and wooden shoes for centuries and not achieve those sums. A fortune this size could only have come from the Thyssen profits made from rearming the Third Reich, and then hidden, first from the Nazi tax auditors, and then from the Allies."

For the full story please go to the link above.

Crocodile tears

All of which makes the following quote from Dubya all the more sickening,

"In April 1999, [then] Texas Governor George W. Bush proclaimed a week of remembrance for the Holocaust. He said, "I urge Texans to never forget the inhumanity of those who perpetrated the Holocaust, and reflect upon our own humanity and our responsibility to respect all peoples."

Source:

Like granpa like grand-son? Well given where Dubya got his money from, and his continuing in the 'grand tradition of the Bush gang, I'm feeling quite biblical about things, so I thought following,

Short diversion

Would be useful. I know there will be some among you who think I've just got it in for the Bushes, so in my wanderings over the Web, I came across this little gem from this web site:

"Duty, Honor, Country

The Life and Legacy of Prescott Bush

By Mickey Herskowitz

This paean to the life of Prescott Bush, by a conservative writer is a salutory warning to us all. I quote,

"He [Prescott Bush] was a unifier, not a divider. And he was of such high integrity [sic] that behind the scenes was where he was at his best. He was a man of great faith. His grandfather was a minister whose faith and integrity were fully ingrained in the Bush family. Prescott always emphasized honesty, charity, fairness and proactive dedication to God, family and country."

From a review by Susan Kurz.

 

I could go on quoting, but I'm afraid I'll throw up. Check it out for yourself at Townhall.com which is, by the way, "the first truly interactive community on the Internet to bring Internet users, conservative public policy organizations, congressional staff, and political activists together under the broad umbrella of "conservative" thoughts, ideas and actions."

There's none so blind as those that refuse to see.

From Eugenicist to anti-abortionist

Not content with digging up the ancestors, supporting Fascism, laundering Nazi money through a Dutch-based bank, selling weapons to the mullahs of Iran, trading guns for drugs, doing business deals with Osama bin Laden, the Bush family in the form of ol' granpa Prescott was an early supporter of the Eugenics movement (or racial purity, to give it its real name). And a rather embarassing connection it is too, as Bush Snr discovered,

"...And the Birth Control League was there, which had long trumpeted the need for eugenical births--fewer births for parents with "inferior" bloodlines. Prescott [Bush's] partner Tighe was a Connecticut director of the league, and the Connecticut league's medical advisor was eugenics advocate Dr. Winternitz of Yale Medical School.

Now in 1950, people who knew something about Prescott Bush knew that he had very unsavory roots in the eugenics movement. There were then, just after the anti-Hitler war, few open advocates of sterilization of "unfit" or "unnecessary" people. (That would be revived later, with the help of General Draper and his friend George Bush

Then, very late in the 1950 senatorial campaign, Prescott Bush was publicly exposed for being an activist in that section of the old fascist eugenics movement. Prescott Bush lost the election by about 1,000 out of 862,000 votes

In his foreword to a population control propaganda book, George Bush wrote about that 1950 election: "My own first awareness of birth control as a public policy issue came with a jolt in 1950 when my father was running for United States Senate in Connecticut. Drew Pearson, on the Sunday before Election day, 'revealed' that my father was involved with Planned Parenthood.... Many political observers felt a sufficient number of voters were swayed by his alleged contacts with the birth controllers to cost him the election...."

Source:

The Bush story is such a fascinating history of capitalist corruption and power that it needs to be presented to a public that is consistently lied to, not only by the corporate media but by our so-called leaders. In Part Two, I'm going to give you the low-down on the Bush family's involvement in the scams and dealings of the Reagan years, the Iran-Contra scandal and one of the biggest rip-offs in history, the savings and loan scandal, which cost the US taxpayer literally trillions of dollars. Yeah, you read right, trillions!

Copyright © 2003, William Bowles.

Fair Use Notice: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, economic, democratic, domestic and international issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.