Naomi Wolf: America's Fascist Coup Owes Legacy To Bush's Nazi Grandfather Author of "10 steps" speaks publicly for the first time about origins of modern-day tyranny
Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet, Thursday, November 29, 2007
Author Naomi Wolf, who made headlines earlier this year after she identified the ten steps to fascism that were being followed to a tee by the Bush administration, spoke publicly for the first time yesterday about the origins of what we see unfolding today, Prescott Bush's attempt to launch a Nazi coup in 1930's America.
Speaking on the Alex Jones Show, Wolf said that she was first alerted to begin researching America's slide into fascism when her friend, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, warned her that the same events that laid the foundations for the rise of the Third Reich in early 1930's Germany, when it was still a Parliamentary democracy, were being mirrored in modern-day America.
"A small group of people began very systematically to use the law and dismantle the Constitution and put pressure on citizens to subvert the law - and that opened the door for everything that followed," said Wolf.
"When I started reading, not only are tactics and strategy being reproduced exactly right now by the Bush administration - but actual sound bytes and language and Wolf's essay, Fascist America, In 10 Easy Steps, has received plaudits for how it succinctly describes the ways in which dictatorships the world over throughout the 20th century have evolved by following the exact same blueprint for tyranny that we see unfolding in America today.
"Everybody that wants to close down a Democracy does the exact same ten things, the same classic steps and unfortunately we're starting to see these ten steps being put in place in the United States," said Wolf.
For the first time publicly, Wolf traced the origins of contemporary developments back to President Bush's Nazi grandfather, Prescott Bush, and his plan to launch a fascist coup in the 1930's.
"There was a scheme in the 30's and Prescott Bush was one of the leaders of this scheme, an industrialist who admired fascism and thought that was a good idea - to have a coup in the United States along the lines of the coup they saw taking place in Italy and Germany," said Wolf, referring to the testimony of Marine Corps Maj.-Gen. Smedley Butler, who was approached by a wealthy and secretive group of industrialists and bankers, including Prescott Bush - the current President's grandfather, who asked him to command a 500,000 strong rogue army of veterans that would help stage a coup to topple then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
A recent BBC radio report confirmed that there was an attempted coup led by Prescott Bush.
"Smedley Butler had been involved with violent regime change throughout his career, but he was approached by these conspirators, including Prescott Bush, and he outed them and he testified to Congress that they were planning a coup in the United States - it's in the Congressional record," said Wolf, adding that the coup was being bankrolled by German industrialist and one of Hitler's chief financiers Fritz Thyssen.
"What is amazing to me and resonant to me is that when the Nuremberg trials were finally put in place, these Nazi industrialists, some of whom had colluded with Americans including IBM, were about to be brought to trial and sent to prison - there was a moment at which they were going to look into turning the spotlight on their American partners," said Wolf.
The author added that laws such as the Military Commissions Act of 2006 were consciously designed to protect current President Bush and his co-conspirators from being indicted for war crimes, harking back to Prescott Bush's history.
"The family history is that you can make so much money uniting corporate interests with a fascist state that violently represses people, that's why when I saw the recycling of so much Nazi language, Nazi tactics, Nazi strategies, Nazi imagery in the Bush White House and then finally belatedly people brought to me this history of Prescott Bush's attempted coup and Smedley Butler's revelations - it gives me absolute chills," said Wolf.
The fact that Bush's grandfather was a Nazi cannot be presented alone as proof that President Bush is carrying on the legacy, but his policies and rhetoric, which in her essay Wolf clearly documents are borrowed from the Nazi playbook, and in particular the recent move to smear administration critics as potential terrorists, are evidence that George W. Bush is the figurehead for a modern-day fascist coup in America led by the Neo-Cons.
Wolf concluded that history shows the only safe course for preserving freedom in such a climate is to prosecute and jail the protagonists of the coup as early as possible, a process many would argue should have been enacted several years ago.
Joined: 19 Feb 2007 Posts: 410 Location: Sheffield
Posted: Fri Nov 30, 2007 5:37 pm Post subject:
Quote:
Wolf was involved in Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election bid where she brainstormed with the Clinton-Gore team about ways to reach "soccer moms" and other female voters.
During Al Gore's unsuccessful bid for the 2000 US presidency, Wolf was hired as a consultant to target female voters, reprising her role in the Clinton campaign. Wolf's ideas and participation in the Gore campaign generated considerable media coverage and criticism. According to a report by Michael Duffy in Time Magazine, "Wolf [was] paid a salary of $15,000 a month…in exchange for advice on everything from how to win the women’s vote to shirt-and-tie combinations." This article was the original source of the widely reported claim that Wolf was responsible for Gore's "three-buttoned, earth-toned look." The Duffy article did not mention "earth tones." The Time article and others also claimed that Wolf had developed the idea that Gore is "a beta male who needs to take on the alpha male in the Oval Office".[
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Wolf
And she's a rhodes scholar _________________ "The people will believe what the media tells them they believe." George Orwell
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2016 12:05 am Post subject:
How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power
Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today's president
Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington
Saturday 25 September 2004 23.59 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
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 labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.
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 debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America 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.
Remarkably, little of Bush's dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush's business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.
While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he 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 America entered the war.
Tantalising
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 tantalising 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 labour 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.
Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush's involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland.
The first set of files, the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress, show that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen.
The second set of papers, which are in the National Archives, are contained in vesting order number 248 which records the seizure of the company assets. What these files show is that on October 20 1942 the alien property custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director. Having gone through the books of the bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. By November, the Silesian-American Company, another of Prescott Bush's ventures, had also been seized.
The third set of documents, also at the National Archives, are contained in the files on IG Farben, who was prosecuted for war crimes.
A report issued by the Office of Alien Property Custodian in 1942 stated of the companies that "since 1939, these (steel and mining) properties have been in possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country's war effort".
Prescott Bush, a 6ft 4in charmer with a rich singing voice, was the founder of the Bush political dynasty and was once considered a potential presidential candidate himself. Like his son, George, and grandson, George W, he went to Yale where he was, again like his descendants, a member of the secretive and influential Skull and Bones student society. He was an artillery captain in the first world war and married Dorothy Walker, the daughter of George Herbert Walker, in 1921.
In 1924, his father-in-law, a well-known St Louis investment banker, helped set him up in business in New York with Averill Harriman, the wealthy son of railroad magnate E H Harriman in New York, who had gone into banking.
One of the first jobs Walker gave Bush was to manage UBC. Bush was a founding member of the bank and the incorporation documents, which list him as one of seven directors, show he owned one share in UBC worth $125.
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.
By the time Fritz Thyssen inherited the business empire in 1926, Germany's economic recovery was faltering. After hearing Adolf Hitler speak, Thyssen became mesmerised by the young firebrand. He joined the Nazi party in December 1931 and admits backing Hitler in his autobiography, I Paid Hitler, when the National Socialists were still a radical fringe party. He stepped in several times to bail out the struggling party: in 1928 Thyssen had bought the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse, in Munich, which Hitler converted into the Brown House, the headquarters of the Nazi party. The money came from another Thyssen overseas institution, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvarrt in Rotterdam.
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.
Between 1931 and 1933 UBC bought more than $8m worth of gold, of which $3m was shipped abroad. According to documents seen by the Guardian, after UBC was set up it transferred $2m to BBH accounts and between 1924 and 1940 the assets of UBC hovered around $3m, dropping to $1m only on a few occasions.
In 1941, Thyssen fled Germany after falling out with Hitler but he was captured in France and detained for the remainder of the 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 $3m 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.
There is no dispute over the fact that the US government seized a string of assets controlled by BBH - including UBC and SAC - in the autumn of 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy act. What is in dispute is if Harriman, Walker and Bush did more than own these companies on paper.
Erwin May, a treasury attache and officer for the department of investigation in the APC, was assigned to look into UBC's business. The first fact to emerge was that Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush and the other directors didn't actually own their shares in UBC but merely held them on behalf of Bank voor Handel. Strangely, no one seemed to know who owned the Rotterdam-based bank, including UBC's president.
May wrote in his report of August 16 1941: "Union Banking Corporation, incorporated August 4 1924, is wholly owned by the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My investigation has produced no evidence as to the ownership of the Dutch bank. Mr Cornelis [sic] Lievense, president of UBC, claims no knowledge as to the ownership of the Bank voor Handel but believes it possible that Baron Heinrich Thyssen, brother of Fritz Thyssen, may own a substantial interest."
May cleared the bank of holding a golden nest egg for the Nazi leaders but went on to describe a network of companies spreading out from UBC across Europe, America and Canada, and how money from voor Handel travelled to these companies through UBC.
By September May had traced the origins of the non-American board members and found that Dutchman HJ Kouwenhoven - who met with Harriman in 1924 to set up UBC - had several other jobs: in addition to being the managing director of voor Handel he was also the director of the August Thyssen bank in Berlin and a director of Fritz Thyssen's Union Steel Works, the holding company that controlled Thyssen's steel and coal mine empire in Germany.
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, and wrote: "Said stock is held by the above named individuals, however, solely as nominees for the Bank voor Handel, Rotterdam, Holland, which is owned by one or more of the Thyssen family, nationals of Germany and Hungary. The 4,000 shares hereinbefore set out are therefore beneficially owned and help for the interests of enemy nationals, and are vestible by the APC," according to the memo from the National Archives seen by the Guardian.
Red-handed
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. Some claim that Bush sold his share in UBC after the war for $1.5m - a huge amount of money at the time - but there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. No further action was ever taken nor was the investigation continued, despite the fact UBC was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family eight months after America had entered the war and that this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler's rise to power.
The most tantalising part of the story remains shrouded in mystery: the connection, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC) and Auschwitz.
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 labour from the concentration camps in Poland. According to a New York Times article published in March 18 1934 Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while "American interests" held the rest.
The US National Archive documents show that BBH's involvement with CSSC was more than simply holding the shares in the mid-1930s. Bush's friend and fellow "bonesman" Knight Woolley, another partner at BBH, wrote to Averill Harriman in January 1933 warning of problems with CSSC after the Poles started their drive to nationalise the plant. "The Consolidated Silesian Steel Company situation has become increasingly complicated, and I have accordingly brought in Sullivan and Cromwell, in order to be sure that our interests are protected," wrote Knight. "After studying the situation Foster Dulles is insisting that their man in Berlin get into the picture and obtain the information which the directors here should have. You will recall that Foster is a director and he is particularly anxious to be certain that there is no liability attaching to the American directors."
But the ownership of the CSSC between 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland and 1942 when the US government vested UBC and SAC is not clear.
"SAC held coal mines and definitely owned CSSC between 1934 and 1935, but when SAC was vested there was no trace of CSSC. All concrete evidence of its ownership disappears after 1935 and there are only a few traces in 1938 and 1939," says Eva Schweitzer, the journalist and author whose book, America and the Holocaust, is published next month.
Silesia was quickly made part of the German Reich after the invasion, but while Polish factories were seized by the Nazis, those belonging to the still neutral Americans (and some other nationals) were treated more carefully as Hitler was still hoping to persuade the US to at least sit out the war as a neutral country. Schweitzer says American interests were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The Nazis bought some out, but not others.
The two Holocaust survivors suing the US government and the Bush family for a total of $40bn in compensation claim both materially benefited from Auschwitz slave labour during the second world war.
Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, began a class action in America in 2001, but the case was thrown out by Judge Rosemary Collier on the grounds that the government cannot be held liable under the principle of "state sovereignty".
Jan Lissmann, one of the lawyers for the survivors, said: "President Bush withdrew President Bill Clinton's signature from the treaty [that founded the court] not only to protect Americans, but also to protect himself and his family."
Lissmann argues that genocide-related cases are covered by international law, which does hold governments accountable for their actions. He claims the ruling was invalid as no hearing took place.
In their claims, Mr Goldstein and Mr 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 petition to The Hague states: "From April 1944 on, the American Air Force could have destroyed the camp with air raids, as well as the railway bridges and railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. The murder of about 400,000 Hungarian Holocaust victims could have been prevented."
The case is built around a January 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.
Lissmann said: "If we have a positive ruling from the court it will cause [president] Bush huge problems and make him personally liable to pay compensation."
The US government and the Bush family deny all the claims against them.
In addition to Eva Schweitzer's book, two other books are about to be published that raise the subject of Prescott Bush's business history. The author of the second book, to be published next year, John Loftus, is a former US attorney who prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the 70s. Now living in St Petersburg, Florida and earning his living as a security commentator for Fox News and ABC radio, Loftus is working on a novel which uses some of the material he has uncovered on Bush. Loftus stressed that what Prescott Bush was involved in was just what many other American and British businessmen were doing at the time.
"You can't blame Bush for what his grandfather did any more than you can blame Jack Kennedy for what his father did - bought Nazi stocks - but what is important is the cover-up, how it could have gone on so successfully for half a century, and does that have implications for us today?" he said.
"This was the mechanism by which Hitler was funded to come to power, this was the mechanism by which the Third Reich's defence industry was re-armed, this was the mechanism by which Nazi profits were repatriated back to the American owners, this was the mechanism by which investigations into the financial laundering of the Third Reich were blunted," said Loftus, who is vice-chairman of the Holocaust Museum in St Petersburg.
"The Union Banking Corporation was a holding company for the Nazis, for Fritz Thyssen," said Loftus. "At various times, the Bush family has tried to spin it, saying they were owned by a Dutch bank and it wasn't until the Nazis took over Holland that they realised that now the Nazis controlled the apparent company and that is why the Bush supporters claim when the war was over they got their money back. Both the American treasury investigations and the intelligence investigations in Europe completely bely that, it's absolute horseshit. They always knew who the ultimate beneficiaries were."
"There is no one left alive who could be prosecuted but they did get away with it," said Loftus. "As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averill Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany."
Loftus said Prescott Bush must have been aware of what was happening in Germany at the time. "My take on him was that he was a not terribly successful in-law who did what Herbert Walker told him to. Walker and Harriman were the two evil geniuses, they didn't care about the Nazis any more than they cared about their investments with the Bolsheviks."
What is also at issue is how much money Bush made from his involvement. His supporters suggest that he had one token share. Loftus disputes this, citing sources in "the banking and intelligence communities" and suggesting that the Bush family, through George Herbert Walker and Prescott, got $1.5m out of the involvement. There is, however, no paper trail to this sum.
The third person going into print on the subject is John Buchanan, 54, a Miami-based magazine journalist who started examining the files while working on a screenplay. Last year, Buchanan published his findings in the venerable but small-circulation New Hampshire Gazette under the headline "Documents in National Archives Prove George Bush's Grandfather Traded With the Nazis - Even After Pearl Harbor". He expands on this in his book to be published next month - Fixing America: Breaking the Stranglehold of Corporate Rule, Big Media and the Religious Right.
In the article, Buchanan, who has worked mainly in the trade and music press with a spell as a muckraking reporter in Miami, claimed that "the essential facts have appeared on the internet and in relatively obscure books but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes".
Buchanan suffers from hypermania, a form of manic depression, and when he found himself rebuffed in his initial efforts to interest the media, he responded with a series of threats against the journalists and media outlets that had spurned him. The threats, contained in e-mails, suggested that he would expose the journalists as "traitors to the truth".
Unsurprisingly, he soon had difficulty getting his calls returned. Most seriously, he faced aggravated stalking charges in Miami, in connection with a man with whom he had fallen out over the best way to publicise his findings. The charges were dropped last month.
Biography
Buchanan said he regretted his behaviour had damaged his credibility but his main aim was to secure publicity for the story. Both Loftus and Schweitzer say Buchanan has come up with previously undisclosed documentation.
The Bush family have largely responded with no comment to any reference to Prescott Bush. Brown Brothers Harriman also declined to comment.
The Bush family recently approved a flattering biography of Prescott Bush entitled Duty, Honour, Country by Mickey Herskowitz. The publishers, Rutledge Hill Press, promised the book would "deal honestly with Prescott Bush's alleged business relationships with Nazi industrialists and other accusations".
In fact, the allegations are dealt with in less than two pages. The book refers to the Herald-Tribune story by saying that "a person of less established ethics would have panicked ... Bush and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman informed the government regulators that the account, opened in the late 1930s, was 'an unpaid courtesy for a client' ... Prescott Bush acted quickly and openly on behalf of the firm, served well by a reputation that had never been compromised. He made available all records and all documents. Viewed six decades later in the era of serial corporate scandals and shattered careers, he received what can be viewed as the ultimate clean bill."
The Prescott Bush story has been condemned by both conservatives and some liberals as having nothing to do with the current president. It has also been suggested that Prescott Bush had little to do with Averill Harriman and that the two men opposed each other politically.
However, documents from the Harriman papers include a flattering wartime profile of Harriman in the New York Journal American and next to it in the files is a letter to the financial editor of that paper from Prescott Bush congratulating the paper for running the profile. He added that Harriman's "performance and his whole attitude has been a source of inspiration and pride to his partners and his friends".
The Anti-Defamation League in the US is supportive of Prescott Bush and the Bush family. In a statement last year they said that "rumours about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush ... have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated ... Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser."
However, one of the country's oldest Jewish publications, the Jewish Advocate, has aired the controversy in detail.
It was a dangerous time in America: The economy was staggering, unemployment was rampant and a banking crisis threatened the entire monetary system.
The newly elected president pursued an ambitious legislative program aimed at easing some of the troubles. But he faced vitriolic opposition from both sides of the political spectrum.
"This is despotism, this is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty," one senator wrote to a colleague. "The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot. The president has not merely signed the death warrant of capitalism, but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom."
Those words could be ripped from today's headlines. In fact, author Sally Denton tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz, they come from a letter written in 1933 by Republican Sen. Henry D. Hatfield of West Virginia, bemoaning the policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Denton is the author of a new book, The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right.
She says that during the tense months between FDR's election in November and his inauguration in March 1933, democracy hung in the balance.
"There was a lot at play. It could have gone very different directions," Denton says.
Though it's hard for us to imagine today, she says fascism, communism, even Naziism seemed like possible solutions to the country's ills.
"There were suggestions that capitalism was not working, that democracy was not working," she says.
Some people even called for a dictator to pull America out of the Great Depression.
When Roosevelt finally took office, he embarked on the now-legendary First Hundred Days, an ambitious legislative program aimed at reopening and stabilizing the country's banks and getting the economy moving again.
"There was just this sense that he was upsetting the status quo," Denton says.
Critics on the right worried that Roosevelt was a Communist, a socialist or the tool of a Jewish conspiracy. Critics on the left complained his policies didn't go far enough. Some of Roosevelt's opponents didn't stop at talk. Though it's barely remembered today, there was a genuine conspiracy to overthrow the president.
The Wall Street Putsch, as it's known today, was a plot by a group of right-wing financiers.
"They thought that they could convince Roosevelt, because he was of their, the patrician class, they thought that they could convince Roosevelt to relinquish power to basically a fascist, military-type government," Denton says.
"It was a cockamamie concept," she adds, "and the fact that it even got as far as it did is pretty shocking."
The conspirators had several million dollars, a stockpile of weapons and had even reached out to a retired Marine general, Smedley Darlington Butler, to lead their forces.
"Had he been a different kind of person, it might have gone a lot further," Denton says. "But he saw it as treason and he reported it to Congress."
Denton says that as she was writing the book, she was struck by the parallels between the treatment of Roosevelt and that of Barack Obama. For example, a cottage industry much like the birther movement grew up around proving that the Dutch-descended Roosevelt was actually a secret Jew.
"It seems to me that going through history here, there are times that we need to have a demon, somebody that's not of us, in order to solidify our fears and our anxieties," Denton says.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTdx6vEUtIA
In 1933, Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler was approached by a wealthy group of industrialists and bankers called the "American Liberty League", including Prescott Bush (George W. Bush's grandfather) who asked him to command a rogue army of 500,000 veterans that would help stage a coup to topple then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1934 Butler testified to the McCormack--Dickstein Congressional committee on these claims. In the opinion of the committee, these allegations were credible. One of the purported plotters, Gerald MacGuire, vehemently denied any such plot. In their report, the Congressional committee stated that it was able to confirm Butler's statements other than the proposal from MacGuire which it considered more or less confirmed by MacGuire's European reports. No one was prosecuted.
In 1936, William Dodd, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, wrote a letter to President Roosevelt in which he stated,
"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime.... A prominent executive of one of the largest corporations, told me point blank that he would be ready to take definite action to bring fascism into America if President Roosevelt continued his progressive policies. Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there. Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare. We should be aware of the symptoms. When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions."
The proven record of Prescott Bush's involvement in financing the Nazi war machine dovetails with the fact that he was part of a criminal cabal that actively sought to impose a fascist coup in America.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sat Nov 19, 2016 9:10 pm Post subject:
The Whitehouse Coup
Monday 23 July 2007
Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by right-wing American businessmen
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtml
The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.
Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy.
The "Business Plot" (also the Plot Against FDR and the White House Putsch) was an alleged political conspiracy in 1933 wherein wealthy businessmen and corporations plotted a coup détat to overthrow United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1934, the Business Plot was publicly revealed by retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler testifying to the McCormack-Dickstein Congressional Committee. In his testimony, Butler claimed that a group of men had approached him as part of a plot to overthrow Roosevelt in a military coup. One of the alleged plotters, Gerald MacGuire, vehemently denied any such plot. In their final report, the Congressional committee supported Butler's allegations of the existence of the plot, but no prosecutions or further investigations followed, and the matter was mostly forgotten.
On July 17, 1932, thousands of World War I veterans converged on Washington, D.C., set up tent camps, and demanded immediate payment of bonuses due them according to the Adjusted Service Certificate Law of 1924. This "Bonus Army" was led by Walter W. Waters, a former Army sergeant. The Army was encouraged by an appearance from retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, who had considerable influence over the veterans, being one of the most popular military figures of the time. A few days after Butler's arrival, President Herbert Hoover ordered the marchers removed, and their camps were destroyed by US Army cavalry troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur.
Butler, although a self-described Republican, responded by supporting Roosevelt in that year's election.
By John Buchanan and Stacey Michael
Global Research, November 02, 2005
The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 3 3 November 2003
We bring to the attention of Global Research readers this important article on the links of the Bush famuily to Nazi Germany, first published in the The New Hampshire Gazette in November 2003.
While this relationship has been amply documented by official US government records (see the book by Webster Tarpley), the authors point in their article to newly discovered US government documents, which suggest that the relationship continued until 1951, nine years after the assets of Prescott Bush were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1942.
After the seizures in late 1942 of five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, failed to divest himself of more than a dozen “enemy national” relationships that continued until as late as 1951, newly-discovered U.S. government documents reveal.
Furthermore, the records show that Bush and his colleagues routinely attempted to conceal their activities from government investigators.
Bush’s partners in the secret web of Thyssen-controlled ventures included former New York Governor W. Averell Harriman and his younger brother, E. Roland Harriman. Their quarter-century of Nazi financial transactions, from 1924-1951, were conducted by the New York private banking firm, Brown Brothers Harriman.
The White House did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Although the additional seizures under the Trading with the Enemy Act did not take place until after the war, documents from The National Archives and Library of Congress confirm that Bush and his partners continued their Nazi dealings unabated. These activities included a financial relationship with the German city of Hanover and several industrial concerns. They went undetected by investigators until after World War Two.
At the same time Bush and the Harrimans were profiting from their Nazi partnerships, W. Averell Harriman was serving as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s personal emissary to the United Kingdom during the toughest years of the war. On October 28, 1942, the same day two key Bush-Harriman-run businesses were being seized by the U.S. government, Harriman was meeting in London with Field Marshall Smuts to discuss the war effort.
Denial and Deceit
While Harriman was concealing his Nazi relationships from his government colleagues, Cornelius Livense, the top executive of the interlocking German concerns held under the corporate umbrella of Union Banking Corporation (UBC), repeatedly tried to mislead investigators, and was sometimes supported in his subterfuge by Brown Brothers Harriman.
All of the assets of UBC and its related businesses belonged to Thyssen-controlled enterprises, including his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam, the documents state.
Nevertheless, Livense, president of UBC, claimed to have no knowledge of such a relationship. “Strangely enough, (Livense) claims he does not know the actual ownership of the company,” states a government report.
H.D Pennington, manager of Brown Brothers Harriman and a director of UBC “for many years,” also lied to investigators about the secret and well-concealed relationship with Thyssen’s Dutch bank, according to the documents.
Investigators later reported that the company was “wholly owned” by Thyssen’s Dutch bank.
Despite such ongoing subterfuge, U.S. investigators were able to show that “a careful examination of UBC’s general ledger, cash books and journals from 1919 until the present date clearly establish that the principal and practically only source of funds has been Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart.”
In yet another attempt to mislead investigators, Livense said that $240,000 in banknotes in a safe deposit box at Underwriters Trust Co. in New York had been given to him by another UBC-Thyssen associate, H.J. Kouwenhoven, managing director of Thyssen’s Dutch bank and a director of the August Thyssen Bank in Berlin. August Thyssen was Fritz’s father.
The government report shows that Livense first neglected to report the $240,000, then claimed that it had been given to him as a gift by Kouwenhoven. However, by the time Livense filed a financial disclosure with U.S. officials, he changed his story again and reported the sum as a debt rather than a cash holding.
In yet another attempt to deceive the governments of both the U.S. and Canada, Livense and his partners misreported the facts about the sale of a Canadian Nazi front enterprise, La Cooperative Catholique des Consommateurs de Combustible, which imported German coal into Canada via the web of Thyssen-controlled U.S. businesses.
“The Canadian authorities, however, were not taken in by this maneuver,” a U.S. government report states. The coal company was later seized by Canadian authorities.
After the war, a total of 18 additional Brown Brothers Harriman and UBC-related client assets were seized under The Trading with the Enemy Act, including several that showed the continuation of a relationship with the Thyssen family after the initial 1942 seizures.
The records also show that Bush and the Harrimans conducted business after the war with related concerns doing business in or moving assets into Switzerland, Panama, Argentina and Brazil – all critical outposts for the flight of Nazi capital after Germany’s surrender in 1945. Fritz Thyssen died in Argentina in 1951.
One of the final seizures, in October 1950, concerned the U.S. assets of a Nazi baroness named Theresia Maria Ida Beneditka Huberta Stanislava Martina von Schwarzenberg, who also used two shorter aliases. Brown Brothers Harriman, where Prescott Bush and the Harrimans were partners, attempted to convince government investigators that the baroness had been a victim of Nazi persecution and therefore should be allowed to maintain her assets.
“It appears, rather, that the subject was a member of the Nazi party,” government investigators concluded.
At the same time the last Brown Brothers Harriman client assets were seized, Prescott Bush announced his Senate campaign that led to his election in 1952.
Investigation Investigated?
In 1943, six months after the seizure of UBC and its related companies, a government investigator noted in a Treasury Department memo dated April 8, 1943 that the FBI had inquired about the status of any investigation into Bush and the Harrimans.
“I gave ‘a memorandum’ which did not say anything about the American officers of subject,” the investigator wrote. “(Another investigator) wanted to know whether any specific action had been taken by us with respect to them.”
No further action beyond the initial seizures was ever taken, and the newly-confirmed records went unseen by the American people for six decades.
What Does It All Mean?
So why are the documents relevant today?
“The story of Prescott Bush and Brown Brothers Harriman is an introduction to the real history of our country,” says L.A. art book publisher and historian Edward Boswell. “It exposes the money-making motives behind our foreign policies, dating back a full century. The ability of Prescott Bush and the Harrimans to bury their checkered pasts also reveals a collusion between Wall Street and the media that exists to this day.”
Sheldon Drobny, a Chicago entrepreneur and philanthropist who will soon launch a liberal talk radio network, says the importance of the new documents is that they prove a long pattern of Bush family war profiteering that continues today via George H.W. Bush’s intimate relationship with the Saudi royal family and the bin Ladens, conducted via the super-secret Carlyle Group, whose senior advisers include former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III.
In the post-9/11 world, Drobny finds the Bush-Saudi connection deeply troubling. “Trading with the enemy is trading with the enemy,” he says. “That’s the relevance of the documents and what they show.”
Lawrence Lader, an abortion rights activist and the author of more than 40 books, says “the relevance lies with the fact that the sitting President of the United States would lead the nation to war based on lies and against the wishes of the rest of the world.” Lader and others draw comparisons between President Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Hitler’s occupation of Poland in 1939 – the event that sparked World War Two.
However, others see an even larger significance.
“The discovery of the Bush-Nazi documents raises new questions about the role of Prescott Bush and his influential business partners in the secret emigration of Nazi war criminals, which allowed them to escape justice in Germany,” says Bob Fertik, co-founder of Democrats.com and an amateur ‘Nazi hunter.’ “It also raises questions about the importance of Nazi recruits to the CIA in its early years, in what was called Operation Paperclip, and Prescott Bush’s role in that dark operation.”
Fertik and others, including former Justice Department Nazi war crimes prosecutor John Loftus, a Constitutional attorney in Miami, and a former Veterans Administration official, believe Prescott Bush and the Harrimans should have been tried for treason.
What Next?
Now, say Fertik and Loftus, there should be a Congressional investigation into the Bush family’s Nazi past and its concealment from the American people for 60 years.
“The American people have a right to know, in detail, about this hidden chapter of our history,” says Loftus, author of The Secret War Against the Jews. “That’s the only way we can understand it and deal with it.”
For his part, Fertik is pessimistic that even a Congressional investigation can thwart the war profiteering of the present Bush White House. “It’s impossible to stop it,” he says, “when the worst war profiteers are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who operate in secrecy behind the vast powers of the White House.”
John Buchanan is a journalist and magazine writer based in Miami Beach. He can be reached by e-mail at jtwg@bellsouth.net
Stacey Michael is a New Orleans-based journalist and the author of Religious Conceit. His most recent book is Weapons of Mass Dysfunction: The Art of “Faith-Based” Politics, due in early 2004. He can be reached by email at
staceymichael@religiousconceit.com
Bush – Nazi Link Confirmed By by John Buchanan from
The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 1, October 10, 2003
By John Buchanan
WASHINGTON – After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his “enemy national” partners.
The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and FBI, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler’s rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law.
Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush’s maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial baron for nearly eight months after the U.S. entered the war.
No Story?
For six decades these historical facts have gone unreported by the mainstream U.S. media. The essential facts have appeared on the Internet and in relatively obscure books, but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes. This story has also escaped the attention of “official” Bush biographers, Presidential historians and publishers of U.S. history books covering World War II and its aftermath.
The White House did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
The Summer of ’42
The unraveling of the web of Bush-Harriman-Thyssen U.S. enterprises, all of which operated out of the same suite of offices at 39 Broadway under the supervision of Prescott Bush, began with a story that ran in the New York Herald-Tribune on July 30, 1942. By then, the U.S. had been at war with Germany for nearly eight months.
“Hitler’s Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank,” declared the headline. The lead paragraph characterized Fritz Thyssen as “Adolf Hitler’s original patron a decade ago.” In fact, the steel and coal magnate had aggressively supported and funded Hitler since October 1923, according to Thyssen’s autobiography, I Paid Hitler. In that book, Thyssen also acknowledges his direct personal relationships with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess.
The Herald-Tribune also cited unnamed sources who suggested Thyssen’s U.S. “nest egg” in fact belonged to “Nazi bigwigs” including Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, or even Hitler himself.
Business is Business
The “bank,” founded in 1924 by W. Averell Harriman on behalf of Thyssen and his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. of Holland, was Union Banking Corporation (UBC) of New York City. According to government documents, it was in reality a clearing house for a number of Thyssen-controlled enterprises and assets, including as many as a dozen individual businesses. UBC also bought and shipped overseas gold, steel, coal, and U.S. Treasury and war bonds. The company’s activities were administered for Thyssen by a Netherlands-born, naturalized U.S. citizen named Cornelis Lievense, who served as president of UBC. Roland Harriman was chairman and Prescott Bush a managing director.
The Herald-Tribune article did not identify Bush or Harriman as executives of UBC, or Brown Brothers Harriman, in which they were partners, as UBC’s private banker. A confidential FBI memo from that period suggested, without naming the Bush and Harriman families, that politically prominent individuals were about to come under official U.S. government scrutiny as Hitler’s plunder of Europe continued unabated.
After the “Hitler’s Angel” article was published Bush and Harriman made no attempts to divest themselves of the controversial Thyssen financial alliance, nor did they challenge the newspaper report that UBC was, in fact, a de facto Nazi front organization in the U.S.
Instead, the government documents show, Bush and his partners increased their subterfuge to try to conceal the true nature and ownership of their various businesses, particularly after the U.S. entered the war. The documents also disclose that Cornelis Lievense, Thyssen’s personal appointee to oversee U.S. matters for his Rotterdam-based Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V., via UBC for nearly two decades, repeatedly denied to U.S. government investigators any knowledge of the ownership of the Netherlands bank or the role of Thyssen in it.
UBC’s original group of business associates included George Herbert Walker, who had a relationship with the Harriman family that began in 1919. In 1922, Walker and W. Averell Harriman traveled to Berlin 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.
The Walker-Harriman-created German industrial alliance also included partnership with another German titan who supported Hitler’s rise, Friedrich Flick, who partnered with Thyssen in the German Steel Trust that forged the Nazi war machine. For his role in using slave labor and his own steel, coal and arms resources to build Hitler’s war effort, Flick was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to seven years in prison.
The Family Business
In 1926, after Prescott Bush had married Walker’s daughter, Dorothy, Walker brought Bush in as a vice president of the private banking and investment firm of W.A. Harriman & Co., also located in New York. Bush became a partner in the firm that later became Brown Brothers Harriman and the largest private investment bank in the world. Eventually, Bush became a director of and stockholder in UBC.
However, the government documents note that Bush, Harriman, Lievense and the other UBC stockholders were in fact “nominees,” or phantom shareholders, for Thyssen and his Holland bank, meaning that they acted at the direct behest of their German client.
Seized
On October 20, 1942, under authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act, the U.S. Congress seized UBC and liquidated its assets after the war. The seizure is confirmed by Vesting Order No. 248 in the U.S. Office of the Alien Property Custodian and signed by U.S. Alien Property Custodian Leo T. Crowley.
In August, under the same authority, Congress had seized the first of the Bush-Harriman-managed Thyssen entities, Hamburg-American Line, under Vesting Order No. 126, also signed by Crowley. Eight days after the seizure of UBC, Congress invoked the Trading with the Enemy Act again to take control of two more Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses – Holland-American Trading Corp. (Vesting Order No. 261) and Seamless Steel Equipment Corp (Vesting Order No. 259). In November, Congress seized the Nazi interests in Silesian-American Corporation, which allegedly profited from slave labor at Auschwitz via a partnership with I.G. Farben, Hitler’s third major industrial patron and partner in the infrastructure of the Third Reich.
The documents from the Archives also show that the Bushes and Harrimans shipped valuable U.S. assets, including gold, coal, steel and U.S. Treasury and war bonds, to their foreign clients overseas as Hitler geared up for his 1939 invasion of Poland, the event that sparked World War II.
That’s One Way to Put It
Following the Congressional seizures of UBC and the other four Bush-Harriman-Thyssen enterprises, The New York Times reported on December 16, 1944, in a brief story on page 25, that UBC had “received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway.” The Times story did not report that UBC had been seized by the U.S. government or that the new address was the U.S. Office of the Alien Property Custodian. The story also neglected to mention that the other UBC-related businesses had also been seized by Congress.
Still No Story?
Since then, the information has not appeared in any U.S. news coverage of any Bush political campaign, nor has it been included in any of the major Bush family biographies. It was, however, covered extensively in George H.W. Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin. Chaitkin’s father served as an attorney in the 1940s for some of the victims of the Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.
The book gave a detailed, accurate accounting of the Bush family’s long Nazi affiliation, but no mainstream U.S. media entity reported on or even investigated the allegations, despite careful documentation by the authors. Major booksellers declined to distribute the book, which was dismissed by Bush supporters as biased and untrue. Its authors struggled even to be reviewed in reputable newspapers. That the book was published by a Lyndon LaRouche’s organization undoubtedly made it easier to dismiss, but does not change the facts.
The essence of the story been posted for years on various Internet sites, including BuzzFlash.com and TakeBackTheMedia.com, but no online media seem to have independently confirmed it.
Likewise, the mainstream media have apparently made no attempt since World War II to either verify or disprove the allegations of Nazi collaboration against the Bush family. Instead, they have attempted to dismiss or discredit such Internet sites or “unauthorized” books without any journalistic inquiry or research into their veracity.
Loyal Defenders
The National Review ran an essay on September 1 by their White House correspondent Byron York, entitled “Annals of Bush-Hating.” It begins mockingly: “Are you aware of the murderous history of George W. Bush – indeed, of the entire Bush family? Are you aware of the president’s Nazi sympathies? His crimes against humanity? And do you know, by the way, that George W. Bush is a certifiable moron?” York goes on to discredit the “Bush is a moron” IQ hoax, but fails to disprove the Nazi connection.
The more liberal Boston Globe ran a column September 29 by Reason magazine’s Cathy Young in which she referred to “Bush-o-phobes on the Internet” who “repeat preposterous claims about the Bush family’s alleged Nazi connections.”
Poles Tackle the Topic
Newsweek Polska, the magazine’s Polish edition, published a short piece on the “Bush Nazi past” in its March 5, 2003 edition. The item reported that “the Bush family reaped rewards from the forced-labor prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp,” according to a copyrighted English-language translation from Scoop Media (www.scoop.co.nz). The story also reported the seizure of the various Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses.
Still Not Interested
Major U.S. media outlets, including ABC News, NBC News, The New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times and Miami Herald, have repeatedly declined to investigate the story when information regarding discovery of the documents was presented to them beginning Friday, August 29. Newsweek U.S. correspondent Michael Isikoff, famous for his reporting of big scoops during the Clinton-Lewinsky sexual affair of the 1990s, declined twice to accept an exclusive story based on the documents from the archives.
Aftermath
After the seizures of the various businesses they oversaw with Cornelis Lievense and his German partners, the U.S. government quietly settled with Bush, Harriman and others after the war. Bush and Harriman each received $1.5 million in cash as compensation for their seized business assets.
In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate, with no press accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past. There is no record of any U.S. press coverage of the Bush-Nazi connection during any political campaigns conducted by George Herbert Walker Bush, Jeb Bush, or George W. Bush, with the exception of a brief mention in an unrelated story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune in November 2000 and a brief but inaccurate account in The Boston Globe in 2001.
The following is excerpted from an article that appeared in New Federalist, June 9, 1997, under the title "Now, as Then: Bush and the British, from Auschwitz to Africa."
When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, his Nazi Party was in the minority. The Nazis had just suffered setbacks in the German elections of Nov. 6, 1932, losing 34 Reichstag seats. President Hindenburg had appointed Kurt von Schleicher Chancellor.
Yet, less than three months later, on Jan. 30, 1933, after a well-financed Nazi propaganda and armed-terror campaign, Hindenburg appointed Hitler to take Schleicher's place. The Nazis got Hindenburg to schedule new elections for March 5. With streams of money for their propaganda and guns, the Nazis "won" the election, and Hitler seized power.
The two principal German organizers of this Hitler takeover, were Hjalmar Schacht and Fritz Thyssen. Both men were operatives of the British Empire, through Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman, and of a British-controlled Wall Street grouping at the center of which were Averell Harriman, and Harriman's partner, Prescott Bush, the father of the later U.S. President George Bush.
Over several years, every Nazi step toward power in Germany was coordinated, and Nazi campaign finances were overseen, by this British-New York axis. Hitler's master-race ideology, which led to mass extermination, was simultaneously promoted and given the stamp of approval by this same British-New York faction.
Thyssen-Harriman-Bush
Fritz Thyssen was the earliest important financial backer of Hitler. In 1923, he gave Gen. Erich Ludendorf 100,000 gold marks for the Nazis, prior to the attempted putsch by Hitler. From then through the 1930s, the bulk of the funds to build both the Nazi party, and Hitler's career, went through Thyssen.
On Oct. 5, 1942, during World War II, U.S. government investigators reported on Thyssen's Nazi base in America: "Averell Harriman was in Europe sometime prior to 1924 and at that time became acquainted with Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist." Harriman and Thyssen agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York.
"[C]ertain of [Harriman's] associates would serve as directors." Thyssen agent "H.J. Kouwenhoven . . . came to the United States . . . prior to 1924 for conferences with the Harriman Company in this connection."
The first Harriman-Thyssen meeting was most likely in 1922, when Averell Harriman had been in Berlin to set up the Berlin branch of W.A. Harriman & Co. This Harriman banking house had recently been created by the British-allied American financier, George Herbert Walker (George Bush's maternal grandfather), who was the bank's president.
In 1924, Harriman and Walker formally organized, within their New York office, a shell company entirely devoted to projects to be run through Thyssen, called the Union Banking Corporation. This interlocked with the Thyssen-owned Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart (BHS) in the Netherlands, which represented Thyssen's German interests.
Thus, the W.A. Harriman & Co. (alias Union Banking Corporation) would be transferring funds back and forth between New York and the European Thyssen projects. By putting up about $400,000, the Harriman organization became the controller of Thyssen's banking operations outside of Germany.
In 1926, Walker's son-in-law, Prescott Bush (George's father), joined the firm as vice president, and soon became its Chief Executive. That same year, Wall Street's Dillon Read set up the United Steel Works, Thyssen's main German corporation.
On Jan. 1, 1931, the Harriman bank merged with the old British-U.S. company, Brown Brothers. This put the new Brown Brothers Harriman, which would be the world's largest private investment bank, directly under the control of London's Montagu Norman. The governor of the Bank of England, personally a satanic Theosophist, and Britain's best-known public supporter of Adolf Hitler, Norman had earlier been a Brown Brothers partner; his family had run the firm since the 1860s. London's Hitler project was stepped up, with Harriman, Bush, and Thyssen as leading intermediaries.
After the war, Fritz Thyssen revealed to Allied interrogators, certain limited aspects of his mediation between the Norman-Harriman-Bush complex and the Nazi rise to power. He stated, "In 1930 or 1931 . . . I told [Hitler's deputy Rudolph] Hess . . . I would arrange a credit for him with a Dutch bank in Rotterdam, the Bank für Handel und Schiff [a branch of the Union Banking Corp.].
"The credit was about 250,000-300,000 [gold] marks—about the sum I had given before. . . ."
In January 1931, immediately after Montagu Norman's Brown Brothers merged with Harriman and Bush, their agent Thyssen met privately to talk money and strategy with Adolf Hitler, Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, and Montagu Norman's German banker protégé, Hjalmar Schacht, at the home of Hitler's deputy Hermann Goering.
In Congressional hearings at the end of the war, the U.S. Treasury Department reported on the Harriman-Bush banking front for Thyssen, on the huge part that the Thyssen organization played in Hitler's war buildup, and on the flow of money that had put Hitler into power.
The Treasury officials stated:
"During the . . . two years [after the 1931 crash] Thyssen dedicated his fortune and his influence to the single purpose of bringing Hitler to power. In 1932, he arranged the now famous meeting in the Düsseldorf Industrialists' Club, at which Hitler addressed the leading businessmen of the Ruhr and the Rhineland. At the close of Hitler's speech, Thyssen cried, `Heil Herr Hitler'. . . . By the time of the German . . . elections later that year Thyssen had succeeded in eliciting contributions to Hitler's campaign fund from all of the big industrial combines. He himself is reported to have spent 3,000,000 marks on the Nazis in the year 1932 alone.
"During 1933 Thyssen served as intercessor between von Hindenburg, von Papen, and Hitler. He brought them together at a secret meeting which laid the basis for the appointment of Hitler as Reichschancellor."[1]
Schacht Passes the Hat
After Hitler was appointed Chancellor, Hjalmar Schacht hosted and chaired a meeting on Feb. 20, 1933 at Goering's Reichstag President's palace for Thyssen's representatives and a few other German businessmen. Schacht passed the hat, raising 3 million gold marks for the final drive to Nazi dictatorship.
The biggest contributors there were Karl Bosch and Georg von Schnitzler for the IG Farben company, steelmaker Gustav Krupp (who had previously held off supporting Hitler), and the Thyssen-Wall Street United Steel Works chief executive Albert Voegler. Herr Voegler was also a director of the Harriman-Bush affiliated BHS Bank in Rotterdam, and a director of the Hamburg-America shipping company, which would soon be owned jointly by the Harriman-Bush enterprise and the Hitler government.
With Hitler and the Gestapo in power, Central Bank President and Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht threw all resources into creating a Nazi war machine. Fritz Thyssen was made the dictator of the Ruhr region, with mammoth war contracts. He and his British-Wall Street allies took complete ownership of every industrial concern in which Thyssen was involved; his opponents were defeated, purged, and arrested.
While Hitler cynically denounced the IG Farben company as an "international Jewish organization," Schacht simultaneously awarded that company huge contracts to produce munitions and chemicals for the military buildup.
Throughout this period, up until 1937, banker Max Warburg was the leading stockholder of IG Farben. Warburg (like the Rothschilds, politically loyal to the British crown) meanwhile presumed to instruct his fellow Jews in the western countries not to boycott or otherwise protest Hitler's anti-Jewish persecution.
Max Warburg had brokered the Harriman-Bush takeover of German companies, and their subsequent staffing by Nazis. The Warburg family's Kuhn Loeb bank in New York had earlier launched the Harriman family's railroad fortune, with capital from the British monarchy. In the 1930s, Kuhn Loeb was selling new bonds in New York for Hitler and Schacht, to replace, at a lower interest rate, the German public and private bonds held by Americans. Max Warburg meanwhile served as Schacht's deputy at the German central bank.
In May 1933, an agreement was reached in Berlin, for the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The Harriman International Co., led by Averell Harriman's first cousin Oliver, was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct all exports from Hitler's Germany to the United States. This pact, reported in the May 20, 1933 New York Times, had been negotiated in Berlin by Hjalmar Schacht and John Foster Dulles, attorney for Harriman, Prescott Bush, and various Nazi enterprises, with the counsel of Max Warburg. Leading up to this agreement, a telegram (now in the Harriman papers, Library of Congress) was sent to Nazi official Hjalmar Schacht at the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, dated May 11, 1933: "Much disappointed to have missed seeing you Tuesday afternoon. . . . I hope to see you either in Washington or New York before you sail. With my regards, W.A. Harriman."
At the top, Montagu Norman made all the decisions. Schacht went abroad to meet several times each year with Norman to plan the budget of Nazi Germany within the guidelines of British credit policy. These meetings were often at Montagu Norman's London house, or at the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland, which was controlled entirely by Norman and his Nazis. Norman, whenever he was in the U.S.A., coordinating Britain's Hitler project with his New York allies, would stay at the home of his fanatical devotee, Thatcher Brown, the partner of Harriman and Bush.
Friedrich Flick, a direct partner of Harriman and Bush, and of Thyssen, was another contributor to the Hitler takeover. In preparation for the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the U.S. government said that Flick was "one of leading financiers and industrialists who, from 1932, contributed large sums to the Nazi Party. . . ."
Harriman-Bush: Banking on the Nazis
The Flick-Harriman partnership was directly supervised by Prescott Bush, President Bush's father, and by George Walker, President Bush's grandfather.
The Harriman-Walker Union Banking Corporation's arrangements for the German Steel Trust had made them bankers for Flick and his vast operations in Germany by no later than 1926.
The Harriman Fifteen Corporation (George Walker, president, Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman, sole directors) held a substantial stake in the Silesian Holding Co. at the time of the merger with Brown Brothers, on Jan. 1, 1931. This holding correlated with Averell Harriman's chairmanship of the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, the Harriman-Bush group owning one-third of a complex of steelmaking, coal-mining, and zinc-mining activities in Germany and Poland, in which Friedrich Flick owned two-thirds.
The Nuremberg prosecutor characterized Flick as "proprietor and head of a large group of industrial enterprises (coal and iron mines, steel producing and fabricating plants) . . . `Wehrwirtschaftsführer,' 1938 ["Military Economy Leader," the title awarded to prominent industrialists for merit in the armaments drive]. . . ."
For this buildup of the Hitler war machine with coal, steel, and arms production, using slave laborers, Flick was condemned to seven years in prison at the Nuremberg trials, and served three years.
On March 19, 1934, Prescott Bush, by then manager of Harriman's personal funds and director of the Union Banking Corp., sent a memo to Harriman alerting him to an emerging resistance by the Polish government to the Bush-Harriman-Nazi enterprise, which was then looting Poland's labor and mineral wealth. Hitler solved this resistance problem in 1939 by invading Poland, thus starting World War II.
George Bush's father and grandfather were not prosecuted at Nuremberg. But, acting under the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1942, U.S. government officials had quietly seized their assets in the various Nazi enterprises.
Before the Pearl Harbor attack brought the United States into the war, the American end of the Hitler project had gotten some play in the press. Here is a report in the New York Herald Tribune, July 31, 1941:
Thyssen has $3,000,000 Cash in New York Vaults; Union Banking Corp. May Hide Nest Egg for High Nazis He Once Backed
by M.J. Racusin
In the tides of economic warfare now surging over the world, the New York Herald Tribune has discovered that Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist who was Adolf Hitler's original patron on a prodigal scale a decade ago, has $3,000,000 in American cash salted away in the bank vaults of downtown New York.
In the American colony of Thyssen enterprises perhaps the most interesting is the Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, nominal guardian of the $3,000,000 cache, all in United States currency—a sort of nest egg for Herr Thyssen or perhaps for some of his high-placed Nazi friends when the present troublous days are over.
Among other Thyssen interests in New York are half a dozen corporations engaged in the shipping, export and import trades, centering chiefly about the coal and steel industries and operating under the wing of the Union Banking Corporation. . . .
Perhaps it wasn't Herr Thyssen's money at all, some persons suggest. Maybe he sent it here for safekeeping for some of the Nazi bigwigs—perhaps for Goering, for Goebbels, for Himmler, or even Hitler himself.
No matter how the story comes out, the United States government has the situation in hand. Every penny of known Thyssen assets is frozen, under the strictest control. . . .
The circumstances of [the bank's] relationship [to the Nazi Thyssen] were frankly set forth in a letter addressed by Knight Wooley, a partner of the Brown Brothers Harriman firm. . . .
January 14, 1941
William R. White, Esq.
Superintendant of Banks, State of New York
Dear Mr. White:
As you are aware, my partners, E.R. Harriman [Averell's brother], Ray Morris, Prescott S. Bush and our [employee] H.D. Pennington, are directors of the Union Banking Corporation, a state institution under your supervision. This corporation is located at 39 Broadway, and it is in effect a New York office, or agency, of the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, in Rotterdam. . . .
From London, to New York, to Auschwitz
On June 14, 1940, nine months after the Nazi tanks rolled into Poland, the IG Farben company opened the Auschwitz factory and slave labor camp in occupied Poland, to produce artificial rubber and gasoline from coal. The Hitler government thereafter supplied IG Farben with political opponents and Jews as the slaves, who were worked to near death and then murdered. Later, Jews and others were simply mass-exterminated there.
The Auschwitz slave camp was a project of the merger and worldwide cartel agreements between IG Farben and the Rockefeller family's Standard Oil company (later called Exxon). On Oct. 12, 1939, eight months before Auschwitz opened, a Standard Oil executive wrote to its president, William S. Farish, concerning a renewal of their earlier agreements with the Nazis, and the British approval for the deal. The report to Farish stated:
In England I met by appointment the Royal Dutch [Shell Oil Co.] gentlemen from Holland, and . . . a general agreement was reached on the necessary changes in our relations with the IG [Farben], in view of the state of war. . . . [T]he Royal Dutch Shell group is essentially British. . . . I also had several meetings with . . . the [British] Air Ministry. . . .
I required help to obtain the necessary permission to go to Holland. . . . The gentlemen in the Air Ministry . . . very kindly offered to assist me [later] in reentering England. . . .
Pursuant to these arrangements, I was able to keep my appointments in Holland [having flown there on a British Royal Air Force bomber], where I had three days of discussion with the representatives of IG. They delivered to me assignments of some 2,000 foreign patents and we did our best to work out complete plans for a modus vivendi which could operate through the term of the war, whether or not the U.S. came in.
Emil Helfferich, chief executive of both Standard Oil's Germany subsidiary, and of Harriman, Bush, and Hitler's Hamburg-America lines, testified after the war that money to pay the SS guards at the Auschwitz death camp, was paid out of a Standard Oil bank account. Both Emil Helfferich and fellow Harriman-Bush shipping director Karl Lindemann were authorized to write Standard Oil checks to Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler.
In 1936, the Warburg bank had transmitted a letter from this Helfferich to the Harriman-Bush enterprise, stating: "It is the intention to continue the relations with Mr. Harriman on the same basis as heretofore"—that is, just as before the Hitler dictatorship! After Helfferich sent a Nazi emissary to New York to meet Averell Harriman, the Harriman-Bush office replied: "I am glad to learn that Mr. Hellferich [sic] has stated that relations between the Hamburg American Line and ourselves will be continued on the same basis as heretofore."
This reply was sent to Rudolph Brinkmann, Max Warburg's employee at the Warburg bank.
Max Warburg was forced out of IG Farben in 1937, as the Hitler regime bore down upon the Jews. Brinkmann, a non-Jew acceptable to Hitler, kept the Warburg bank going for the Nazis—under the name "Brinkmann," as the IG Farben-Standard Oil cartel moved toward its Auschwitz project.
After countless hundreds of thousands of victims were murdered at Auschwitz, the money made by the IG-Standard cartel for Standard President William S. Farish, was inherited by his grandson, William S. Farish III. This Auschwitz heir is Queen Elizabeth's main host on her current visits to the U.S.A., and George Bush's closest friend: Farish took control of managing Bush's personal fortune after Bush's 1980 election as U.S. Vice President.
Quietly, George's father, Prescott, had persevered with his comrades in the old Auschwitz gang. Witness a Nov. 15, 1961 internal memo of Brown Brothers Harriman warning of an embezzlement at the August Thyssen bank, which memo stated that the "information [on the Thyssen family bank] came to us through our trainee, Rudy Brinkmann, and apparently was confirmed by E.M. Warburg & Co., New York."
Harriman's Eugenics Movement
and Nazi Race Science
The smoldering bodies in Auschwitz followed logically upon the race propaganda festival which had been staged by the Harriman-Bush enterprise a decade earlier in New York. The Third International Congress on Eugenics, held at the American Museum of Natural History on Aug. 21-23, 1932, had given a seal of approval to the then-planned takeover of Germany by the Nazi master-race fanatics.
The Eugenics Congress was officially dedicated to Averell Harriman's mother, who had paid for the founding of the "race-science" movement in America. She had built the Eugenics Record Office as a branch of the Galton National Laboratory in London.
Averell Harriman's sister Mary, hostess and director of "entertainment" for the Eugenics Congress, lived in Virginia fox-hunting country. Fellow Virginian W.A. Plecker, state Commissioner of Vital Statistics and crusader against race-mixing, spoke on "racial purity."
Averell Harriman personally arranged with the Walker/Bush/Helfferich Hamburg-America Line to transport Nazi ideologues from Germany to New York for this meeting. The most famous such guest was Dr. Ernst Rudin, psychiatrist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography in Berlin, where the Rockefeller family paid for Dr. Rudin to occupy an entire floor with his eugenics research.
Harriman's 1932 Eugenics Congress elected Ernst Rudin president of the International Federation of Eugenics Societies. Rudin thus became official leader of the world racist movement, dedicated to sterilization of mental patients, euthanasia execution of the insane and the terminally ill, and prevention of births to parents from "inferior" blood stocks.
The New York Times gave favorable front-page coverage to the Eugenics Congress as a "distinguished gathering of scientists from many parts of the world."
Harriman-nominee Rudin went back to Germany. Hitler was soon installed in power, and Rudin wrote Hitler's "Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Posterity." This sterilization law was printed in the September 1933 Eugenical News (U.S.A.) with Chancellor Hitler's signature, and advertised therein as an American Model Law. Anthropologist Josef Mengele, later notorious for his crimes at Auschwitz, wrote reports for special courts which enforced Rudin's racial purity law against cohabitation of Aryans and non-Aryans.
A quarter-million Germans were sterilized: mental patients, blind, deaf, and alcoholics. Rudin and his associates trained physicians and psychiatrists as sterilizers and as killers. They killed first at euthanasia centers, then at slave camps and racial extermination centers.
In 1943, Mengele was assigned as medical commandant of Auschwitz. His boss, Othmar Verschuer, wartime director of Rockefeller's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Genetics in Berlin, got money for Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz from the German Research Council, to which Verschuer reported: "My co-researcher in this research is my assistant the anthropologist and physician Mengele. He is serving as Hauptsturmführer and camp doctor in the concentration camp Auschwitz. . . . With the permission of the Reichsführer SS Himmler, anthropological research is being undertaken on the various racial groups in the concentration camps and blood samples will be sent to my laboratory for investigation."
Mengele constantly checked the railroad lines leading into Auschwitz, looking for twins, and other interesting persons, on whom to perform heredity experiments. Needles were injected into eyes for work on eye color. Organs and limbs were removed, sometimes without anesthetics. Sex changes were attempted. Females were sterilized, males were castrated. Those killed were autopsied at the Verschuer-grant laboratory next to the crematory, which was burning bodies to hide the evidence. Various organs, eyes, heads, and limbs were sent to Rockefeller's employee Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
In 1946, Verschuer wrote to the Bureau of Human Heredity in London, asking for help in continuing his "scientific research." In 1947, the Bureau of Human Heredity, moved from London to Copenhagen. The new Danish building for this was built with Rockefeller money. Verschuer soon became a member of the American Eugenics Society, headquartered in Rockefeller Center. . . .
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You can download files in this forum
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Chat
Usergroups
Calendar
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
