To fully understand the transformations taking place in America following 9/11 and the series of scandals which have rocked our nation since the end of World War II, it is important that the public understand how the Bush family, our nation’s most preeminent dynasty, amassed its great fortune and attained such a position of power.
As we push back the cobwebs obscuring the past our story begins with the Patriarch of the Bush Dynasty, Samuel Prescott Bush, who built his fortune on oil and armaments, two industries which along with investment banking form the core of Bush family concerns to this day.
Samuel P. Bush was an industrialist who had served as general manager for the Buckeye Steel Castings Company owned by Frank Rockefeller the brother of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil. Through his ties with the Rockefeller family Samuel Bush became the first President of the Oil Manufacturers Association.
During World War I, Samuel P. Bush was put in charge of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition Section of the War Industries Board where his dealings with Remington Arms owner Percy Rockefeller helped pave the way for his son Prescott Bush to be admitted to Skull and Bones. While a member of Skull and Bones, Prescott is alleged to have stolen the skull of Geronimo from its grave site at Fort Sill Oklahoma in 1918 as a prank. Geronimo’s skull is believed to still reside at Skull and Bones Headquarters at Yale.
After graduating from Yale, Prescott Bush served as an artillery captain and intelligence officer in the American Expeditionary force sent to France in World War I. While serving in France he created controversy by lying about medals he had received that were published in his hometown newspaper in Columbus, OH.
Prescott had claimed that he had been awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor, the Victoria Cross and the Distinguished Service Cross for having saved the lives of generals Foch, Haig and Pershing when he saw an artillery shell coming towards them and parried it with his bolo knife. Shortly after this story appeared in his hometown newspaper his mother was forced to submit a retraction stating that her son, had written his first letter in jest and that it had not been intended for publication.
Following the embarrassment of this incident, Prescott Bush, fearing humiliation if he were to return to his hometown of Columbus, OH decided to relocate to St. Louis, MO after the war. He took a job working for the Simmons Hardware Company, a supplier of railroad parts. It was while in St. Louis that he met Dorothy Walker the daughter of George Herbert Walker. Bert Walker, as he was known, was a Missouri investment banker with ties to the J. P. Morgan banking empire.
In 1921 Prescott and Dorothy Walker married. After marrying, Prescott went to work for his father’s rubber products business in Columbus, OH. After a short stint there he was offered a position with U. S. Rubber by a fellow Skull and Bones-man, E. Roland Harriman. This was around the time that the future President, George Herbert Walker Bush, was born.
In 1926 Bert Walker, the president of W. A. Harriman Company, a Wall Street investment firm appointed his son-in-law vice president. The company had been founded by W. Averell Harriman, an heir to the Union Pacific Railroad fortune.
It would be through dealings with W. A. Harriman Company that Prescott Bush would become involved in a series of business ventures with German industrialists instrumental in financing the rise to power of Adolph Hitler.
Towards the end of the First World War, one of Germany’s leading industrialists and steel and coal magnates, August Thyssen, recognizing that Germany was destined to lose the war, began moving his assets out Germany. He set up the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam, Holland and placed one of his sons Heinrich in charge. This bank would a later be a key conduit of funds between Thyssen operations in Germany and wealthy investors abroad. After the armistice he became interested in opening banking operations in the United States. In 1922 he met with W. Averell Harriman while the American millionaire was visiting Berlin. Through this meeting the two agreed to set up what would become the Union Banking Corporation. At the time the deal was agreed upon, George Herbert Walker was managing director of both W. A. Harriman’s New York and Berlin operations.
Harriman had first become involved in business dealings in Germany following the First World War when he was able to acquire control of the Hamburg-American Line at a discount as a result of unfavorable terms imposed by the Versailles Treaty on the German owners following the armistice. Prescott Bush became a director of the company.
In 1923 upset with French and Belgian seizure of the Ruhr as mandated by the Treaty of Versailles, August Thyssen met with General Erich Ludendorff, who urged Thyssen to throw his financial support behind Adolph Hitler whose national socialist movement was mobilizing opposition against the Weimar Republic. Later that year Ludendorff and Hitler attempted the infamous “Beer Hall Putsch” to topple the government of Bavaria. The putsch failed and Hitler was jailed. It was during his imprisonment that he wrote “Mein Kampf.” He was released after serving only 9 months in prison.
In 1926 August Thyssen died and his eldest son Fritz inherited the family concerns including controlling interest in the Union Banking Corporation.
In 1931 as a result of the Great Depression, W. A. Harriman merged with Brown Brothers Co. to become Brown Brothers Harriman. Prescott Bush was appointed the company’s managing director.
During the 1930s with backing from his American investors, Fritz Thyssen along with Friedrich Flick financed Hitler’s private armies: the Sturmabteilung (SA or Brown Shirts) and Schutzstaffel (SS or Black Shirts). Both groups were instrumental in creating chaos and disorder leading to the resignations of both Franz von Papen and General Kurt von Schleicher as chancellors. Following Schleicher’s resignation, Hindenburg, who had lead in the elections, but was unable to achieve a majority, appointed Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, despite the fact that Hitler’s party had only received approximately a third of the votes. After his appointment Hitler had Hindenburg dissolve the German Parliament and call for new elections to be held on March 5th, 1933.
One week before the scheduled elections were to be held someone set fire to the Reichstag building. As a result of the Reichstag fire, Hitler requested emergency powers. By a vote of 441 to 81 members of the Reichstag granted Hitler emergency powers under the Enabling Act. This provided the legal pretext for his arrogation of dictatorial powers.
A Dutch Communist named Marinus van der Lubbe was accused of having committed the arson. He was convicted in a show trial at which he confessed and was subsequently beheaded. At the Nuremburg War Tribunal it would later be revealed by General Franz Halder that the Reichstag had been burned down on the orders of Hermann Goering. Hitler had been dining with Goering the night of the fire.
According to Antony Sutton in “Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler,” wealthy German and Anglo-American industrialists financed the Nazi Party in the lead up to the 1933 Elections. In May of 1932 at the “Kaiserhof Meeting” representatives of I.G. Farben (which was jointly owned by Standard Oil of New Jersey) met with representatives of the Harriman owned Hamburg-American Line and the German Potash Trust. Together they contributed 500,000 marks to the Nazi cause.
(http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/chapter_07.htm)
On January 4, 1933 both John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles attended a fundraiser for Hitler on behalf of the New York Law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which was representing the Schroeder Bank in Berlin.
(http://www.cephas-library.com/nwo/federal_reserve_chapter_7.html)
John Foster Dulles would go on to be Secretary of State under Eisenhower. Allen Dulles would become the Director of CIA who President Kennedy fired after the Bay of Pigs disaster. Following the JFK Assassination, Lyndon Johnson appointed Allen Dulles to serve on the Warren Commission along with another Nazi sympathizer, John J. McCloy.
McCloy was a Wall Street lawyer who served on the board of directors of I. G. Farben. During the 1930s, while working as a lawyer in Paris, he maintained close ties to top Nazi officials. At the 1936 Olympics he shared a box with Hitler. After the Second World War he was appointed the High Commissioner of Germany.
A third fund-raiser consisting of German Industrialists with Wall Street backing, met at the home of Herman Goering on February 20, 1933 one week before the burning of the Reichstag.
Some of America’s most powerful multinational corporations actively financed Hitler’s rise to power, continuing to do so even after the United States declared war on Germany and Japan. Those companies included: Standard Oil of New Jersey (Rockefeller owned); General Motors Corporation (Dupont owned); General Electric; International Telephone and Telegraph; Ford Motor Company and IBM.
One of the most tragic episodes of this period was Harriman and Bush involvement in the atrocities committed at Auschwitz.
One of the businesses which Prescott Bush managed on behalf of the Harriman’s was the United Steel Corporation. United Steel had been formed as a joint venture between Fritz Thyseen; Friedrich Flick, an industrialist close to Heinrich Himmler; Averell Harriman and George Herbert Walker.
United Steel Company included within one of its divisions both the Silesian Steel Corporation and the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company. The coal operations of Consolidated Silesian Steel were located near the Polish town of Oswiecim. This became the site of the Auschwitz death camp and a source of slave labor for the business.
In 1934 Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman hired John Foster Dulles to represent the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company in negotiations with the Polish Government, which was threatening to confiscate the company for failure to pay taxes along with charges of mismanagement and corruption.
The dispute was resolved on August 31, 1939 when the Nazis launched “Operation Himmler,” a series of “false flag” attacks made to appear as though Polish troops had attacked the German border including a radio station at Gleiwitz. The SS dressed Jewish prisoners in Polish uniforms then shot them, leaving their bodies behind to appear as though Polish soldiers had been killed in action. The following day using the fake Polish attack as pretext for war, Germany invaded Poland setting in motion World War II.
Another company which utilized slave labor from Auschwitz was I. G. Farben, a company owned in conjunction with Standard Oil of New Jersey. Standard Oil had provided the Germans with a secret process for developing synthetic aviation fuel from coal and a secret formula for producing synthetic rubber known as the Buna rubber process. Both patents were withheld from the United States government. In 1942 during Senate hearings into war profiteering, the chairman of the investigating committee, Senator Harry S. Truman, called the actions of Standard Oil “treasonable.”
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued a formal declaration of war against both Germany and Japan. Despite this declaration, Harriman and Bush continued to do business with their Nazi partners forcing the Federal Government to take action. In 1942 the U.S. Government’s Alien Property Custodian seized six Harriman- Bush companies for violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act. The companies included:
The Union Banking Corporation
The Holland American Trading Corporation
Seamless Steel Equipment Company
The Silesian-American Company
The Hamburg-American Line
The Harriman 15 Company
After the war in 1951, the U. S. Government returned the Union Banking Corporation to Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker along with a payment worth approximately $1.5 million as reparation.
(http://www.john-loftus.com/bush_nazi_scandal.asp)
The following year Prescott Bush was elected to the United States Senate from Connecticut. He was a close friend and golfing partner of President Dwight Eisenhower.
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John Loftus, a former Justice Department investigator, alleges that Prescott Bush’s son George Herbert Walker Bush (the first President Bush), while serving as the Chairman of the Republican National Committee during Watergate, urged Nixon to step down for fear that the Watergate investigations might uncover “the Fascist skeletons in the Republican Party’s closet.” (ibid) The following day after receiving Bush’s note Nixon resigned. One wonders was it the Republican Party’s closet or his own family’s that he feared might be revealed?
Further Reading:
“George Bush the Unauthorized Biography,” Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm
“Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler,” Antony C. Sutton
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/index.html
“Gold Fillings, Auschwitz and George Bush,” Glen Yeadon
http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/bushies.htm
“Heir to the Holocaust,” John Loftus
http://www.john-loftus.com/Thyssen.asp
“Trading with the Enemy, The Nazi American Money Plot,” Charles Higham,
Delacorte Press, 1983
Robert Baldwin is an Indianapolis area antiwar activist, artist and freelance journalist.
