Milton, Massachusetts.
Lifted by the financial boom of the 1920s, Prescott and Dorothy Bush were
on the rise. By 1926, George Herbert Walker had brought his son-in-law in on a piece of the Harriman action, hiring him as a vice president in the
Harriman banking firm.
By the mid-Thirties, Prescott Bush had become a managing partner at the
merged firm of Brown Brothers Harriman. The archival records also show that Brown Brothers Harriman served as the U.S. financial service arm for German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, an early funder of Germany's National Socialist Party.
Thyssen, an admirer of Adolf Hitler since the 1920s, joined the Party in 1931 when it was still a fringe organization. He helped bail the struggling party out with financial help, even providing its headquarters building in Munich.
steamships to facilitate the bank's dealings with Germany, and made Prescott Bush a director. The ships delivered fuel, steel, coal, gold and money to Germany as Hitler was consolidating his power and building his war machine.
Other evidence shows that Prescott Bush served as the director of the
Union Banking Corp. of New York, which represented Thyssen's interests in the United States and was owned by a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands.
As a steel magnate, Thyssen was amassing a fortune as Hitler rearmed
Germany. Documents also linked Bush to Thyssen's Consolidated Silesian Steel Company, which was based in mineral-rich Silesia on the German-Polish border and exploited slave labor from concentration camps, including Auschwitz. But records at the National Archives do not spell out exactly when Bush's connection ended or what he knew about the business details.
In 1941, Thyssen had a falling out with Hitler and fled to France where
he was captured. Much of Thyssen's empire went under the direct control of
the Germans, but even that did not shatter the business ties that existed with Prescott Bush and Harriman's bank.
It wasn't until August 1942 that newspaper stories disclosed the secretive ties between Union Banking Corp. and Germany.
After an investigation, the U.S. government seized the property of the
Hamburg-Amerika line and moved against affiliates of the Union Banking Corp. In November 1942, the government seized the assets of the Silesian-American Corp. [For more details, see an investigative report by the U.K. Guardian, Sept. 25, 2004.]
No Kiss of Death
For most public figures, allegations of trading with the enemy would have
been a political kiss of death, but the disclosures barely left a lipstick
smudge on Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush and other business associates
implicated in the business dealings.
"Politically, the significance of these dealings - the great surprise - is that none of it seemed to matter much over the next decade or so," wrote Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty.
"A few questions would be raised, but Democrat Averell Harriman would not
be stopped from becoming federal mutual security administrator in 1951 or
winning election as governor of New York in 1954. Nor would Republican
Prescott Bush (who was elected senator from Connecticut in 1952) and his
presidential descendants be hurt in any of their future elections."
Indeed, the quick dissipation of the National Socialist financial scandal was only a portent of the Bush family's future. Unlike politicians of lower classes, the Bushes seemed to travel in a bubble impervious to accusations of impropriety, since the Eastern Establishment doesn't like to think badly of its own. [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
To this day - as President Bush showed by mocking the long-forgotten Sen.
Borah and then wielding the "appeasement" club against Barack Obama and other Democrats - the assumption remains that the bubble will continue to protect the Bush family name.
However, the evidence from dusty archives suggests that the Bush family
went way beyond appeasement of Adolf Hitler to aiding and abetting the National Socialists in Germany.
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