While the Enron scandal currently unfolds, another Bush family
business scandal lurks beneath the shadows of history that may dwarf
it.
On April 19, 2001, President George W. Bush spent some of Holocaust
Remembrance Day in the Capital Rotunda with holocaust survivors,
allied veterans, and their families. In a ceremony that included
Jewish prayers and songs sung by holocaust victims in the camps,
Benjamin Meed, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, movingly
described to the gathering what he experienced on April 19, 1943.
"I stood outside a Catholic church, which faced the ghetto," Mr. Meed
said, "a young Jewish boy posing as a gentile. As I watched the ghetto
being bombarded by the German artillery, I could see many of the Jews
of my community jumping out of windows of burning buildings. I stood
long and mute."
The survivor concluded his reminiscence saying, "We tremble to think
what could happen if we allow a new generation to arise ignorant of
the tragedy which is still shaping the future."
President Bush, appearing almost uncomfortable, read a statement that
said that humanity was "bound by conscience to remember what happened"
and that "the record has been kept and preserved." The record, Mr.
Bush stated, was that one of the worst acts of genocide in human
history "came not from crude and uneducated men, but from men who
regarded themselves as cultured and well schooled, modern men, forward
looking. Their crime showed the world that evil can slip in and blend
in amid the most civilized surroundings. In the end only conscience
can stop it."
But while President Bush publicly embraced the community of holocaust
survivors in Washington last spring, he and his family have been
keeping a secret from them for over 50 years about Prescott Bush, the
president's grandfather. According to classified documents from Dutch
intelligence and US government archives, President George W. Bush's
grandfather, Prescott Bush made considerable profits off Auschwitz
slave labor. In fact, President Bush himself is an heir to these
profits from the holocaust which were placed in a blind trust in 1980
by his father, former president George Herbert Walker Bush.
Throughout the Bush family's decades of public life, the American
press has gone out of its way to overlook one historical fact – that
through Union Banking Corporation (UBC), Prescott Bush, and his
father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, along with German industrialist
Fritz Thyssen, financed Adolf Hitler before and during World War II.
It was first reported in 1994 by John Loftus and Mark Aarons in The
Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish
People.
The US government had known that many American companies were aiding
Hitler, like Standard Oil, General Motors and Chase Bank, all of which
was sanctioned after Pearl Harbor. But as The New York Times reporter
Charles Higham later discovered, and published in his 1983
groundbreaking book, Trading With The Enemy; The Nazi American Money
Plot 1933-1949, "the government smothered everything during and even
after the war." Why?
According to Higham, the US government believed "a public scandal ...
would have drastically affected public morale, caused widespread
strikes and perhaps provoked mutinies in the armed services." Higham
claims the government thought "their trial and imprisonment would have
made it impossible for the corporate boards to help the American war
effort."
However, Prescott Bush's banks were not just financing Hitler as
previously reported. In fact, there was a distinct business link much
deeper than Mr. Higham or Mr. Loftus knew at the time their books were
published.
A classified Dutch intelligence file which was leaked by a courageous
Dutch intelligence officer, along with newly surfaced information from
U.S. government archives, "confirms absolutely," John Loftus says, the
direct links between Bush, Thyssen and genocide profits from
Auschwitz.
The business connections between Prescott Bush and Fritz Thyssen were
more direct than what has been previously written. This new
information reveals how Prescott Bush and UBC, which he managed
directly, profited from the Holocaust. A case can be made that the
inheritors of the Prescott Bush estate could be sued by survivors of
the Holocaust and slave labor communities. To understand the complete
picture of how Prescott Bush profited from the Holocaust, it is
necessary to return to the year 1916, where it all began.
Post World War I: Thyssen Empire On The Ropes
By 1916, August Thyssen could see the writing on the wall. The "Great
War" was spinning out of control, grinding away at Germany's resources
and economy. The government was broke and his company, Thyssen & Co.,
with 50,000 German workers and annual production of 1,000,000 tons of
steel and iron, was buckling under the war's pressure. As the main
supplier of the German military, August Thyssen knew Germany would be
defeated once the US entered the war.
At 74, "King" August Thyssen knew he was also running out of time. His
first born "prince" Friedrich (Fritz) Thyssen, had been groomed at the
finest technical business schools in Europe and was destined to
inherit his father's estimated $100,000,000 fortune and an industrial
empire located at Muehhlheim on the Ruhr.
In addition to Fritz, plans were also made for the second son
Heinrich. At the outbreak of the war, Heinrich Thyssen discreetly
changed his citizenship from German to Hungarian and married the
Hungarian aristocrat Baroness Margrit Bornemisza de Kaszon. Soon
Heinrich Thyssen switched his name to Baron Thyssen Bornemisza de
Kaszon.
Near the end of World War I, August Thyssen opened the Bank voor
Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam. The neutral Holland was the
perfect location outside of Germany to launder assets from the August
Thyssen Bank in Berlin when the financial demands of the Allied forces
surfaced. But the war ended much sooner than even Thyssen calculated
and what developed caught the "Rockefeller of the Ruhr" off guard.
On November 10, 1918, German socialists took over Berlin. The
following morning at 5 a.m., what was left of Germany surrendered to
the Allies, officially ending World War I. "At the time of the
Armistice and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, my Father and I
were deeply saddened by the spectacle of Germany's abject
humiliation," Thyssen recalled later in his autobiography, I Paid
Hitler.
After the war, chaos descended on Germany as food ran short. Winter
was looming over a starving nation when on Dec. 7, 1918, the socialist
Spartacists League came knocking on the Thyssen Villa with armed
militia. August and Fritz were arrested and dragged from jail to jail
across Germany for four days. Along the way, they were lined up in
staged executions designed to terrorize them.
It worked. When released, the two Thyssens were horrified at the new
political climate in their beloved Germany. They could not accept that
Germany was responsible for its own demise. All Germany's problems,
the Thyssens felt, "have almost always been due to foreigners." It was
the Jews, he and many others believed, who were secretly behind the
socialist movement across the globe.
Meanwhile Fritz's younger brother Baron Thyssen Bornemisza de Kaszon
moved to Rotterdam and became the principal owner of the Bank voor
Handel en Scheepvaart. All the Thyssens needed now was an American
branch.
"life is like a mushroom, they feed you ***** and keep you in the dark"
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