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.
Thyssen did not merely have a "falling out", he was exiled from Germany in 1935, and lost most of his assets, due to his opposition to the Nazi Party. (He had not taken seriously Nazi anti- semitism until after the Party came to power, and was appalled. Also, his wife was Jewish.)He came to the United States and became a prominent anti- Nazi speaker. The assets that were held after the outbreak of war mainly belonged to Thyssen's siblings, neither of whom was particularly political, but both of whom were, after all, German. |
