>>>Not by the sale of German government bonds..... <<<
By truly insidious means:
>>>Hitler's Ladder to Power
Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany January 30, 1933, and absolute dictator in March 1933, after two years of expensive and violent lobbying and electioneering. Two affiliates of the Bush-Harriman organization played great parts in this criminal undertaking: Thyssen's German Steel Trust; and the Hamburg-Amerika Line and several of its executives.@s1@s3
Let us look more closely at the Bush family's German partners.
Fritz Thyssen told Allied interrogators after the war about some of his financial support for the Nazi Party: `` 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 fu@aur Handel und Schiff [i.e. Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart (BHS), the Harriman-Bush affiliate]. I arranged the credit ... he would pay it back in three years.... I chose a Dutch bank because I did not want to be mixed up with German banks in my position, and because I thought it was better to do business with a Dutch bank, and I thought I would have the Nazis a little more in my hands... .
`` The credit was about 250-300,000 [gold] marks--about the sum I had given before. The loan has been repaid in part to the Dutch bank, but I think some money is still owing on it.... ''@s1@s4
The overall total of Thyssen's political donations and loans to the Nazis was well over a million dollars, including funds he raised from others--in a period of terrible money shortage in Germany.
Friedrich Flick was the major co-owner of the German Steel Trust with Fritz Thyssen, Thyssen's long-time collaborator and occasional competitor. In preparation for the war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg, the U.S. government said that Flick was `` one of leading financiers and industrialists who from 1932 contributed large sums to the Nazi Party ... member of `Circle of Friends' of Himmler who contributed large sums to the SS. ''@s1@s5
Flick, like Thyssen, financed the Nazis to maintain their private armies called Schutzstaffel (S.S. or Black Shirts) and Sturmabteilung (S.A., storm troops or Brown Shirts).
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 Corp. 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, Jan. 1, 1931. This holding correlated to Averell Harriman's chairmanship of the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, the American group owning one-third of a complex of steel-making, coal-mining and zinc-mining activities in Germany and Poland, in which Friedrich Flick owned two-thirds.@s1@s6
The Nuremberg prosecutor characterized Flick as follows:
`` Proprietor and head of a large group of industrial enterprises (coal and iron mines, steel producing and fabricating plants) ... `Wehrwirtschaftsfuh@aurer', 1938 [title awarded to prominent industrialists for merit in armaments drive--`Military Economy Leader'].... ''@s1@s7
For this buildup of the Hitler war machine with coal, steel and arms production, using slave laborers, the Nazi Flick was condemned to seven years in prison at the Nuremberg trials; he served three years. With friends in New York and London, however, Flick lived into the 1970s and died a billionaire.
On March 19, 1934, Prescott Bush--then director of the German Steel Trust's Union Banking Corporation--initiated an alert to the absent Averell Harriman about a problem which had developed in the Flick partnership.@s1@s8 Bush sent Harriman a clipping from the New York Times of that day, which reported that the Polish government was fighting back against American and German stockholders who controlled `` Poland's largest industrial unit, the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company.... ''
The Times article continued: `` The company has long been accused of mismanagement, excessive borrowing, fictitious bookkeeping and gambling in securities. Warrants were issued in December for several directors accused of tax evasions. They were German citizens and they fled. They were replaced by Poles. Herr Flick, regarding this as an attempt to make the company's board entirely Polish, retaliated by restricting credits until the new Polish directors were unable to pay the workmen regularly. ''
The Times noted that the company's mines and mills `` employ 25,000 men and account for 45 percent of Poland's total steel output and 12 percent of her coal production. Two-thirds of the company's stock is owned by Friedrich Flick, a leading German steel industrialist, and the remainder is owned by interests in the United States. ''
In view of the fact that a great deal of Polish output was being exported to Hitler Germany under depression conditions, the Polish government thought that Prescott Bush, Harriman and their Nazi partners should at least pay full taxes on their Polish holdings. The U.S. and Nazi owners responded with a lockout. The letter to Harriman in Washington reported a cable from their European representative: `` Have undertaken new steps London Berlin ... please establish friendly relations with Polish Ambassador [in Washington]. ''
A 1935 Harriman Fifteen Corporation memo from George Walker announced an agreement had been made `` in Berlin '' to sell an 8,000 block of their shares in Consolidated Silesian Steel.@s1@s9 But the dispute with Poland did not deter the Bush family from continuing its partnership with Flick.
Nazi tanks and bombs `` settled '' this dispute in September, 1939 with the invasion of Poland, beginning World War II. The Nazi army had been equipped by Flick, Harriman, Walker and Bush, with materials essentially stolen from Poland.
There were probably few people at the time who could appreciate the irony, that when the Soviets also attacked and invaded Poland from the East, their vehicles were fueled by oil pumped from Baku wells revived by the Harriman/Walker/Bush enterprise.
Three years later, nearly a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of the Nazis' share in the Silesian-American Corporation under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Enemy nationals were said to own 49 percent of the common stock and 41.67 percent of the preferred stock of the company.
The order characterized the company as a `` business enterprise within the United States, owned by [a front company in] Zurich, Switzerland, and held for the benefit of Bergwerksgesellschaft George von Giesche's Erben, a German corporation.... ''@s2@s0
Bert Walker was still the senior director of the company, which he had founded back in 1926 simultaneously with the creation of the German Steel Trust. Ray Morris, Prescott's partner from Union Banking Corp. and Brown Brothers Harriman, was also a director.
The investigative report prior to the government crackdown explained the `` NATURE OF BUSINESS: The subject corporation is an American holding company for German and Polish subsidiaries, which own large and valuable coal and zinc mines in Silesia, Poland and Germany. Since September 1939, these properties have been in the possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country in its war effort. ''@s2@s1
The report noted that the American stockholders hoped to regain control of the European properties after the war. |
