Chapter 1 – The House of Bush: Born in a Bank
Who is George Bush? How did he become the 41st U.S. President?
He is said to be a man of the “old establishment,” who “chose to seek his fortune as an independent oilman….” @s1
In fact, Bush was never “independent.” Every career step in his upward climb relied on his family’s powerful associations. The Bush family joined the Eastern Establishment comparatively recently, and only as servitors. Their wealth and influence resulted from their loyalty to another, more powerful family, and their willingness to do anything to get ahead.
For what they did, Bush’s forebears should have become very famous, or infamous. They remained obscure figures, managers from behind the scenes. But their actions–including his father’s role as banker for Adolf Hitler–had tragic effects for the whole planet.
It was these services to his family’s benefactors, which propelled George Bush to the top.
Prescott Goes to War
President George Herbert Walker Bush was born in 1924, the son of Prescott S. Bush and Dorothy Walker Bush. We will begin the George Bush story about a decade before his birth, on the eve of World War I. We will follow the career of his father, Prescott Bush, through his marriage with Dorothy Walker, on the path to fortune, elegance and power.
Prescott Bush entered Yale University in 1913. A native of Columbus, Ohio, Prescott had spent the last five years before college in St. George’s Episcopal preparatory school in Newport, Rhode Island.
Prescott Bush’s first college year, 1913, was also the freshman year at Yale for E. Roland ( “Bunny” ) Harriman, whose older brother (Wm.) Averell Harriman had just graduated from Yale. This is the Averell Harriman who went on to fame as the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union during World War II, as a governor of New York State, and as a presidential advisor who was greatly responsible for starting the Vietnam War.
The Harrimans would become the sponsors of the Bushes, to lift them onto the stage of world history.
In the spring of 1916, Prescott Bush and “Bunny” Harriman were chosen for membership in an elite Yale senior-year secret society known as Skull and Bones. This unusually morbid, death-celebrating group helped Wall Street financiers find active young men of “good birth” to form a kind of imitation British aristocracy in America.
World War I was then raging in Europe. With the prospect that the U.S.A. would soon join the war, two Skull and Bones “Patriarchs” , Averell Harriman (class of 1913) and Percy A. Rockefeller (class of 1900), paid special attention to Prescott’s class of 1917. They wanted reliable cadres to help them play the Great Game, in the lucrative new imperial era that the war was opening up for London and New York moneycrats. Prescott Bush, by then a close friend of “Bunny” Harriman, and several other Bonesmen from their class of 1917 would later comprise the core partners in Brown Brothers Harriman, the world’s largest private investment bank.
World War I did make an immense amount of money for the clan of stock speculators and British bankers who had just taken over U.S. industry. The Harrimans were stars of this new Anglo-American elite.
Averell’s father, stock broker E.H. Harriman, had gained control of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1898 with credit arranged by William Rockefeller, Percy’s father, and by Kuhn Loeb & Co.’s British-affiliated private bankers, Otto Kahn, Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg.
William Rockefeller, treasurer of Standard Oil and brother of Standard founder John D. Rockefeller, owned National City Bank (later “Citibank” ) together with Texas-based James Stillman. In return for their backing, E.H. Harriman deposited in City Bank the vast receipts from his railroad lines. When he issued tens of millions of dollars of “watered” (fraudulent) railroad stock, Harriman sold most of the shares through the Kuhn Loeb company.
The First World War elevated Prescott Bush and his father, Samuel P. Bush, into the lower ranks of the Eastern Establishment.
As war loomed in 1914, National City Bank began reorganizing the U.S. arms industry. Percy A. Rockefeller took direct control of the Remington Arms company, appointing his own man, Samuel F. Pryor, as the new chief executive of Remington.
The U.S entered World War I in 1917. In the spring of 1918, Prescott’s father, Samuel P. Bush, became chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition Section of the War Industries Board.@s2 The senior Bush took national responsibility for government assistance to and relations with Remington and other weapons companies.
This was an unusual appointment, as Prescott’s father seemed to have no background in munitions. Samuel Bush had been president of the Buckeye Steel Castings Co. in Columbus, Ohio, makers of railcar parts. His entire career had been in the railroad business– supplying equipment to the Wall Street-owned railroad systems.
The War Industries Board was run by Bernard Baruch, a Wall Street speculator with close personal and business ties to old E.H. Harriman. Baruch’s brokerage firm had handled Harriman speculations of all kinds.@s3
In 1918, Samuel Bush became director of the Facilities Division of the War Industries Board. Prescott’s father reported to the Board’s Chairman, Bernard Baruch, and to Baruch’s assistant, Wall Street private banker Clarence Dillon.
Robert S. Lovett, President of Union Pacific Railroad, chief counsel to E.H. Harriman and executor of his will, was in charge of national production and purchase “priorities” for Baruch’s board.
With the war mobilization conducted under the supervision of the War Industries Board, U.S. consumers and taxpayers showered unprecedented fortunes on war producers and certain holders of raw materials and patents. Hearings in 1934 by the committee of U.S. Senator Gerald Nye attacked the “Merchants of Death” — war profiteers such as Remington Arms and the British Vickers company –whose salesmen had manipulated many nations into wars, and then supplied all sides with the weapons to fight them.
Percy Rockefeller and Samuel Pryor’s Remington Arms supplied machine guns and Colt automatic pistols; millions of rifles to Czarist Russia; over half of the small-arms ammunition used by the Anglo-American allies in World War I; and 69 percent of the rifles used by the United States in that conflict.@s4
Samuel Bush’s wartime relationship to these businessmen would continue after the war, and would especially aid his son Prescott’s career of service to the Harrimans.
Most of the records and correspondence of Samuel Bush’s arms- related section of the government have been burned, “to save space” in the National Archives. This matter of destroyed or misplaced records should be of concern to citizens of a constitutional republic. Unfortunately, it is a rather constant impediment with regard to researching George Bush’s background: He is certainly the most “covert” American chief executive.
Now, arms production in wartime is by necessity carried on with great security precautions. The public need not know details of the private lives of the government or industry executives involved, and a broad interrelationship between government and private-sector personnel is normal and useful.
But during the period preceding World War I, and in the war years 1914-1917 when the U.S. was still neutral, interlocking Wall Street financiers subservient to British strategy lobbied heavily, and twisted U.S. government and domestic police functions. Led by the J.P. Morgan concern, Britain’s overall purchasing agent in America, these financiers wanted a world war and they wanted the United States in it as Britain’s ally. The U.S. and British arms companies, owned by these international financiers, poured out weapons abroad in deals not subject to the scrutiny of any electorate back home. The same gentlemen, as we shall see, later supplied weapons and money to Hitler’s Nazis.
That this problem persists today, is in some respect due to the “control” over the documentation and the history of the arms traffickers.
World War I was a disaster for civilized humanity. It had terrible, unprecedented casualties, and shattering effects on the moral philosophy of Europeans and Americans.
But for a brief period, the war treated Prescott Bush rather well.
In June, 1918, just as his father took over responsibility for relations of the government with the private arms producers, Prescott went to Europe with the U.S. Army. His unit did not come near any fire until September. But on August 8, 1918, the following item appeared on the front page of Bush’s home-town newspaper:
High Military Honors Conferred on Capt. Bush
For Notable Gallantry, When Leading Allied Commanders Were Endangered, Local Man is Awarded French, English and U.S. Crosses.
International Honors, perhaps unprecedented in the life of an American soldier, have been conferred upon Captain Prescott Sheldon Bush, son of Mr. and Mrs. S.P. Bush of Columbus.
Upon young Bush … were conferred: Cross of the Legion of Honor, … Victoria Cross, … Distinguished Service Cross….
Conferring of the three decorations upon one man at one time implies recognition of a deed of rare valor and probably of great military importance as well.
From word which has reached Columbus during the last few days, it appears as if the achievement of Captain Bush well measures up to these requirements.
The incident occurred on the western front about the time the Germans were launching their great offensive of July 15…. The history of the remarkable victory scored later by the allies might have been written in another vein, but for the heroic and quick action of Captain Bush.
The … three allied leaders, Gen. [Ferdinand] Foch, Sir Douglas Haig and Gen. [John J.] Pershing … were making an inspection of American positions. Gen. Pershing had sent for Captain Bush to guide them about one sector…. Suddenly Captain Bush noticed a shell coming directly for them. He shouted a warning, suddenly drew his bolo knife, stuck it up as he would a ball bat, and parried the blow, causing the shell to glance off to the right….
Within 24 hours young Bush was notified … [that] the three allied commanders had recommended him for practically the highest honors within their gift…. Captain Bush is 23 years old, a graduate of Yale in the class of 1917. He was one of Yale’s best- known athletes … was leader of the glee club … and in his senior year was elected to the famous Skull and Bones Society….@s5
The day after this astonishing story appeared, there was a large cartoon on the editorial page. It depicted Prescott Bush as a small boy, reading a story-book about military heroism, and saying: “Gee! I wonder if anything like that could ever truly happen to a boy.” The caption below was a rehash of the batting- away- the-deadly-shell exploit, written in storybook style.@s6
Local excitement about the military “Babe Ruth” lasted just four weeks. Then this somber little box appeared on the front page:
Editor State Journal:
A cable received from my son, Prescott S. Bush, brings word that he has not been decorated, as published in the papers a month ago. He feels dreadfully troubled that a letter, written in a spirit of fun, should have been misinterpreted. He says he is no hero and asks me to make explanations. I will appreciate your kindness in publishing this letter….
Flora Sheldon Bush.
Columbus, Sept. 5.@s7
Prescott Bush later claimed that he spent “about 10 or 11 weeks” in the area of combat in France. “We were under fire there…. It was quite exciting, and of course a wonderful experience.” @s8
Prescott Bush was discharged in mid-1919, and returned for a short time to Columbus, Ohio. But his humiliation in his home town was so intense that he could no longer live there. The “war hero” story was henceforth not spoken of in his presence. Decades later, when he was an important, rich U.S. Senator, the story was whispered and puzzled over among the Congressmen.
Looking to be rescued from this ugly situation, Captain Bush went to the 1919 reunion of his Yale class in New Haven, Connecticut. Skull and Bones Patriarch Wallace Simmons, closely tied to the arms manufacturers, offered Prescott Bush a job in his St. Louis railroad equipment company. Bush took the offer and moved to St. Louis–and his destiny.
A Thoroughbred Marriage
Prescott Bush went to St. Louis to repair his troubled life. Sometime that same year, Averell Harriman made a trip there on a project which would have great consequences for Prescott. The 28- year-old Harriman, until then something of a playboy, wanted to bring his inherited money and contacts into action in the arena of world affairs.
President Theodore Roosevelt had denounced Harriman’s father for “cynicism and deep-seated corruption” and called him an “undesirable citizen.” @s9 For the still- smarting Averell to take his place among the makers and breakers of nations, he needed a financial and intelligence-gathering organization of his own. The man Harriman sought to create such an institution for him was Bert Walker, a Missouri stock broker and corporate wheeler- dealer.
George Herbert ( “Bert” ) Walker, for whom President George H.W. Bush was named, did not immediately accept Harriman’s proposal. Would Walker leave his little St. Louis empire, to try his influence in New York and Europe?
Bert was the son of a dry goods wholesaler who had thrived on imports from England.@s1@s0 The British connection had paid for Walker summer houses in Santa Barbara, California, and in Maine– “Walker’s Point” at Kennebunkport. Bert Walker had been sent to England for his prep school and college education.
By 1919 Bert Walker had strong ties to the Guaranty Trust Company in New York and to the British-American banking house J.P. Morgan and Co. These Wall Street concerns represented all the important owners of American railroads: the Morgan partners and their associates or cousins in the intermarried Rockefeller, Whitney, Harriman and Vanderbilt families.
Bert Walker was known as the midwest’s premier deal-arranger, awarding the investment capital of his international-banker contacts to the many railroads, utilities and other midwestern industries of which he and his St. Louis friends were executives or board members.
Walker’s operations were always quiet, or mysterious, whether in local or global affairs. He had long been the “power behind the throne” in the St. Louis Democratic Party, along with his crony, former Missouri Governor David R. Francis. Walker and Francis together had sufficient influence to select the party’s candidates.@s1@s1
Back in 1904, Bert Walker, David Francis, Washington University President Robert Brookings and their banker/broker circle had organized a world’s fair in St. Louis, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. In line with the old Southern Confederacy family backgrounds of many of these sponsors, the fair featured a “Human Zoo” : live natives from backward jungle regions were exhibited in special cages under the supervision of anthropologist William J. McGee.
So Averell Harriman was a natural patron for Bert Walker. Bert shared Averell’s passion for horse breeding and horse racing, and easily accommodated the Harriman family’s related social philosophy. They believed that the horses and racing stables they owned showed the way toward a sharp upgrading of the human stock–just select and mate thoroughbreds, and spurn or eliminate inferior animals.
The First World War had brought the little St. Louis oligarchy into the Confederate-slaveowner-oriented administration of President Woodrow Wilson and his advisors, Col. Edward House and Bernard Baruch.
Walker’s friend Robert Brookings got into Bernard Baruch’s War Industries Board as director of national Price Fixing (sic). David R. Francis became U.S. ambassador to Russia in 1916. As the Bolshevik Revolution broke out, we find Bert Walker busy appointing people to Francis’s staff in Petrograd.@s1@s2
Walker’s earliest activities in relation to the Soviet state are of significant interest to historians, given the activist role he was to play there together with Harriman. But Walker’s life is as covert as the rest of the Bush clan’s, and the surviving public record is extremely thin.
The 1919 Versailles peace conference brought together British imperial strategists and their American friends to make postwar global arrangements. For his own intended international adventures, Harriman needed Bert Walker the seasoned intriguer, who quietly represented many of the British-designated rulers of American politics and finance.
After two persuasion trips west by Harriman,@s1@s3 Walker at length agreed to move to New York. But he kept his father’s summer house in Kennebunkport, Maine.
Bert Walker formally organized the W.A. Harriman & Co. private bank in November 1919. Walker became the bank’s president and chief executive; Averell Harriman was chairman and controlling co-owner with his brother Roland ( “Bunny” ), Prescott Bush’s close friend from Yale; and Percy Rockefeller was a director and a founding financial sponsor.
In the autumn of 1919, Prescott Bush made the acquaintance of Bert Walker’s daughter Dorothy. They were engaged the following year, and were married in August, 1921.@s1@s4 Among the ushers and grooms at the elaborate wedding were Ellery S. James, Knight Woolley and four other fellow Skull and Bonesmen from the Yale Class of 1917.@s1@s5 The Bush-Walker extended family has gathered each summer at the “Walker country home” in Kennebunkport, from this marriage of President Bush’s parents down to the present day.
When Prescott married Dorothy, he was only a minor executive of the Simmons Co., railroad equipment suppliers, while his wife’s father was building one of the most gigantic businesses in the world. The following year the couple tried to move back to Columbus, Ohio; there Prescott worked for a short time in a rubber products company owned by his father. But they soon moved again to Milton, Mass., after outsiders bought the little family business and moved it near there.
Thus Prescott Bush was going nowhere fast, when his son George Herbert Walker Bush–the future U.S. President–was born in Milton, Mass., on June 12, 1924.
Perhaps it was as a birthday gift for George, that “Bunny” Harriman stepped in to rescue his father Prescott from oblivion, bringing him into the Harriman-controlled U.S. Rubber Co. in New York City. In 1925 the young family moved to the town where George was to grow up: Greenwich, Connecticut, a suburb both of New York and of New Haven/Yale.
Then on May 1, 1926, Prescott Bush joined W.A. Harriman & Co. as its vice president, under the bank’s president, Bert Walker, his father-in-law and George’s maternal grandfather–the head of the family.@s1@s6
The Great Game
Prescott Bush would demonstrate strong loyalty to the firm he joined in 1926. And the bank, with the scope and power of many ordinary nations, could amply reward its agents. George Bush’s Grandfather Walker had put the enterprise together, quietly, secretly, using all the international connections at his disposal. Let us briefly look back at the beginning of the Harriman firm–the Bush family enterprise–and follow its course into one of history’s darkest projects.
The firm’s first global lever was its successful arrangement to get into Germany by dominating that country’s shipping. Averell Harriman announced in 1920 that he would re-start Germany’s Hamburg- Amerika Line, after many months of scheming and arm-twisting. Hamburg-Amerika’s commercial steamships had been confiscated by the United States at the end of the First World War. These ships had then become the property of the Harriman enterprise, by some arrangements with the U.S. authorities that were never made public.
The deal was breathtaking; it would create the world’s largest private shipping line. Hamburg-Amerika Line regained its confiscated vessels, for a heavy price. The Harriman enterprise took “the right to participate in 50 percent of all business originated in Hamburg” ; and for the next twenty years (1920-1940), the Harriman enterprise had “complete control of all activities of the Hamburg line in the United States.” @s1@s7
Harriman became co-owner of Hamburg-Amerika. The Harriman-Walker firm gained a tight hold on its management, with the not-so-subtle backing of the post-World War I occupation of Germany by the armies of England and America.
Just after Harriman’s public statement, the St. Louis press celebrated Bert Walker’s role in assembling the money to consummate the deal:
“Ex-St. Louisan Forms Giant Ship Merger”
“G. H. Walker is Moving Power Behind Harriman-Morton Shipping Combine….”
The story celebrated a “merger of two big financial houses in New York, which will place practically unlimited capital at the disposal of the new American-German shipping combine….” @s1@s8
Bert Walker had arranged a “marriage” of J.P. Morgan credit and Harriman family inherited wealth.
W.A. Harriman & Co., of which Walker was president and founder, was merging with the Morton & Co. private bank–and Walker was “[p]rominent in the affairs of Morton & Co.,” which was interlocked with the Morgan-controlled Guaranty Trust Co.
The Hamburg-Amerika takeover created an effective instrument for the manipulation and fatal subversion of Germany. One of the great “merchants of death,” Samuel Pryor, was in it from the beginning. Pryor, then chairman of the executive committee of Remington Arms, helped arrange the deal and served with Walker on the board of Harriman’s shipping front organization, the American Ship and Commerce Co.
Walker and Harriman took the next giant step in 1922, setting up their European headquarters office in Berlin. With the aid of the Hamburg-based Warburg bank, W.A. Harriman & Co. began spreading an investment net over German industry and raw materials.
From the Berlin base, Walker and Harriman then plunged into deals with the new dictatorship of the Soviet Union. They led a select group of Wall Street and British Empire speculators who re-started the Russian oil industry, which had been devastated by the Bolshevik Revolution. They contracted to mine Soviet manganese, an element essential to modern steelmaking. These concessions were arranged directly with Leon Trotsky, then with Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet dictatorship’s secret intelligence service (K.G.B), whose huge statue was finally pulled down by pro-democracy demonstrators in 1991.
These speculations created both channels of communication, and the style of accomodation, with the communist dictatorship, that have continued in the family down to President Bush.
With the bank launched, Bert Walker found New York the ideal place to satisfy his passion for sports, games and gambling. Walker was elected president of the U.S. Golf Association in 1920. He negotiated new international rules for the game with the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Scotland. After these talks he contributed the three-foot-high silver Walker Cup, for which British and American teams have since competed every two years.
Bert’s son-in-law Prescott Bush was later secretary of the U.S. Golf Association, during the grave political and economic crises of the early 1930s. Prescott became USGA President in 1935, while he was otherwise embroiled in the family firm’s work with Nazi Germany.
When George was one year old, in 1925, Bert Walker and Averell Harriman headed a syndicate which rebuilt Madison Square Garden as the modern Palace of Sport. Walker was at the center of New York’s gambling scene in its heyday, in that Prohibition era of colorful and bloody gangsters. The Garden bloomed with million-dollar prize fights; bookies and their clients pooled more millions, trying to match the pace of the speculation-crazed stock and bond men. This was the era of “organized” crime–the national gambling and bootleg syndicate structured on the New York corporate model.
By 1930, when George was a boy of six, Grandpa Walker was New York State Racing Commissioner. The vivid colors and sounds of the racing scene must have impressed little George as much as his grandfather. Bert Walker bred race horses at his own stable, the Log Cabin Stud. He was president of the Belmont Park race track. Bert also personally managed most aspects of Averell’s racing interests– down to picking the colors and fabrics for the Harriman racing gear.@s1@s9
From 1926, George’s father Prescott Bush showed a fierce loyalty to the Harrimans and a dogged determination to advance himself; he gradually came to run the day-to-day operations of W.A. Harriman & Co. After the firm’s 1931 merger with the British-American banking house Brown Brothers, Prescott Bush became managing partner of the resulting company: Brown Brothers Harriman. This was ultimately the largest and politically the most important private banking house in America.
Financial collapse, world depression and social upheaval followed the fevered speculation of the 1920s. The 1929-31 crash of securities values wiped out the small fortune Prescott Bush had gained since 1926. But because of his devotion to the Harrimans, they “did a very generous thing,” as Bush later put it. They staked him to what he had lost and put him back on his feet.
Prescott Bush described his own role, from 1931 through the 1940s, in a confidential interview:
But of the “three or four” partners in charge, Prescott was effectively at the head of the firm, because he had taken over management of the gigantic personal investment funds of Averell and E. Roland “Bunny” Harriman.
In those interwar years, Prescott Bush made the family fortune which George Bush inherited. He piled up the money from an international project which continued until a new world war, and the action of the U.S. government, intervened to stop him.
Return to the Table of Contents
Notes for Chapter I
1. Washington Post, Aug. 16, 1991, p. A1.
2. Gen. Hugh S. Johnson to Major J.H.K. Davis, June 6, 1918, file no. 334.8/168 or 334.8/451 in U.S. National Archives, Suitland, Maryland.
3. Bernard M. Baruch, My Own Story (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1957), pp. 138-39. Baruch related that “our firm did a large business for Mr. Harriman…. In 1906 Harriman had [us] place heavy bets on Charles Evans Hughes in his race for Governor of New York against William Randolph Hearst. After several hundred thousand dollars had been wagered, [our firm] stopped. Hearing of this, Harriman called … up. `Didn’t I tell you to bet?’ he demanded. `Now go on.’|”
4. Alden Hatch, Remington Arms: An American History, 1956, copyright by the Remington Arms Co., pp. 224-25.
5. The Ohio State Journal, Columbus, Ohio, Thursday, Aug. 8, 1918.
6. The Ohio State Journal, Friday, Aug. 9, 1918.
7. The Ohio State Journal, Friday, Sept. 6, 1918.
8. Interview with Prescott Bush in the Oral History Research Project conducted by Columbia University in 1966, Eisenhower Administration Part II; pp. 5-6. The interview was supposed to be kept confidential and was never published, but Columbia later sold microfilms of the transcript to certain libraries, including Arizona State University.
9. Theodore Roosevelt to James S. Sherman, Oct. 6, 1906, made public by Roosevelt at a press conference April 2, 1907. Quoted in Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1931), p. 452. Roosevelt later confided to Harriman lawyer Robert S. Lovett that his views on Harriman were based on what J.P. Morgan had told him.
10. See The Industries of St. Louis, published 1885 by J.M. Elstner & Co., pp. 61-62 for Crow, Hagardine & Co., David Walker’s first business; and p. 86 for Ely & Walker.
11. See Letter of G.H. Walker to D.R. Francis, March 20, 1905, in the Francis collection of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Missouri, on the organization of the Republicans and Democrats to run the election of the mayor, a Democrat acceptable to the socially prominent. The next day Walker became the treasurer and Francis the president of this “Committee of 1000.” See also George H. Walker obituary, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, June 25, 1953.
12. Letter of Perry Francis to his father, Ambassador David R. Francis, Oct. 15, 1917, Francis collection of the Missouri Historical Society. “… Joe Miller left for San Francisco last Tuesday night, where he will receive orders to continue to Petrograd. I was told by Mildred Kotany [Walker’s sister-in-law] that Bert Walker got him his appointment through Breck Long. I didn’t know Joe was after it, or could have helped him myself. He will be good company for you when he gets there….”
13. Private interview with a Walker family member, cousin of President Bush.
14. Prescott Bush, Columbia University, op. cit., p. 7.
15. St. Louis Globe Democrat, Aug. 7, 1921. 16. This is the sequence of events, from Simmons to U.S. Rubber, which Prescott Bush gave in his Columbia University interview, op. cit.,) pp. 7-8.
17. Public statement of Averell Harriman, New York Times, Oct. 6, 1920, p. 1.
18. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Oct. 12, 1920, p. 1.
19. Sports-as-business has continued in the family up through George Bush’s adult life. Bert’s son George Walker, Jr.–President Bush’s uncle and financial angel in Texas–co-founded the New York Mets and was the baseball club’s vice president and treasurer for 17 years until his death in 1977. The President’s son, George Walker Bush, was co-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball club during his father’s presidency.
20. Prescott Bush, Columbia University, op. cit., pp. 16-22.
Chapter 2 – The Hitler Project
Bush Property Seized–Trading with the Enemy
In October 1942, ten months after entering World War II, America was preparing its first assault against Nazi military forces. Prescott Bush was managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman. His 18-year-old son George, the future U.S. President, had just begun training to become a naval pilot. On Oct. 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City which were being conducted by Prescott Bush.
Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took over the Union Banking Corporation, in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.’s stock shares, all of which were owned by Prescott Bush, E. Roland “ Bunny ” Harriman, three Nazi executives, and two other associates of Bush.@s1
The order seizing the bank “ vests ” (seizes) “ all of the capital stock of Union Banking Corporation, a New York corporation, ” and names the holders of its shares as:
- “ E. Roland Harriman–3991 shares ”
[chairman and director of Union Banking Corp. (UBC); this is “ Bunny ” Harriman, described by Prescott Bush as a place holder who didn’t get much into banking affairs; Prescott managed his personal investments]“ Cornelis Lievense–4 shares ”
[president and director of UBC; New York resident banking functionary for the Nazis]
“ Harold D. Pennington–1 share ”
[treasurer and director of UBC; an office manager employed by Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman]
“ Ray Morris–1 share ”
[director of UBC; partner of Bush and the Harrimans]
“ Prescott S. Bush–1 share ”
[director of UBC, which was co-founded and sponsored by his father-in-law George Walker; senior managing partner for E. Roland Harriman and Averell Harriman]
“ H.J. Kouwenhoven–1 share ”
[director of UBC; organized UBC as the emissary of Fritz Thyssen in negotiations with George Walker and Averell Harriman; managing director of UBC’s Netherlands affiliate under Nazi occupation; industrial executive in Nazi Germany; director and chief foreign financial executive of the German Steel Trust]
“ Johann G. Groeninger–1 share ”
[director of UBC and of its Netherlands affiliate; industrial executive in Nazi Germany]
“ all of which shares are held for the benefit of … members of the Thyssen family, [and] is property of nationals … of a designated enemy country…. ”
By Oct. 26, 1942, U.S. troops were under way for North Africa. On Oct. 28, the government issued orders seizing two Nazi front organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation.@s2
U.S. forces landed under fire near Algiers on Nov. 8, 1942; heavy combat raged throughout November. Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation, long managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on Nov. 17, 1942. In this action, the government announced that it was seizing only the Nazi interests, leaving the Nazis’ U.S. partners to carry on the business.@s3
These and other actions taken by the U.S. government in wartime were, tragically, too little and too late. President Bush’s family had already played a central role in financing and arming Adolf Hitler for his takeover of Germany; in financing and managing the buildup of Nazi war industries for the conquest of Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and in the development of Nazi genocide theories and racial propaganda, with their well-known results.
The facts presented here must be known, and their implications reflected upon, for a proper understanding of President George Herbert Walker Bush and of the danger to mankind that he represents. The President’s family fortune was largely a result of the Hitler project. The powerful Anglo-American family associations, which later boosted him into the Central Intelligence Agency and up to the White House, were his father’s partners in the Hitler project.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The order, published in obscure government record books and kept out of the news,@s4 explained nothing about the Nazis involved; only that the Union Banking Corporation was run for the “ Thyssen family ” of “ Germany and/or Hungary ”–“ nationals … of a designated enemy country. ”
By deciding that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the Union Banking Corp. were legally front men for the Nazis, the government avoided the more important historical issue: In what way were Hitler’s Nazis themselves hired, armed and instructed by the New York and London clique of which Prescott Bush was an executive manager? Let us examine the Harriman-Bush Hitler project from the 1920s until it was partially broken up, to seek an answer for that question.
Origin and Extent of the Project
Fritz Thyssen and his business partners are universally recognized as the most important German financiers of Adolf Hitler’s takeover of Germany. At the time of the order seizing the Thyssen family’s Union Banking Corp., Mr. Fritz Thyssen had already published his famous book, I Paid Hitler,@s5 admitting that he had financed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement since October 1923. Thyssen’s role as the leading early backer of Hitler’s grab for power in Germany had been noted by U.S. diplomats in Berlin in 1932.@s6 The order seizing the Bush-Thyssen bank was curiously quiet and modest about the identity of the perpetrators who had been nailed.
But two weeks before the official order, government investigators had reported secretly that “ W. Averell Harriman was in Europe sometime prior to 1924 and at that time became acquainted with Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist. ” Harriman and Thyssen agreed to set up a bank for Thyssen in New York. “ [C]ertain of [Harriman’s] associates would serve as directors…. ” Thyssen agent “ H. J. Kouwenhoven … came to the United States … prior to 1924 for conferences with the Harriman Company in this connection…. ”@s7
When exactly was “ Harriman in Europe sometime prior to 1924 ”? In fact, he was in Berlin in 1922 to set up the Berlin branch of W.A. Harriman & Co. under George Walker’s presidency.
The Union Banking Corporation was established formally in 1924, as a unit in the Manhattan offices of W.A. Harriman & Co., interlocking with the Thyssen-owned Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart (BHS) in the Netherlands. The investigators concluded that “ the Union Banking Corporation has since its inception handled funds chiefly supplied to it through the Dutch bank by the Thyssen interests for American investment. ”
Thus by personal agreement between Averell Harriman and Fritz Thyssen in 1922, W.A. Harriman & Co. (alias Union Banking Corporation) would be transferring funds back and forth between New York and the “ Thyssen interests ” in Germany. By putting up about $400,000, the Harriman organization would be joint owner and manager of Thyssen’s banking operations outside of Germany.
How important was the Nazi enterprise for which President Bush’s father was the New York banker?
The 1942 U.S. government investigative report said that Bush’s Nazi-front bank was an interlocking concern with the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works Corporation or German Steel Trust) led by Fritz Thyssen and his two brothers. After the war, Congressional investigators probed the Thyssen interests, Union Banking Corp. and related Nazi units. The investigation showed that the Vereinigte Stahlwerke had produced the following approximate proportions of total German national output:
- 50.8% of Nazi Germany’s pig iron
41.4% of Nazi Germany’s universal plate
36.0% of Nazi Germany’s heavy plate
38.5% of Nazi Germany’s galvanized sheet
45.5% of Nazi Germany’s pipes and tubes
22.1% of Nazi Germany’s wire
35.0% of Nazi Germany’s explosives.@s8
Prescott Bush became vice president of W.A. Harriman & Co. in 1926. That same year, a friend of Harriman and Bush set up a giant new organization for their client Fritz Thyssen, prime sponsor of politician Adolf Hitler. The new German Steel Trust, Germany’s largest industrial corporation, was organized in 1926 by Wall Street banker Clarence Dillon. Dillon was the old comrade of Prescott Bush’s father Sam Bush from the “ Merchants of Death ” bureau in World War I.
In return for putting up $70 million to create his organization, majority owner Thyssen gave the Dillon Read company two or more representatives on the board of the new Steel Trust.@s9
Thus there is a division of labor: Thyssen’s own confidential accounts, for political and related purposes, were run through the Walker-Bush organization; the German Steel Trust did its corporate banking through Dillon Read.
The Walker-Bush firm’s banking activities were not just politically neutral money-making ventures which happened to coincide with the aims of German Nazis. All of the firm’s European business in those days was organized around anti-democratic political forces.
In 1927, criticism of their support for totalitarianism drew this retort from Bert Walker, written from Kennebunkport to Averell Harriman: “ It seems to me that the suggestion in connection with Lord Bearsted’s views that we withdraw from Russia smacks somewhat of the impertinent…. I think that we have drawn our line and should hew to it. ”@s1@s0
Averell Harriman met with Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. A representative of the firm subsequently telegraphed good news back to his chief executive Bert Walker: “ … During these last days … Mussolini … has examined and approved our c[o]ntract 15 June. ”@s1@s1
The great financial collapse of 1929-31 shook America, Germany and Britain, weakening all governments. It also made the hard-pressed Prescott Bush even more willing to do whatever was necessary to retain his new place in the world. It was in this crisis that certain Anglo-Americans determined on the installation of a Hitler regime in Germany.
W.A. Harriman & Co., well-positioned for this enterprise and rich in assets from their German and Russian business, merged with the British-American investment house, Brown Brothers, on January 1, 1931. Bert Walker retired to his own G.H. Walker & Co. This left the Harriman brothers, Prescott Bush and Thatcher M. Brown as the senior partners of the new Brown Brothers Harriman firm. (The London, England branch of the Brown family firm continued operating under its historic name–Brown, Shipley.)
Robert A. Lovett also came over as a partner from Brown Brothers. His father, E.H. Harriman’s lawyer and railroad chief, had been on the War Industries Board with Prescott’s father. Though he remained a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, the junior Lovett soon replaced his father as chief executive of Union Pacific Railroad.
Brown Brothers had a racial tradition that fitted it well for the Hitler project! American patriots had cursed its name back in U.S. Civil War days. Brown Brothers, with offices in the U.S.A. and in England, had carried on their ships fully 75 percent of the slave cotton from the American South over to British mill owners. Now in 1931, the virtual dictator of world finance, Bank of England Governor Montagu Collet Norman, was a former Brown Brothers partner, whose grandfather had been boss of Brown Brothers during the U.S. Civil War. Montagu Norman was known as the most avid of Hitler’s supporters within British ruling circles, and Norman’s intimacy with this firm was essential to his management of the Hitler project.
In 1931, while Prescott Bush ran the New York office of Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott’s partner was Montagu Norman’s intimate friend Thatcher Brown. The Bank of England chief always stayed at the home of Prescott’s partner on his hush-hush trips to New York. Prescott Bush concentrated on the firm’s German activities, and Thatcher Brown saw to their business in old England, under the guidance of his mentor Montagu Norman.@s1@s2
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.
Control of Nazi Commerce
Bert Walker had arranged the credits Harriman needed to take control of the Hamburg-Amerika Line back in 1920. Walker had organized the American Ship and Commerce Corp. as a unit of the W.A. Harriman & Co., with contractual power over Hamburg-Amerika’s affairs.
As the Hitler project went into high gear, Harriman-Bush shares in American Ship and Commerce Corp. were held by the Harriman Fifteen Corp., run by Prescott Bush and Bert Walker.@s2@s2
It was a convenient stroll for the well-tanned, athletic, handsome Prescott Bush: From the Brown Brothers Harriman skyscraper at 59 Wall Street–where he was senior managing partner, confidential investments manager and adviser to Averell and his brother “ Bunny ”–he walked across to the Harriman Fifteen Corporation at One Wall Street, otherwise known as G.H. Walker & Co.–and around the corner to his subsidiary offices at 39 Broadway, former home of the old W.A. Harriman & Co., and still the offices for American Ship and Commerce Corp., and of the Union Banking Corporation.
In many ways, Bush’s Hamburg-Amerika Line was the pivot for the entire Hitler project.
Averell Harriman and Bert Walker had gained control over the steamship company in 1920 in negotiations with its post-World War I chief executive, Wilhelm Cuno, and with the line’s bankers, M.M. Warburg. Cuno was thereafter completely dependent on the Anglo-Americans, and became a member of the Anglo-German Friendship Society. In the 1930-32 drive for a Hitler dictatorship, Wilhelm Cuno contributed important sums to the Nazi Party.@s2@s3
Albert Voegler was chief executive of the Thyssen-Flick German Steel Trust for which Bush’s Union Banking Corp. was the New York office. He was a director of the Bush-affiliate BHS Bank in Rotterdam, and a director of the Harriman-Bush Hamburg-Amerika Line. Voegler joined Thyssen and Flick in their heavy 1930-33 Nazi contributions, and helped organize the final Nazi leap into national power.@s2@s4
The Schroeder family of bankers was a linchpin for the Nazi activities of Harriman and Prescott Bush, closely tied to their lawyers Allen and John Foster Dulles.
Baron Kurt von Schroeder was co-director of the massive Thyssen-Hu@autte foundry along with Johann Groeninger, Prescott Bush’s New York bank partner. Kurt von Schroeder was treasurer of the support organization for the Nazi Party’s private armies, to which Friedrich Flick contributed. Kurt von Schroeder and Montagu Norman’s prote@aage@aa Hjalmar Schacht together made the final arrangements for Hitler to enter the government.@s2@s5
Baron Rudolph von Schroeder was vice president and director of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. Long an intimate contact of Averell Harriman’s in Germany, Baron Rudolph sent his grandson Baron Johann Rudolph for a tour of Prescott Bush’s Brown Brothers Harriman offices in New York City in December 1932–on the eve of their Hitler-triumph.@s2@s6
Certain actions taken directly by the Harriman-Bush shipping line in 1932 must be ranked among the gravest acts of treason in this century.
The U.S. embassy in Berlin reported back to Washington that the “ costly election campaigns ” and “ the cost of maintaining a private army of 300,000 to 400,000 men ” had raised questions as to the Nazis’ financial backers. The constitutional government of the German republic moved to defend national freedom by ordering the Nazi Party private armies disbanded. The U.S. embassy reported that the Hamburg-Amerika Line was purchasing and distributing propaganda attacks against the German government, for attempting this last-minute crackdown on Hitler’s forces.@s2@s7
Thousands of German opponents of Hitlerism were shot or intimidated by privately armed Nazi Brown Shirts. In this connection we note that the original “ Merchant of Death, ” Samuel Pryor, was a founding director of both the Union Banking Corp. and the American Ship and Commerce Corp. Since Mr. Pryor was executive committee chairman of Remington Arms and a central figure in the world’s private arms traffic, his use to the Hitler project was enhanced as the Bush family’s partner in Nazi Party banking and trans-Atlantic shipping.
The U.S. Senate arms-traffic investigators probed Remington after it was joined in a cartel agreement on explosives to the Nazi firm I.G. Farben. Looking at the period leading up to Hitler’s seizure of power, the Senators found that “ German political associations, like the Nazi and others, are nearly all armed with American … guns…. Arms of all kinds coming from America are transshipped in the Scheldt to river barges before the vessels arrive in Antwerp. They then can be carried through Holland without police inspection or interference. The Hitlerists and Communists are presumed to get arms in this manner. The principal arms coming from America are Thompson submachine guns and revolvers. The number is great. ”@s2@s8
The beginning of the Hitler regime brought some bizarre changes to the Hamburg-Amerika Line–and more betrayals.
Prescott Bush’s American Ship and Commerce Corp. notified Max Warburg of Hamburg, Germany, on March 7, 1933, that Warburg was to be the corporation’s official, designated representative on the board of Hamburg-Amerika.@s2@s9
Max Warburg replied on March 27, 1933, assuring his American sponsors that the Hitler government was good for Germany: “ For the last few years business was considerably better than we had anticipated, but a reaction is making itself felt for some months. We are actually suffering also under the very active propaganda against Germany, caused by some unpleasant circumstances. These occurrences were the natural consequence of the very excited election campaign, but were extraordinarily exaggerated in the foreign press. The Government is firmly resolved to maintain public peace and order in Germany, and I feel perfectly convinced in this respect that there is no cause for any alarm whatsoever. ”@s3@s0
This seal of approval for Hitler, coming from a famous Jew, was just what Harriman and Bush required, for they anticipated rather serious “ alarm ” inside the U.S.A. against their Nazi operations.
On March 29, 1933, two days after Max’s letter to Harriman, Max’s son, Erich Warburg, sent a cable to his cousin Frederick M. Warburg, a director of the Harriman railroad system. He asked Frederick to “ use all your influence ” to stop all anti-Nazi activity in America, including “ atrocity news and unfriendly propaganda in foreign press, mass meetings, etc. ” Frederick cabled back to Erich: “ No responsible groups here [are] urging [a] boycott [of] German goods[,] merely excited individuals. ” Two days after that, On March 31, 1933, the American-Jewish Committee, controlled by the Warburgs, and the B’nai B’rith, heavily influenced by the Sulzbergers (New York Times), issued a formal, official joint statement of the two organizations, counseling “ that no American boycott against Germany be encouraged, ” and advising “ that no further mass meetings be held or similar forms of agitation be employed. ”@s3@s1
The American Jewish Committee and the B’nai B’rith (mother of the “ Anti-Defamation League ”) continued with this hardline, no-attack-on-Hitler stance all through the 1930s, blunting the fight mounted by many Jews and other anti-fascists.
Thus the decisive interchange reproduced above, taking place entirely within the orbit of the Harriman/Bush firm, may explain something of the relationship of George Bush to American Jewish and Zionist leaders. Some of them, in close cooperation with his family, played an ugly part in the drama of Naziism. Is this why “ professional Nazi-hunters ” have never discovered how the Bush family made its money?
The executive board of the Hamburg Amerika Line (Hapag) met jointly with the North German Lloyd Company board in Hamburg on Sept. 5, 1933. Under official Nazi supervision, the two firms were merged. Prescott Bush’s American Ship and Commerce Corp. installed Christian J. Beck, a long-time Harriman executive, as manager of freight and operations in North America for the new joint Nazi shipping lines (Hapag-Lloyd) on Nov. 4, 1933.
According to testimony of officials of the companies before Congress in 1934, a supervisor from the Nazi Labor Front rode with every ship of the Harriman-Bush line; employees of the New York offices were directly organized into the Nazi Labor Front organization; Hamburg-Amerika provided free passage to individuals going abroad for Nazi propaganda purposes; and the line subsidized pro-Nazi newspapers in the U.S.A., as it had done in Germany against the constitutional German government.@s3@s2
In mid-1936, Prescott Bush’s American Ship and Commerce Corp. cabled M.M. Warburg, asking Warburg to represent the company’s heavy share interest at the forthcoming Hamburg-Amerika stockholders meeting. The Warburg office replied with the information that “ we represented you ” at the stockholders meeting and “ exercised on your behalf your voting power for Rm [gold marks] 3,509,600 Hapag stock deposited with us. ”
The Warburgs transmitted a letter received from Emil Helfferich, German chief executive of both Hapag-Lloyd and of the Standard Oil subsidiary in Nazi Germany: “ It is the intention to continue the relations with Mr. Harriman on the same basis as heretofore…. ” In a colorful gesture, Hapag’s Nazi chairman Helfferich sent the line’s president across the Atlantic on a Zeppelin to confer with their New York string-pullers.
After the meeting with the Zeppelin passenger, the Harriman-Bush office replied: “ I am glad to learn that Mr. Hellferich [sic] has stated that relations between the Hamburg American Line and ourselves will be continued on the same basis as heretofore. ”@s3@s3
Two months before moving against Prescott Bush’s Union Banking Corporation, the U. S. government ordered the seizure of all property of the Hamburg-Amerika Line and North German Lloyd, under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The investigators noted in the pre-seizure report that Christian J. Beck was still acting as an attorney representing the Nazi firm.@s3@s4
In May 1933, just after the Hitler regime was consolidated, an agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The Harriman International Co., led by Averell Harriman’s first cousin Oliver, was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct all exports from Hitler Germany to the United States.@s3@s5
This pact had been negotiated in Berlin between Hitler’s economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and John Foster Dulles, international attorney for dozens of Nazi enterprises, with the counsel of Max Warburg and Kurt von Schroeder.
John Foster Dulles would later be U.S. Secretary of State, and the great power in the Republican Party of the 1950s. Foster’s friendship and that of his brother Allen (head of the Central Intelligence Agency), greatly aided Prescott Bush to become the Republican U.S. Senator from Connecticut. And it was to be of inestimable value to George Bush, in his ascent to the heights of “ covert action government, ” that both of these Dulles brothers were the lawyers for the Bush family’s far-flung enterprise.
Throughout the 1930s, John Foster Dulles arranged debt restructuring for German firms under a series of decrees issued by Adolf Hitler. In these deals, Dulles struck a balance between the interest owed to selected, larger investors, and the needs of the growing Nazi war-making apparatus for producing tanks, poison gas, etc.
Dulles wrote to Prescott Bush in 1937 concerning one such arrangement. The German-Atlantic Cable Company, owning Nazi Germany’s only telegraph channel to the United States, had made debt and management agreements with the Walker-Harriman bank during the 1920s. A new decree would now void those agreements, which had originally been reached with non-Nazi corporate officials. Dulles asked Bush, who managed these affairs for Averell Harriman, to get Averell’s signature on a letter to Nazi officials, agreeing to the changes. Dulles wrote:
Sept. 22, 1937
Mr. Prescott S. Bush
59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y.
Dear Press,
I have looked over the letter of the German-American [sic] Cable Company to Averell Harriman…. It would appear that the only rights in the matter are those which inure in the bankers and that no legal embarrassment would result, so far as the bondholders are concerned, by your acquiescence in the modification of the bankers’ agreement.
Sincerely yours,
John Foster Dulles
Dulles enclosed a proposed draft reply, Bush got Harriman’s signature, and the changes went through.@s3@s6
In conjunction with these arrangements, the German Atlantic Cable Company attempted to stop payment on its debts to smaller American bondholders. The money was to be used instead for arming the Nazi state, under a decree of the Hitler government.
Despite the busy efforts of Bush and Dulles, a New York court decided that this particular Hitler “ law ” was invalid in the United States; small bondholders, not parties to deals between the bankers and the Nazis, were entitled to get paid.@s3@s7
In this and a few other of the attempted swindles, the intended victims came out with their money. But the Nazi financial and political reorganization went ahead to its tragic climax.
For his part in the Hitler revolution, Prescott Bush was paid a fortune.
This is the legacy he left to his son, President George Bush.
An Important Historical Note:
How the Harrimans Hired Hitler
It was not inevitable that millions would be slaughtered under fascism and in World War II. At certain moments of crisis, crucial pro-Nazi decisions were made outside of Germany. These decisions for pro-Nazi actions were more aggressive than the mere “ appeasement ” which Anglo-American historians later preferred to discuss.
Private armies of 300,000 to 400,000 terrorists aided the Nazis’ rise to power. W.A. Harriman’s Hamburg-Amerika Line intervened against Germany’s 1932 attempt to break them up.
The 1929-31 economic collapse bankrupted the Wall-Street-backed German Steel Trust. When the German government took over the Trust’s stock shares, interests associated with Konrad Adenauer and the anti-Nazi Catholic Center Party attempted to acquire the shares. But the Anglo-Americans–Montagu Norman, and the Harriman-Bush bank–made sure that their Nazi puppet Fritz Thyssen regained control over the shares and the Trust. Thyssen’s bankrolling of Hitler could then continue unhindered.
Unpayable debts crushed Germany in the 1920s, reparations required by the Versailles agreements. Germany was looted by the London-New York banking system, and Hitler’s propaganda exploited this German debt burden.
But immediately after Germany came under Hitler’s dictatorship, the Anglo-American financiers granted debt relief, which freed funds to be used for arming the Nazi state.
The North German Lloyd steamship line, which was merged with Hamburg-Amerika Line, was one of the companies which stopped debt payments under a Hitler decree arranged by John Foster Dulles and Hjalmar Schacht.
Kuhn Loeb and Co.’s Felix Warburg carried out the Hitler finance plan in New York. Kuhn Loeb asked North German Lloyd bondholders to accept new lower interest steamship bonds, issued by Kuhn Loeb, in place of the better pre-Hitler bonds.
The Opposition
New York attorney Jacob Chaitkin, father of coauthor Anton Chaitkin, took the cases of many different bondholders who rejected the swindle by Harriman, Bush, Warburg, and Hitler. Representing a women who was owed $30 on an old steamship bond–and opposing John Foster Dulles in New York municipal court–Chaitkin threatened a writ from the sheriff, tying up the 30,000 ton transatlantic liner Europa until the client received her $30. (New York Times, January 10, 1934, p. 31 col. 3).
The American Jewish Congress hired Jacob Chaitkin as the legal director of the boycott against Nazi Germany. The American Federation of Labor cooperated with Jewish and other groups in the anti-import boycott. On the other side, virtually all the Nazi trade with the United States was under the supervision of the Harriman interests and functionaries such as Prescott Bush, father of President George Bush.
Meanwhile, the Warburgs demanded that American Jews not “ agitate ” against the Hitler government, or join the organized boycott. The Warburgs’ decision was carried out by the American Jewish Committee and the B’nai B’rith, who opposed the boycott as the Nazi military state grew increasingly powerful.
The historical coverup on these events is so tight that virtually the only expose@aa of the Warburgs came in journalist John L. Spivak’s “ Wall Street’s Fascist Conspiracy, ” in the pro-communist New Masses periodical (Jan. 29 and Feb. 5, 1934). Spivak pointed out that the Warburgs controlled the American Jewish Committee, which opposed the anti-Nazi boycott, while their Kuhn Loeb and Co. had underwritten Nazi shipping; and he exposed the financing of pro-fascist political activities by the Warburgs and their partners and allies, many of whom were bigwigs in the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith.
Given where the Spivak piece appeared, it is not surprising that Spivak called Warburg an ally of the Morgan Bank, but made no mention of Averell Harriman. Mr. Harriman, after all, was a permanent hero of the Soviet Union.
John L. Spivak later underwent a curious transformation, himself joining the coverup. In 1967, he wrote an autobiography (A Man in His Time, New York: Horizon Press), which praises the American Jewish Committee. The pro-fascism of the Warburgs does not appear in the book. The former “ rebel ” Spivak also praises the action arm of the B’nai B’rith, the Anti-Defamation League. Pathetically, he comments favorably that the League has spy files on the American populace which it shares with government agencies.
Thus is history erased; and those decisions, which direct history into one course or another, are lost to the knowledge of the current generation.
Return to the Table of Contents
NOTES:
1. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order No. 248. The order was signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed October 20, 1942; F.R. Doc. 42-11568; Filed, November 6, 1942, 11:31 A.M.; 7 Fed. Reg. 9097 (Nov. 7, 1942). See also the New York City Directory of Directors (available at the Library of Congress). The volumes for the 1930s and 1940s list Prescott Bush as a director of Union Banking Corporation for the years 1934 through 1943.
2. Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 259: Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation; Vesting Order No. 261: Holland-American Trading Corp.
3. Alien Property Custodian Vesting Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp.
4. The New York Times on December 16, 1944, ran a five-paragraph page 25 article on actions of the New York State Banking Department. Only the last sentence refers to the Nazi bank, as follows: “ The Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway. ”
The Times omitted the fact that the Union Banking Corporation had been seized by the government for trading with the enemy, and even the fact that 120 Broadway was the address of the government’s Alien Property Custodian.
5. Fritz Thyssen, I Paid Hitler, 1941, reprinted in (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972), p. 133. Thyssen says his contributions began with 100,000 marks given in October 1923, for Hitler’s attempted “ putsch ” against the constitutional government.
6. Confidential memorandum from U.S. embassy, Berlin, to the U.S. Secretary of State, April 20, 1932, on microfilm in Confidential Reports of U.S. State Dept., 1930s, Germany, at major U.S. libraries.
7. Oct. 5, 1942, Memorandum to the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order No. 248.
8. Elimination of German Resources for War: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs, United States Senate, Seventy-Ninth Congress; Part 5, Testimony of [the United States] Treasury Department, July 2, 1945. P. 507: Table of Vereinigte Stahlwerke output, figures are percent of German total as of 1938; Thyssen organization including Union Banking Corporation pp. 727-31.
9. Robert Sobel, The Life and Times of Dillon Read (New York: Dutton-Penguin, 1991), pp. 92-111. The Dillon Read firm cooperated in the development of Sobel’s book.
10. George Walker to Averell Harriman, Aug. 11, 1927, in the W. Averell Harriman papers at the Library of Congress (designated hereafter WAH papers).
11. “ Iaccarino ” to G. H. Walker, RCA Radiogram Sept. 12, 1927. The specific nature of their business with Mussolini is not explained in correspondence available for public access.
12. Andrew Boyle, Montagu Norman (London: Cassell, 1967).
Sir Henry Clay, Lord Norman (London, MacMillan & Co., 1957), pp. 18, 57, 70-71.
John A. Kouwenhouven, Partners in Banking … Brown Brothers Harriman (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1969).
13. Coordination of much of the Hitler project took place at a single New York address. The Union Banking Corporation had been set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway. Management of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, carried out through Harriman’s American Ship and Commerce Corp., was also set up by George Walker at 39 Broadway.
14. Interrogation of Fritz Thyssen, EF/Me/1 of Sept. 4, 1945 in U.S. Control Council records, photostat on page 167 in Anthony Sutton, An Introduction to The Order (Billings, Mt.: Liberty House Press, 1986).
15. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression–Supplement B, by the Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, United States Government Printing Office, (Washington: 1948), pp. 1597, 1686.
16. “ Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation – [minutes of the] Meeting of Board of Directors, ” Oct. 31, 1930 (Harriman papers, Library of Congress), shows Averell Harriman as Chairman of the Board.
Prescott Bush to W.A. Harriman, Memorandum Dec. 19, 1930 on their Harriman Fifteen Corp.
Annual Report of United Konigs and Laura Steel and Iron Works for the year 1930 (Harriman papers, Library of Congress) lists “ Dr. Friedrich Flick … Berlin ” and “ William Averell Harriman … New York ” on the Board of Directors.
“ Harriman Fifteen Corporation Securities Position February 28, 1931, ” Harriman papers, Library of Congress. This report shows Harriman Fifteen Corporation holding 32,576 shares in Silesian Holding Co. V.T.C. worth (in scarce depression dollars) $1,628,800, just over half the value of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation’s total holdings.
The New York City Directory of Directors volumes for the 1930s (available at the Library of Congress) show Prescott Sheldon Bush and W. Averell Harriman as the directors of Harriman Fifteen Corp.
“ Appointments, ” (three typed pages) marked “ Noted May 18 1931 W.A.H., ” (among the papers from Prescott Bush’s New York Office of Brown Brothers Harriman, Harriman papers, Library of Congress), lists a meeting between Averell Harriman and Friedrich Flick in Berlin at 4:00 P.M., Wednesday April 22, 1931. This was followed immediately by a meeting with Wilhelm Cuno, chief executive of the Hamburg-Amerika Line.
The “ Report To the Stockholders of the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, ” Oct. 19, 1933 (in the Harriman papers, Library of Congress) names G.H. Walker as president of the corporation. It shows the Harriman Fifteen Corporation’s address as 1 Wall Street–the location of G.H. Walker and Co.
17. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression–Supplement B, op. cit., p. 1686.
18. Jim Flaherty (a BBH manager, Prescott Bush’s employee), March 19, 1934 to W.A. Harriman.
- “ Dear Averell:In Roland’s absence Pres[cott] thought it advisable for me to let you know that we received the following cable from [our European representative] Rossi dated March 17th [relating to conflict with the Polish government]….”
19. Harriman Fifteen Corporation notice to stockholders Jan. 7, 1935, under the name of George Walker, President.
20. Order No. 370: Silesian-American Corp. Executed Nov. 17, 1942. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian. F.R. Doc. 42-14183; Filed Dec. 31, 1942, 11:28 A.M.; 8 Fed. Reg. 33 (Jan. 1, 1943).
The order confiscated the Nazis’ holdings of 98,000 shares of common and 50,000 shares of preferred stock in Silesian-American.
The Nazi parent company in Breslau, Germany wrote directly to Averell Harriman at 59 Wall St. on Aug. 5, 1940, with “ an invitation to take part in the regular meeting of the members of the Bergwerksgesellsc[h]aft Georg von Giesche’s Erben…. ” WAH papers.
21. Sept. 25, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order No. 370.
22. George Walker was a director of American Ship and Commerce from its organization through 1928. Consult New York City Directory of Directors.
“ Harriman Fifteen Corporation Securities Position February 28, 1931, ” op. cit. The report lists 46,861 shares in the American Ship & Commerce Corp.
See “ Message from Mr. Bullfin, ” Aug. 30, 1934 (Harriman Fifteen section, Harriman papers, Library of Congress) for the joint supervision of Bush and Walker, respectively director and president of the corporation.
23. Cuno was later exposed by Walter Funk, Third Reich Press Chief and Under Secretary of Propaganda, in Funk’s postwar jail cell at Nuremberg; but Cuno had died just as Hitler was taking power. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 144. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression–Supplement B, op. cit., p. 1688.
24. See “ Elimination of German Resources for War, ” op. cit., pp. 881-82 on Voegler.
See Annual Report of the (Hamburg-Amerikanische-Packetfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft (Hapag or Hamburg-Amerika Line), March 1931, for the board of directors. A copy is in the New York Public Library Annex at 11th Avenue, Manhattan.
25. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression–Supplement B, op. cit., pp. 1178, 1453-54, 1597, 1599.
See “ Elimination of German Resources for War, ” op. cit., pp. 870-72 on Schroeder; p. 730 on Groeninger.
26. Annual Report of Hamburg-Amerika, op. cit.
Baron Rudolph Schroeder, Sr. to Averell Harriman, Nov. 14, 1932. K[night] W[ooley] handwritten note and draft reply letter, Dec. 9, 1932.
In his letter, Baron Rudolph refers to the family’s American affiliate, J. Henry Schroder [name anglicized], of which Allen Dulles was a director, and his brother John Foster Dulles was the principal attorney.
Baron Bruno Schroder of the British branch was adviser to Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman, and Baron Bruno’s partner Frank Cyril Tiarks was Norman’s co-director of the Bank of England throughout Norman’s career. Kurt von Schroeder was Hjalmar Schacht’s delegate to the Bank for International Settlements in Geneva, where many of the financial arrangements for the Nazi regime were made by Montagu Norman, Schacht and the Schroeders for several years of the Hitler regime right up to the outbreak of World War II.
27. Confidential memorandum from U.S. embassy, Berlin, op. cit.
28. U.S. Senate “ Nye Committee ” hearings, Sept. 14, 1934, pp. 1197-98, extracts from letters of Col. William N. Taylor, dated June 27, 1932 and Jan. 9, 1933.
29. American Ship and Commerce Corporation to Dr. Max Warburg, March 7, 1933.
Max Warburg had brokered the sale of Hamburg-Amerika to Harriman and Walker in 1920. Max’s brothers controlled the Kuhn Loeb investment banking house in New York, the firm which had staked old E.H. Harriman to his 1890s buyout of the giant Union Pacific Railroad.
Max Warburg had long worked with Lord Milner and others of the racialist British Round Table concerning joint projects in Africa and Eastern Europe. He was an advisor to Hjalmar Schacht for several decades and was a top executive of Hitler’s Reichsbank. The reader may consult David Farrer, The Warburgs: The Story of A Family (New York: Stein and Day, 1975).
30. Max Warburg, at M.M. Warburg and Co., Hamburg, to Averill [sic] Harriman, c/o Messrs. Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., 59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y., March 27, 1933.
31. This correspondence, and the joint statement of the Jewish organizations, are reproduced in Moshe R. Gottlieb, American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933-41: An Historical Analysis (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1982).
32. Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities: Public Hearings before A Subcommittee of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, United States House of Representatives, Seventy Third Congress, New York City, July 9-12, 1934–Hearings No. 73-NY-7 (Washington: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 1934). See testimony of Capt. Frederick C. Mensing, John Schroeder, Paul von Lilienfeld-Toal, and summaries by Committee members.
See New York Times, July 16, 1933, p. 12, for organizing of Nazi Labor Front at North German Lloyd, leading to Hamburg-Amerika after merger.
33. American Ship and Commerce Corporation telegram to Rudolph Brinckmann at M.M. Warburg, June 12, 1936.
Rudolph Brinckmann to Averell Harriman at 59 Wall St., June 20, 1936, with enclosed note transmitting Helfferich’s letter.
Reply to Dr. Rudolph Brinckmann c/o M.M. Warburg and Co, July 6, 1936, in the Harriman papers at the Library of Congress. The file copy of this letter carries no signature, but is presumably from Averell Harriman.
34. Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order No. 126. Signed by Leo T. Crowley, Alien Property Custodian, executed August 28, 1942. F.R. Doc. 42-8774; Filed September 4, 1942, 10:55 A.M.; 7 F.R. 7061 (No. 176, Sept. 5, 1942.) July 18, 1942, Memorandum To the Executive Committee of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, from the Division of Investigation and Research, Homer Jones, Chief. Now declassified in United States National Archives, Suitland, Maryland annex. See Record Group 131, Alien Property Custodian, investigative reports, in file box relating to Vesting Order No. 126.
35. New York Times, May 20, 1933. Leading up to this agreement is a telegram which somehow escaped the shredder and may be seen in the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress. It is addressed to Nazi official Hjalmar Schacht at the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, dated May 11, 1933: “ Much disappointed to have missed seeing you Tuesday afternoon…. I hope to see you either in Washington or New York before you sail.
with my regards W.A. Harriman ”
36. Dulles to Bush letter and draft reply in WAH papers.
37. New York Times, Jan. 19, 1938.
Chapter 3 – Race Hygiene: Three Bush Family Alliances
- “The [government] must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge…. Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children…. The prevention of the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the physically degenerate and mentally sick, over a period of only 600 years, would … free humanity from an immeasurable misfortune.”“The per capita income gap between the developed and the developing countries is increasing, in large part the result of higher birth rates in the poorer countries…. Famine in India, unwanted babies in the United States, poverty that seemed to form an unbreakable chain for millions of people–how should we tackle these problems?…. It is quite clear that one of the major challenges of the 1970s … will be to curb the world’s fertility.”
These two quotations are alike in their mock show of concern for human suffering, and in their cynical remedy for it: Big Brother must prevent the “ unworthy ” or “ unwanted ” people from living.
Let us now further inquire into the family background of our President, so as to help illustrate how the second quoted author, George Bush@s1 came to share the outlook of the first, Adolf Hitler.@s2
We shall examine here the alliance of the Bush family with three other families: Farish, Draper and Gray.
The private associations among these families have led to the President’s relationship to his closest, most confidential advisers. These alliances were forged in the earlier Hitler project and its immediate aftermath. Understanding them will help us to explain George Bush’s obsession with the supposed overpopulation of the world’s non-Anglo-Saxons, and the dangerous means he has adopted to deal with this “ problem. ”
Bush and Farish
When George Bush was elected Vice President in 1980, Texas mystery man William (“ Will ”) Stamps Farish III took over management of all of George Bush’s personal wealth in a “ blind trust. ” Known as one of the richest men in Texas, Will Farish keeps his business affairs under the most intense secrecy. Only the source of his immense wealth is known, not its employment.@s3
Will Farish has long been Bush’s closest friend and confidante. He is also the unique private host to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II: Farish owns and boards the studs which mate with the Queen’s mares. That is her public rationale when she comes to America and stays in Farish’s house. It is a vital link in the mind of our Anglophile President.
President Bush can count on Will Farish not to betray the violent secrets surrounding the Bush family money. For Farish’s own family fortune was made in the same Hitler project, in a nightmarish partnership with George Bush’s father.
On March 25, 1942, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Thurman Arnold announced that William Stamps Farish (grandfather of the President’s money manager) had pled “ no contest ” to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis. Farish was the principal manager of a worldwide cartel between Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey and the I.G. Farben concern. The merged enterprise had opened the Auschwitz slave labor camp on June 14, 1940, to produce artificial rubber and gasoline from coal. The Hitler government supplied political opponents and Jews as the slaves, who were worked to near death and then murdered.
Arnold disclosed that Standard Oil of N.J. (later known as Exxon), of which Farish was president and chief executive, had agreed to stop hiding from the United States patents for artificial rubber which the company had provided to the Nazis.@s4
A Senate investigating committee under Senator (later U.S. President) Harry Truman of Missouri had called Arnold to testify at hearings on U.S. corporations’ collaboration with the Nazis. The Senators expressed outrage at the cynical way Farish was continuing an alliance with the Hitler regime that had begun back in 1933, when Farish became chief of Jersey Standard. Didn’t he know there was a war on?
The Justice Department laid before the committee a letter, written to Standard president Farish by his vice president, shortly after the beginning of World War II (Sept. 1, 1939) in Europe. The letter concerned a renewal of their earlier agreements with the Nazis:
- Report on European Trip
- Very truly yours, F[rank] A. Howard@s5
Oct. 12, 1939
Mr. W.S. Farish
30 Rockefeller PlazaDear Mr. Farish: … I stayed in France until Sept. 17th…. In England I met by appointment the Royal Dutch [Shell Oil Co.] gentlemen from Holland, and … a general agreement was reached on the necessary changes in our relations with the I.G. [Farben], in view of the state of war…. [T]he Royal Dutch Shell group is essentially British…. I also had several meetings with … the [British] Air Ministry….
I required help to obtain the necessary permission to go to Holland…. After discussions with the [American] Ambassador [Joseph Kennedy] … the situation was cleared completely…. The gentlemen in the Air Ministry … very kindly offered to assist me [later] in reentering England….
Pursuant to these arrangements, I was able to keep my appointments in Holland [having flown there on a British Royal Air Force bomber], where I had three days of discussion with the representatives of I.G. They delivered to me assignments of some 2,000 foreign patents and we did our best to work out complete plans for a modus vivendi which could operate through the term of the war, whether or not the U.S. came in…. [emphasis added]
Here are some cold realities behind the tragedy of World War II, which help explain the Bush-Farish family alliance–and their peculiar closeness to the Queen of England:
Uncle Sam would not seize Prescott Bush’s Union Banking Corporation for another seven months.
The Bush-Farish axis had begun back in 1929. In that year the Harriman bank bought Dresser Industries, supplier of oil-pipeline couplers to Standard and other companies. Prescott Bush became a director and financial czar of Dresser, installing his Yale classmate Neil Mahlon as chairman.@s7 George Bush would later name one of his sons after the Dresser executive.
William S. Farish was the main organizer of the Humble Oil Co. of Texas, which Farish merged into the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Farish built up the Humble-Standard empire of pipelines and refineries in Texas.@s8
The stock market crashed just after the Bush family got into the oil business. The world financial crisis led to the merger of the Walker-Harriman bank with Brown Brothers in 1931. Former Brown partner Montagu Norman and his prote@aage@aa Hjalmar Schacht paid frantic visits to New York that year and the next, preparing the new Hitler regime for Germany.
The most important American political event in those preparations for Hitler was the infamous “ Third International Congress on Eugenics, ” held at New York’s American Museum of Natural History August 21-23, 1932, supervised by the International Federation of Eugenics Societies.@s9 This meeting took up the stubborn persistence of African-Americans and other allegedly “ inferior ” and “ socially inadequate ” groups in reproducing, expanding their numbers, and amalgamating with others. It was recommended that these “ dangers ” to the “ better ” ethnic groups and to the “ well-born, ” could be dealt with by sterilization or “ cutting off the bad stock ” of the “ unfit. ”
Italy’s fascist government sent an official representative. Averell Harriman’s sister Mary, director of “ Entertainment ” for the Congress, lived down in Virginia fox-hunting country; her state supplied the speaker on “ racial purity, ” W.A. Plecker, Virginia commissioner of vital statistics. Plecker reportedly held the delegates spellbound with his account of the struggle to stop race-mixing and inter-racial sex in Virginia.
The Congress proceedings were dedicated to Averell Harriman’s mother; she had paid for the founding of the race-science movement in America back in 1910, building the Eugenics Record Office as a branch of the Galton National Laboratory in London. She and other Harrimans were usually escorted to the horse races by old George Herbert Walker–they shared with the Bushes and the Farishes a fascination with “ breeding thoroughbreds ” among horses and humans.@s1@s0
Averell Harriman personally arranged with the Walker/Bush Hamburg-Amerika Line to transport Nazi ideologues from Germany to New York for this meeting.@s1@s1 The most famous among those transported was Dr. Ernst Ru@audin, psychiatrist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography in Berlin, where the Rockefeller family paid for Dr. Ru@audin to occupy an entire floor with his eugenics “ research. ” Dr. Ru@audin had addressed the International Federation’s 1928 Munich meeting, speaking on “ Mental Aberration and Race Hygiene, ” while others (Germans and Americans) spoke on race-mixing and sterilization of the unfit. Ru@audin had also led the German delegation to the 1930 Mental Hygiene Congress in Washington, D.C.
At the Harrimans’ 1932 New York Eugenics Congress, Ernst Ru@audin was unanimously elected president of the International Federation of Eugenics Societies. This was recognition of Ru@audin as founder of the German Society for Race Hygiene, with his co-founder, Eugenics Federation vice president Alfred Plo@autz.
As depression-maddened financiers schemed in Berlin and New York, Ru@audin was now official leader of the world eugenics movement. Components of his movement included groups with overlapping leadership, dedicated to:
Before the Auschwitz death camp became a household word, these British-American-European groups called openly for the elimination of the “ unfit ” by means including force and violence.@s1@s2
Ten months later, in June 1933, Hitler’s interior minister Wilhelm Frick spoke to a eugenics meeting in the new Third Reich. Frick called the Germans a “ degenerate ” race, denouncing one-fifth of Germany’s parents for producing “ feeble-minded ” and “ defective ” children. The following month, on a commission by Frick, Dr. Ernst Ru@audin wrote the “ Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Posterity, ” the sterilization law modeled on previous U.S. statutes in Virginia and other states.
Special courts were soon established for the sterilization of German mental patients, the blind, the deaf and alcoholics. A quarter million people in these categories were sterilized. Ru@audin, Plo@autz and their colleagues trained a whole generation of physicians and psychiatrists–as sterilizers and as killers.
When the war started, the eugenicists, doctors and psychiatrists staffed the new “ T4 ” agency, which planned and supervised the mass killings: first at “ euthanasia centers, ” where the same categories which had first been subject to sterilization were now to be murdered, their brains sent in lots of 200 to experimental psychiatrists; then at slave camps such as Auschwitz; and finally, for Jews and other race victims, at straight extermination camps in Poland, such as Treblinka and Belsen.@s1@s3
In 1933, as what Hitler called his “ New Order ” appeared, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. appointed William S. Farish the chairman of Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey (in 1937 he was made president and chief executive). Farish moved his offices to Rockefeller Center, New York, where he spent a good deal of time with Hermann Schmitz, chairman of I.G. Farben; his company paid a publicity man, Ivy Lee, to write pro-I.G. Farben and pro-Nazi propaganda and get it into the U.S. press.
Now that he was outside of Texas, Farish found himself in the shipping business–like the Bush family. He hired Nazi German crews for Standard Oil tankers. And he hired Emil Helfferich, chairman of the Walker/Bush/Harriman Hamburg-Amerika Line, as chairman also of the Standard Oil Company subsidiary in Germany. Karl Lindemann, board member of Hamburg-Amerika, also became a top Farish-Standard executive in Germany.@s1@s4
This interlock between their Nazi German operations put Farish together with Prescott Bush in a small, select group of men operating from abroad through Hitler’s “ revolution, ” and calculating that they would never be punished.
In 1939, Farish’s daughter Martha married Averell Harriman’s nephew, Edward Harriman Gerry, and Farish in-laws became Prescott Bush’s partners at 59 Broadway.@s1@s5
Both Emil Helfferich and Karl Lindemann were authorized to write checks to Heinrich Himmler, chief of the Nazi S.S., on a special Standard Oil account. This account was managed by the German-British-American banker, Kurt von Schroeder. According to U.S. intelligence documents reviewed by author Anthony Sutton, Emil Helfferich continued his payments to the S.S. into 1944, when the S.S. was supervising the mass murder at the Standard-I.G. Farben Auschwitz and other death camps. Helfferich told Allied interrogators after the war that these were not his personal contributions–they were corporate Standard Oil funds.@s1@s6
After pleading “ no contest ” to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis, William Stamps Farish was fined $5,000. (Similar fines were levied against Standard Oil–$5,000 each for the parent company and for several subsidiaries.) This of course did not interfere with the millions of dollars that Farish had acquired in conjunction with Hitler’s New Order, as a large stockholder, chairman and president of Standard Oil. All the government sought was the use of patents which his company had given to the Nazis–the Auschwitz patents–but had withheld from the U.S. military and industry.
But a war was on, and if young men were to be asked to die fighting Hitler … something more was needed. Farish was hauled before the Senate committee investigating the national defense program. The committee chairman, Senator Harry Truman, told newsmen before Farish testified: “ I think this approaches treason. ”@s1@s7
Farish began breaking apart at these hearings. He shouted his “ indignation ” at the Senators, and claimed he was not “ disloyal. ”
After the March-April hearings ended, more dirt came gushing out of the Justice Department and the Congress on Farish and Standard Oil. Farish had deceived the U.S. Navy to prevent the Navy from acquiring certain patents, while supplying them to the Nazi war machine; meanwhile, he was supplying gasoline and tetraethyl lead to Germany’s submarines and air force. Communications between Standard and I.G. Farben from the outbreak of World War II were released to the Senate, showing that Farish’s organization had arranged to deceive the U.S. government into passing over Nazi-owned assets: They would nominally buy I.G.’s share in certain patents because “ in the event of war between ourselves and Germany … it would certainly be very undesirable to have this 20 percent Standard-I.G. pass to an alien property custodian of the U.S. who might sell it to an unfriendly interest. ”@s1@s8
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (father of David, Nelson and John D. Rockefeller III), controlling owner of Standard Oil, told the Roosevelt administration that he knew nothing of the day-to-day affairs of his company, that all these matters were handled by Farish and other executives.@s1@s9
In August, Farish was brought back for more testimony. He was now frequently accused of lying. Farish was crushed under the intense, public grilling; he became morose, ashen. While Prescott Bush escaped publicity when the government seized his Nazi banking organization in October, Farish had been nailed. He collapsed and died of a heart attack on Nov. 29, 1942.
The Farish family was devastated by the exposure. Son William Stamps Farish, Jr., a lieutenant in the Army Air Force, was humiliated by the public knowledge that his father was fueling the enemy’s aircraft; he died in a training accident in Texas six months later.@s2@s0
With this double death, the fortune comprising much of Standard Oil’s profits from Texas and Nazi Germany was now to be settled upon the little four-year-old grandson, William (“ Will ”) Stamps Farish III. Will Farish grew up a recluse, the most secretive multi-millionaire in Texas, with investments of “ that money ” in a multitude of foreign countries, and a host of exotic contacts overlapping the intelligence and financial worlds–particularly in Britain.
The Bush-Farish axis started George Bush’s career. After his 1948 graduation from Yale (and Skull and Bones), George Bush flew down to Texas on a corporate airplane and was employed by his father’s Dresser Industries. In a couple of years he got help from his uncle, George Walker, Jr., and Farish’s British banker friends, to set him up in the oil property speculation business. Soon thereafter, George Bush founded the Zapata Oil Company, which put oil drilling rigs into certain locations of great strategic interest to the Anglo-American intelligence community.
Will Farish at 25 years old was a personal aide to Zapata chairman George Bush in Bush’s unsuccessful 1964 campaign for Senate. Will Farish used “ that Auschwitz money ” to back George Bush financially, investing in Zapata. When Bush was elected to Congress in 1966, Farish joined the Zapata board.@s2@s1
When George Bush became U.S. Vice President in 1980, the Farish and Bush family fortunes were again completely, secretly commingled. As we shall see, the old projects were now being revived on a breathtaking scale.
Bush and Draper
Twenty years before he was U.S. President, George Bush brought two “ race-science ” professors in front of the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population. As chairman of the Task Force, then-Congressman Bush invited Professors William Shockley and Arthur Jensen to explain to the committee how allegedly runaway birth-rates for African-Americans were “ down-breeding ” the American population.
Afterwards Bush personally summed up for the Congress the testimony his black-inferiority advocates had given to the Task Force.@s2@s2 George Bush held his hearings on the threat posed by black babies on August 5, 1969, while much of the world was in a better frame of mind–celebrating mankind’s progress from the first moon landing 16 days earlier. Bush’s obsessive thinking on this subject was guided by his family’s friend, Gen. William H. Draper, Jr., the founder and chairman of the Population Crisis Committee, and vice chairman of the Planned Parenthood Federation. Draper had long been steering U.S. public discussion about the so-called “ population bomb ” in the non-white areas of the world.
If Congressman Bush had explained to his colleagues how his family had come to know General Draper, they would perhaps have felt some alarm, or even panic, and paid more healthy attention to Bush’s presentation. Unfortunately, the Draper-Bush population doctrine is now official U.S. foreign policy.
William H. Draper, Jr. had joined the Bush team in 1927, when he was hired by Dillon Read & Co., New York investment bankers. Draper was put into a new job slot at the firm: handling the Thyssen account.
We recall that in 1924, Fritz Thyssen set up his Union Banking Corporation in George Herbert Walker’s bank at 39 Broadway, Manhattan. Dillon Read & Co.’s boss, Clarence Dillon, had begun working with Fritz Thyssen sometime after Averell Harriman first met with Thyssen–at about the time Thyssen began financing Adolf Hitler’s political career.
In January 1926, Dillon Read created the German Credit and Investment Corporation in Newark, New Jersey and Berlin, Germany, as Thyssen’s short-term banker. That same year Dillon Read created the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (German Steel Trust), incorporating the Thyssen family interests under the direction of New York and London finance.@s2@s3
William H. Draper, Jr. was made director, vice president and assistant treasurer of the German Credit and Investment Corp. His business was short-term loans and financial management tricks for Thyssen and the German Steel Trust. Draper’s clients sponsored Hitler’s terroristic takeover; his clients led the buildup of the Nazi war industry; his clients made war against the United States. The Nazis were Draper’s direct partners in Berlin and New Jersey: Alexander Kreuter, residing in Berlin, was president; Frederic Brandi, whose father was a top coal executive in the German Steel Trust, moved to the U.S. in 1926 and served as Draper’s co-director in Newark.
Draper’s role was crucial for Dillon Read & Co., for whom Draper was a partner and eventually vice president. The German Credit and Investment Corp. (GCI) was a “ front ” for Dillon Read: It had the same New Jersey address as U.S. & International Securities Corp. (USIS), and the same man served as treasurer of both firms.@s2@s4
Clarence Dillon and his son C. Douglas Dillon were directors of USIS, which was spotlighted when Clarence Dillon was hauled before the Senate Banking Committee’s famous “ Pecora ” hearings in 1933. USIS was shown to be one of the great speculative pyramid schemes which had swindled stockholders of hundreds of millions of dollars. These investment policies had rotted the U.S. economy to the core, and led to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
But William H. Draper, Jr.’s GCI “ front ” was not apparently affiliated with the USIS “ front ” or with Dillon, and the GCI escaped the Congressmen’s limited scrutiny. This oversight was to prove most unfortunate, particularly to the 50 million people who subsequently died in World War II.
Dillon Read hired public relations man Ivy Lee to prepare their executives for their testimony and to confuse and further baffle the Congressmen.@s2@s5 Lee apparently took enough time out from his duties as image-maker for William S. Farish and the Nazi I.G. Farben Co.; he managed the congressional thinking so that the Congressmen did not disturb the Draper operation in Germany–and did not meddle with Thyssen, or interfere with Hitler’s U.S. moneymen.
Thus in 1932, William H. Draper, Jr. was free to finance the International Eugenics Congress as a “ Supporting Member ”.@s2@s6 Was he using his own income as a Thyssen trust banker? Or did the funds come from Dillon Read corporate accounts, perhaps to be written off income tax as “ expenses for German project: race purification ”? Draper helped select Ernst Ru@audin as chief of the world eugenics movement, who used his office to promote what he called Adolf Hitler’s “ holy, national and international racial hygienic mission. ”@s2@s7
W.S. Farish, as we have seen, was publicly exposed in 1942, humiliated and destroyed. Just before Farish died, Prescott Bush’s Nazi banking office was quietly seized and shut down. But Prescott’s close friend and partner in the Thyssen-Hitler business, William H. Draper, Jr., neither died nor moved out of German affairs. Draper listed himself as a director of the German Credit and Investment Corp. through 1942, and the firm was not liquidated until November 1943.@s2@s8 But a war was on; Draper, a colonel from previous military service, went off to the Pacific theater and became a general.
General Draper apparently had a hobby: magic–illusions, sleight of hand, etc.–and he was a member of the Society of American Magicians. This is not irrelevant to his subsequent career.
The Nazi regime surrendered in May 1945. In July 1945, General Draper was called to Europe by the American military government authorities in Germany. Draper was appointed head of the Economics Division of the U.S. Control Commission. He was assigned to take apart the Nazi corporate cartels. There is an astonishing but perfectly logical rationale to this–Draper knew a lot about the subject! General Draper, who had spent about 15 years financing and managing the dirtiest of the Nazi enterprises, was now authorized to decide who was exposed, who lost and who kept his business, and in practical effect, who was prosecuted for war crimes.@s2@s9
(Draper was not unique within the postwar occupation government. Consider the case of John J. McCloy, U.S. Military Governor and High Commissioner of Germany, 1949-1952. Under instructions from his Wall Street law firm, McCloy had lived for a year in Italy, serving as an advisor to the fascist government of Benito Mussolini. An intimate collaborator of the Harriman/Bush bank, McCloy had sat in Adolf Hitler’s box at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, at the invitation of Nazi chieftains Rudolf Hess and Hermann Go@auring.)@s3@s0
William H. Draper, Jr., as a “ conservative, ” was paired with the “ liberal ” U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau in a vicious game. Morgenthau demanded that Germany be utterly destroyed as a nation, that its industry be dismantled and it be reduced to a purely rural country. As the economic boss in 1945 and 1946, Draper “ protected ” Germany from the Morgenthau Plan … but at a price.
Draper and his colleagues demanded that Germany and the world accept the collective guilt of the German people as the explanation for the rise of Hitler’s New Order, and the Nazi war crimes. This, of course, was rather convenient for General Draper himself, as it was for the Bush family. It is still convenient decades later, allowing Prescott’s son, President Bush, to lecture Germany on the danger of Hitlerism. Germans are too slow, it seems, to accept his New World Order.
After several years of government service (often working directly for Averell Harriman in the North Atlantic Alliance), General Draper was appointed in 1958 chairman of a committee which was to advise President Dwight Eisenhower on the proper course for U.S. military aid to other countries. At that time, Prescott Bush was a U.S. Senator from Connecticut, a confidential friend and golf partner with National Security Director Gordon Gray, and an important golf partner with Dwight Eisenhower as well. Prescott’s old lawyer from the Nazi days, John Foster Dulles, was Secretary of State, and his brother Allen Dulles, formerly of the Schroder bank, was head of the CIA.
This friendly environment emboldened General Draper to pull off a stunt with his military aid advisory committee. He changed the subject under study. The following year the Draper committee recommended that the U.S. government react to the supposed threat of the “ population explosion ” by formulating plans to depopulate the poorer countries. The growth of the world’s non-white population, he proposed, should be regarded as dangerous to the national security of the United States!@s3@s1
President Eisenhower rejected the recommendation. But in the next decade, General Draper founded the “ Population Crisis Committee ” and the “ Draper Fund, ” joining with the Rockefeller and Du Pont families to promote eugenics as “ population control. ” The administration of President Lyndon Johnson, advised by General Draper on the subject, began financing birth control in the tropical countries through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
General Draper was George Bush’s guru on the population question.@s3@s2 But there was also Draper’s money–from that uniquely horrible source–and Draper’s connections on Wall Street and abroad. Draper’s son and heir, William H. Draper III, was co-chairman for finance (chief of fundraising) of the Bush-for-President national campaign organization in 1980. With George Bush in the White House, the younger Draper heads up the depopulation activities of the United Nations throughout the world.
General Draper was vice president of Dillon Read until 1953. During the 1950s and 1960s, the chief executive there was Frederic Brandi, the German who was Draper’s co-director for the Nazi investments and his personal contact man with the Nazi German Steel Trust. Nicholas Brady was Brandi’s partner from 1954, and replaced him as the firm’s chief executive in 1971. Nicholas Brady, who knows where all the bodies are buried, was chairman of his friend George Bush’s 1980 election campaign in New Jersey, and has been United States Treasury Secretary throughout Bush’s presidency.@s3@s3
Bush and Gray
The U.S. Agency for International Development says that surgical sterilization is the Bush administration’s “ first choice ” method of population reduction in the Third World.@s3@s4
The United Nations Population Fund claims that 37 percent of contraception users in Ibero-America and the Caribbean have already been surgically sterilized. In a 1991 report, William H. Draper III’s agency asserts that 254 million couples will be surgically sterilized over the course of the 1990s; and that if present trends continue, 80 percent of the women in Puerto Rico and Panama will be surgically sterilized.@s3@s5
The U.S. government pays directly for these sterilizations.
Mexico is first among targeted nations, on a list which was drawn up in July 1991, at a USAID strategy session. India and Brazil are second and third priorities, respectively.
On contract with the Bush administration, U.S. personnel are working from bases in Mexico to perform surgery on millions of Mexican men and women. The acknowledged strategy in this program is to sterilize those young adults who have not already completed their families.
George Bush has a rather deep-seated personal feeling about this project, in particular as it pits him against Pope John Paul II in Catholic countries such as Mexico. (See Chapter 4 below, on the origin of a Bush family grudge in this regard.)
The spending for birth control in the non-white countries is one of the few items that is headed upwards in the Bush administration budget. As its 1992 budget was being set, USAID said its Population Account would receive $300 million, a 20 percent increase over the previous year. Within this project, a significant sum is spent on political and psychological manipulations of target nations, and rather blatant subversion of their religions and governments.@s3@s6
These activities might be expected to cause serious objections from the victimized nationalities, or from U.S. taxpayers, especially if the program is somehow given widespread publicity.
Quite aside from moral considerations, legal questions would naturally arise, which could be summed up: How does George Bush think he can get away with this?
In this matter the President has expert advice. Mr. (Clayland) Boyden Gray has been counsel to George Bush since the 1980 election. As chief legal officer in the White House, Boyden Gray can walk the President through the dangers and complexities of waging such unusual warfare against Third World populations. Gray knows how these things are done.
When Boyden Gray was four and five years old, his father organized the pilot project for the present worldwide sterilization program, from the Gray family household in North Carolina.
It started in 1946. The eugenics movement was looking for a way to begin again in America.
Nazi death camps such as Auschwitz had just then seared the conscience of the world. The Sterilization League of America, which had changed its name during the war to “ Birthright, Inc., ” wanted to start up again. First they had to overcome public nervousness about crackpots proposing to eliminate “ inferior ” and “ defective ” people. The League tried to surface in Iowa, but had to back off because of negative publicity: A little boy had recently been sterilized there and had died from the operation.
They decided on North Carolina, where the Gray family could play the perfect host. Through British imperial contacts, Boyden Gray’s grandfather, Bowman Gray, had become principal owner of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. Boyden’s father, Gordon Gray, had recently founded the Bowman Gray (memorial) Medical School in Winston-Salem, using his inherited cigarette stock shares. The medical school was already a eugenics center.
As the experiment began, Gordon Gray’s great aunt, Alice Shelton Gray, who had raised him from childhood, was living in his household. Aunt Alice had founded the “ Human Betterment League, ” the North Carolina branch of the national eugenical sterilization movement.
Aunt Alice was the official supervisor of the 1946-47 experiment. Working under Miss Gray was Dr. Claude Nash Herndon, whom Gordon Gray had made assistant professor of “ medical genetics ” at Bowman Gray Medical School.
Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Proctor and Gamble soap fortune, was the sterilizers’ national field operations chief.
The experiment worked as follows. All children enrolled in the school district of Winston-Salem, N.C., were given a special “ intelligence test. ” Those children who scored below a certain arbitrary low mark were then cut open and surgically sterilized.
We quote now from the official story of the project@s3@s7:
- In Winston-Salem and in [nearby] Orange County, North Carolina, the [Sterilization League’s] field committee had participated in testing projects to identify school age children who should be considered for sterilization. The project in Orange County was conducted by the University of North Carolina and was financed by a `Mr. Hanes,’ a friend of Clarence Gamble and supporter of the field work project in North Carolina. The Winston-Salem project was also financed by Hanes. ” [“ Hanes ” was underwear mogul James Gordon Hanes, a trustee of Bowman Gray Medical School and treasurer of Alice Gray’s group]….The medical school had a long history of interest in eugenics and had compiled extensive histories of families carrying inheritable disease. In 1946, Dr. C. Nash Herndon … made a statement to the press on the use of sterilization to prevent the spread of inheritable diseases….
The first step after giving the mental tests to grade school children was to interpret and make public the results. In Orange County the results indicated that three percent of the school age children were either insane or feebleminded…. [Then] the field committee hired a social worker to review each case … and to present any cases in which sterilization was indicated to the State Eugenics Board, which under North Carolina law had the authority to order sterilization….
Race science experimenter Dr. Claude Nash Herndon provided more details in an interview in 1990.@s3@s8
- Alice Gray was the general supervisor of the project. She and Hanes sent out letters promoting the program to the commissioners of all 100 counties in North Carolina…. What did I do? Nothing besides riding herd on the whole thing! The social workers operated out of my office. I was at the time also director of outpatient services at North Carolina Baptist Hospital. We would see the [targeted] parents and children there…. I.Q. tests were run on all the children in the Winston-Salem public school system. Only the ones who scored really low [were targeted for sterilization], the real bottom of the barrel, like below 70.Did we do sterilizations on young children? Yes. This was a relatively minor operation…. It was usually not until the child was eight or ten years old. For the boys, you just make an incision and tie the tube…. We more often performed the operation on girls than with boys. Of course, you have to cut open the abdomen, but again, it is relatively minor.
Dr. Herndon remarked coolly that “ we had a very good relationship with the press ” for the project. This is not surprising, since Gordon Gray owned the Winston-Salem Journal, the Twin City Sentinel and radio station WSJS.
In 1950 and 1951, John Foster Dulles, then chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, led John D. Rockefeller III on a series of world tours, focusing on the need to stop the expansion of the non-white populations. In November 1952, Dulles and Rockefeller set up the Population Council, with tens of millions of dollars from the Rockefeller family.
At that point, the American Eugenics Society, still cautious from the recent bad publicity vis-a-vis Hitler, left its old headquarters at Yale University. The Society moved its headquarters into the office of the Population Council, and the two groups melded together. The long-time secretary of the American Eugenics Society, Frederick Osborne, became the first president of the Population Council. The Gray family’s child-sterilizer, Dr. Claude Nash Herndon, became president of the American Eugenics Society in 1953, as its work expanded under Rockefeller patronage.
Meanwhile, the International Planned Parenthood Federation was founded in London, in the offices of the British Eugenics Society.
The undead enemy from World War II, renamed “ Population Control, ” had now been revived.
George Bush was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1972, when with prodding from Bush and his friends, the U.S. Agency for International Development first made an official contract with the old Sterilization League of America. The League had changed its name twice again, and was now called the “ Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception. ” The U.S. government began paying the old fascist group to sterilize non-whites in foreign countries.
The Gray family experiment had succeeded.
In 1988, the U.S. Agency for International Development signed its latest contract with the old Sterilization League (a.k.a. Association for Voluntary Surgical Contraception), committing the U.S. government to spend $80 million over five years.
Having gotten away with sterilizing several hundred North Carolina school children, “ not usually less than eight to ten years old, ” the identical group is now authorized by President Bush to do it to 58 countries in Asia, Africa and Ibero-America. The group modestly claims it has directly sterilized “ only ” two million people, with 87 percent of the bill paid by U.S. taxpayers.
Meanwhile, Dr. Clarence Gamble, Boyden Gray’s favorite soap manufacturer, formed his own “ Pathfinder Fund ” as a split-off from the Sterilization League. Gamble’s Pathfinder Fund, with additional millions from USAID, concentrates on penetration of local social groups in the non-white countries, to break down psychological resistance to the surgical sterilization teams.
Return to the Table of Contents
NOTES:
1. Phyllis Tilson Piotrow, World Population Crisis: The United States Response (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973), “ Forward ” by George H.W. Bush, pp. vii-viii.
2.Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971), p. 404.
3.“ The Ten Richest People in Houston, ” in Houston Post Magazine, March 11, 1984. “ $150 million to $250 million from … inheritance, plus subsequent investments … chief heir to a family fortune in oil stock…. As to his financial interests, he is … coy. He once described one of his businesses as a company that `invests in and oversees a lot of smaller companies … in a lot of foreign countries.”’
4. The announcements were made in testimony before a Special Committee of the U.S. Senate Investigating the National Defense Program. The hearings on Standard Oil were held March 5, 24, 26, 27, 31, and April 1, 2, 3 and 7, 1942. Available on microfiche, law section, Library of Congress. See also New York Times, March 26 and March 27, 1942, and Washington Evening Star, March 26 and March 27, 1942.
5. Ibid., Exhibit No. 368, printed on pp. 4584-87 of the hearing record. See also Charles Higham, Trading With The Enemy (New York: Delacorte Press, 1983), p. 36.
6. Confidential memorandum from U.S. embassy, Berlin, op. cit., chapter 2. Sir Henri Deterding was among the most notorious pro-Nazis of the early war period.
7. See sections on Prescott Bush in Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc. (New York: Distributed by Simon and Schuster, 1979) (published by the Dresser Company).
8. William Stamps Farish obituary, New York Times, Nov. 30, 1942.
9. A Decade of Progress in Eugenics: Scientific Papers of the Third International Congress of Eugenics held at American Museum of Natural History New York, Aug. 21-23, 1932. (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Company, Sept., 1934).
The term “ eugenics ” is taken from the Greek to signify “ good birth ” or “ well-born, ” as in aristocrat. Its basic assumption is that those who are not “ well-born ” should not exist.
10. See among other such letters, George Herbert Walker, 39 Broadway, N.Y., to W. A. Harriman, London, Feb. 21, 1925, in WAH papers.
11. Averell Harriman to Dr. Charles B. Davenport, President, The International Congress of Eugenics, Cold Spring Harbor, L.I., N.Y.
- January 21, 1932Dear Dr. Davenport:
I will be only too glad to put you in touch with the Hamburg-American Line … they may be able to co-operate in making suggestions which will keep the expenses to a minimum. I have referred your letter to Mr. Emil Lederer [of the Hamburg-Amerika executive board in New York] with the request that he communicate with you.
Davenport to Mr. W.A. Harriman,
59 Wall Street, New York, N.Y.
January 23, 1932
Dear Mr. Harriman:
Thank you very much for your kind letter of January 21st and the action you took which has resulted at once in a letter from Mr. Emil Lederer. This letter will serve as a starting point for correspondence, which I hope will enable more of our German colleagues to come to America on the occasion of the congresses of eugenics and genetics, than otherwise.
Congressional hearings in 1934 established that Hamburg-Amerika routinely provided free transatlantic passage for those carrying out Nazi propaganda chores. See Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities, op. cit., chapter 2.
12. Alexis Carrel, Man the Unknown (New York: Halcyon House, published by arrangement with Harper & Brothers, 1935), pp. 318-19.
The battle cry of the New Order was sounded in 1935 with the publication of Man the Unknown, by Dr. Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute in New York. This Nobel Prize-winner said “ enormous sums are now required to maintain prisons and insane asylums…. Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? This fact must be squarely faced. Why should society not dispose of the criminals and the insane in a more economical manner? … The community must be protected against troublesome and dangerous elements…. Perhaps prisons should be abolished…. The conditioning of the petty criminal with the whip, or some more scientific procedure, followed by a short stay in hospital, would probably suffice to insure order. [Criminals including those] who have … misled the public on important matters, should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases. A similar treatment could be advantageously applied to the insane, guilty of criminal acts. ”
Carrel claimed to have transplanted the head of a dog to another dog and kept it alive for quite some time.
13. Bernhard Schreiber, The Men Behind Hitler: A German Warning to the World, France: La Hay-Mureaux, ca. 1975), English language edition supplied by H & P. Tadeusz, 369 Edgewere Road, London W2. A copy of this book is now held by Union College Library, Syracuse, N.Y.
14. Higham, op. cit., p. 35.
15. Engagement announced Feb. 10, 1939, New York Times, p. 20. See also Directory of Directors for New York City, 1930s and 1940s.
16. Higham, op. cit., pp. 20, 22 and other references to Schroeder and Lindemann.
Anthony Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (Seal Beach: ‘76 Press, 1976). Sutton is also a good source on the Harrimans.
17. Washington Evening Star, March 27, 1942, p. 1.
18. Higham, op. cit. p. 50.
19. Ibid., p. 48.
20. Washington Post, April 29, 1990, p. F4. Higham, op. cit., pp. 52-53.
21. Zapata annual reports, 1950s-60s, Library of Congress microforms.
22. See Congressional Record for Bush speech in the House of Representatives, Sept. 4, 1969. Bush inserted in the record the testimony given before his Task Force on Aug. 5, 1969.
23. Sobel, op. cit., pp. 92-111. See also Boyle, op. cit., chapter 1, concerning the Morgan-led Dawes Committee of Germany’s foreign creditors.
Like Harriman, Dillon used the Schroeder and Warburg banks to strike his German bargains. All Dillon Read & Co. affairs in Germany were supervised by J.P. Morgan & Co. partner Thomas Lamont, and were authorized by Bank of England Governor Montagu Norman.
24. See Poor’s Register of Directors and Executives, (New York: Poor’s Publishing Company, late 1920s, ’30s and ’40s). See also Standard Corporation Records (New York: Standard & Poor), 1935 edition pp. 2571-25, and 1938 edition pp. 7436-38, for description and history of the German Credit and Investment Corporation. For Frederic Brandi, See also Sobel, op. cit., pp. 213-14.
25. Sobel, op. cit., pp. 180, 186. Ivy Lee had been hired to improve the Rockefeller family image, particularly difficult after their 1914 massacre of striking miners and pregnant women in Ludlow, Colorado. Lee got old John D. Rockefeller to pass out dimes to poor people lined up at his porch.
26. Third International Eugenics Congress papers op. cit., footnote 7, p. 512, “ Supporting Members. ”
27. Schreiber, op. cit., p. 160. The Third Int. Eugenics Congress papers, p. 526, lists the officers of the International Federation as of publication date in September, 1934. Ru@audin is listed as president–a year after he has written the sterilization law for Hitler.
28. Directory of Directors for New York City, 1942. Interview with Nancy Bowles, librarian of Dillon Read & Co.
29. Higham, op. cit., p. 129, 212-15, 219-23.
30. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made–Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), pp. 122, 305.
31. Piotrow, op. cit., pp. 36-42.
32. Ibid., p. viii. “ As chairman of the special Republican Task Force on Population and Earth Resources, I was impressed by the arguments of William H. Draper, Jr…. Gen. Draper continues to lead through his tireless work for the U.N. Population Fund. ”
33. Sobel, op. cit., pp. 298, 354.
34. Interview July 16, 1991, with Joanne Grossi, an official with the USAID’s Population Office.
35. Dr. Nafis Sadik, “ The State of World Population, ” 1991, New York, United Nations Population Fund.
36. See User’s Guide to the Office of Population, 1991, Office of Population, Bureau for Science and Technology, United States Agency for International Development. Available from S&T/POP, Room 811 SA-18, USAID, Washington D.C. 20523-1819.
37. “ History of the Association for Voluntary Sterilization [formerly Sterilization League of America], 1935-64, ” thesis submitted to the faculty of the graduate school of the University of Minnesota by William Ray Van Essendelft, March, 1978, available on microfilm, Library of Congress. This is the official history, written with full cooperation of the Sterilization League.
38. Interview with Dr. C. Nash Herndon, June 20, 1990.
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