|
For
the Bush family, it is a lingering nightmare. For their Nazi clients,
the Dutch connection was the mother of all money laundering schemes.
From 1945 until 1949, one of the lengthiest and, it now appears, most
futile interrogations of a Nazi war crimes suspect began in the American
Zone of Occupied Germany. Multibillionaire steel magnate Fritz Thyssen-the
man whose steel combine was the cold heart of the Nazi war
machine-talked and talked and talked to a joint US-UK interrogation
team. For four long years, successive teams of inquisitors tried to
break Thyssen's simple claim to possess neither foreign bank accounts
nor interests in foreign corporations, no assets that might lead to the
missing billions in assets of the Third Reich. The inquisitors failed
utterly.
Why?
Because what the wily Thyssen deposed was, in a sense, true. What the
Allied investigators never understood was that they were not asking
Thyssen the right question. Thyssen did not need any foreign bank
accounts because his family secretly owned an entire chain of banks. He
did not have to transfer his Nazi assets at the end of World War II, all
he had to do was transfer the ownership documents - stocks, bonds, deeds
and trusts--from his bank in Berlin through his bank in Holland to his
American friends in New York City: Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker.
Thyssen's partners in crime were the father and father-in-law of a
future President of the United States.
The
allied investigators underestimated Thyssen's reach, his connections,
his motives, and his means. The web of financial entities Thyssen helped
create in the 1920's remained a mystery for the rest of the twentieth
century, an almost perfectly hidden underground sewer pipeline for
moving dirty money, money that bankrolled the post-war fortunes not only
of the Thyssen industrial empire...but the Bush family as well. It was a
secret Fritz Thyssen would take to his grave.
It
was a secret that would lead former US intelligence agent William Gowen,
now pushing 80, to the very doorstep of the Dutch royal family. The
Gowens are no strangers to controversy or nobility. His father was one
of President Roosevelt's diplomatic emissaries to Pope Pius XII, leading
a futile attempt to persuade the Vatican to denounce Hitler's treatment
of Jews. It was his son, William Gowen, who served in Rome after World
War II as a Nazi hunter and investigator with the U.S. Army Counter
Intelligence Corps. It was Agent Gowen who first discovered the secret
Vatican Ratline for smuggling Nazis in 1949. It was also the same
William Gowen who began to uncover the secret Dutch pipeline for
smuggling Nazi money in 1999.
A
half-century earlier, Fritz Thyssen was telling the allied investigators
that he had no interest in foreign companies, that Hitler had turned on
him and seized most of his property. His remaining assets were mostly in
the Russian Occupied Zone of Germany (which he knew were a write-off
anyway). His distant (and disliked) relatives in neutral nations like
Holland were the actual owners of a substantial percentage of the
remaining German industrial base. As innocent victims of the Third
Reich, they were lobbying the allied occupation governments in Germany,
demanding restitution of the property that had been seized from them by
the Nazis.
Under
the rules of the Allied occupation of Germany, all property owned by
citizens of a neutral nation which had been seized by the Nazis had to
be returned to the neutral citizens upon proper presentation of
documents showing proof of ownership. Suddenly, all sorts of neutral
parties, particularly in Holland, were claiming ownership of various
pieces of the Thyssen empire. In his cell, Fritz Thyssen just smiled and
waited to be released from prison while members of the Dutch royal
family and the Dutch intelligence service reassembled his pre-war
holdings for him.
The
British and American interrogators may have gravely underestimated
Thyssen but they nonetheless knew they were being lied to. Their
suspicions focused on one Dutch Bank in particular, the Bank voor Handel
en Scheepvaart, in Rotterdam. This bank did a lot of business with the
Thyssens over the years. In 1923, as a favor to him, the Rotterdam bank
loaned the money to build the very first Nazi party headquarters in
Munich. But somehow the allied investigations kept going nowhere, the
intelligence leads all seemed to dry up.
If
the investigators realized that the US intelligence chief in postwar
Germany, Allen Dulles, was also the Rotterdam bank's lawyer, they might
have asked some very interesting questions. They did not know that
Thyssen was Dulles' client as well. Nor did they ever realize that it
was Allen Dulles's other client, Baron Kurt Von Schroeder who was the
Nazi trustee for the Thyssen companies which now claimed to be owned by
the Dutch. The Rotterdam Bank was at the heart of Dulles' cloaking
scheme, and he guarded its secrets jealously.
Several
decades after the war, investigative reporter Paul Manning, Edward R.
Murrow's colleague, stumbled across the Thyssen interrogations in the US
National Archives. Manning intended to write a book about Nazi money
laundering. Manning's manuscript was a dagger at Allen Dulles' throat:
his book specifically mentioned the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart by
name, albeit in passing. Dulles volunteered to help the unsuspecting
Manning with his manuscript, and sent him on a wild goose chase,
searching for Martin Bormann in South America.
Without
knowing that he had been deliberately sidetracked, Manning wrote a
forward to his book personally thanking Allen Dulles for his
"assurance that I was "on the right track, and should keep
going.'"Dulles sent Manning and his manuscript off into the swamps
of obscurity. The same "search for Martin Bormann"scam was
also used to successfully discredit Ladislas Farago, another American
journalist probing too far into the laundering of Nazi money. American
investigators had to be sent anywhere but Holland.
And
so the Dutch connection remained unexplored until 1994 when I published
the book "The Secret War Against the Jews."As a matter of
historical curiosity, I mentioned that Fritz Thyssen (and indirectly,
the Nazi Party) had obtained their early financing from Brown Brothers
Harriman, and its affiliate, the Union Banking Corporation. Union Bank,
in turn, was the Bush family's holding company for a number of other
entities, including the "Holland American Trading Company."
It
was a matter of public record that the Bush holdings were seized by the
US government after the Nazis overran Holland. In 1951, the Bush's
reclaimed Union Bank from the US Alien Property Custodian, along with
their "neutral" Dutch assets. I did not realize it, but I had
stumbled across a very large piece of the missing Dutch connection.
Bush's ownership of the Holland-American investment company was the
missing link to Manning's earlier research in the Thyssen investigative
files. In 1981, Manning had written:
"Thyssen's
first step in a long dance of tax and currency frauds began [in the late
1930's] when he disposed of his shares in the Dutch
Hollandische-Amerikanische Investment Corporation to be credited to the
Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, N.V., Rotterdam, the bank founded in
1916 by August Thyssen Senior."
In
this one obscure paragraph, in a little known book, Manning had
unwittingly documented two intriguing points: 1) The Bush's Union Bank
had apparently bought the same corporate stock that the Thyssens were
selling as part of their Nazi money laundering, and 2) the Rotterdam
Bank, far from being a neutral Dutch institution, was founded by Fritz
Thyssen's father. In hindsight, Manning and I had uncovered different
ends of the Dutch connection.
After
reading the excerpt in my book about the Bush's ownership of the
Holland-American trading Company, retired US intelligence agent William
Gowen began to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Mr. Gowen knew
every c orner of Europe from his days as a diplomat's son, an American
intelligence agent, and a newspaperman. William Gowen deserves sole
credit for uncovering the mystery of how the Nazi industrialists hid
their money from the Allies at the end of World War II.
In
1999, Mr. Gowen traveled to Europe, at his own expense, to meet a former
member of Dutch intelligence who had detailed inside information about
the Rotterdam bank. The scrupulous Gowen took a written statement and
then had his source read and correct it for error. Here, in summary
form, is how the Nazis hid their money in America.
After
World War I, August Thyssen had been badly burned by the loss of assets
under the harsh terms of the Versailles treaty. He was determined that
it would never happen again. One of his sons would join the Nazis; the
other would be neutral. No matter who won the next war, the Thyssen
family would survive with their industrial empire intact. Fritz Thyssen
joined the Nazis in 1923; his younger brother married into Hungarian
nobility and changed his name to Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. The Baron
later claimed Hungarian as well as Dutch citizenship. In public, he
pretended to detest his Nazi brother, but in private they met at secret
board meetings in Germany to coordinate their operations. If one brother
were threatened with loss of property, he would transfer his holdings to
the other.
To
aid his sons in their shell game, August Thyssen had established three
different banks during the 1920's -- The August Thyssen Bank in Berlin,
the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam, and the Union Banking
Corporation in New York City. To protect their corporate holdings, all
the brothers had to do was move the corporate paperwork from one bank to
the other. This they did with some regularity. When Fritz Thyssen
"sold" the Holland-American Trading Company for a tax loss,
the Union Banking Corporation in New York bought the stock. Similarly,
the Bush family invested the disguised Nazi profits in American steel
and manufacturing corporations that became part of the secret Thyssen
empire.
When
the Nazis invaded Holland in May 1940, they investigated the Bank voor
Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam. Fritz Thyssen was suspected by
Hitler's auditors of being a tax fraud and of illegally transferring his
wealth outside the Third Reich. The Nazi auditors were right: Thyssen
felt that Hitler's economic policies would dilute his wealth through
ruinous war inflation. He had been smuggling his war profits out through
Holland. But the Rotterdam vaults were empty of clues to where the money
had gone. The Nazis did not know that all of the documents evidencing
secret Thyssen ownership had been quietly shipped back to the August
Thyssen Bank in Berlin, under the friendly supervision of Baron Kurt Von
Schroeder. Thyssen spent the rest of the war under VIP house arrest. He
had fooled Hitler, hidden his immense profits, and now it was time to
fool the Americans with same shell game. |
|
As
soon as Berlin fell to the allies, it was time to ship the documents
back to Rotterdam so that the "neutral" bank could claim
ownership under the friendly supervision of Allen Dulles, who, as the
OSS intelligence chief in 1945 Berlin, was well placed to handle any
troublesome investigations. Unfortunately, the August Thyssen Bank had
been bombed during the war, and the documents were buried in the
underground vaults beneath the rubble. Worse, the vaults lay in the
Soviet Zone of Berlin.
According
to Gowen's source, Prince Bernhard commanded a unit of Dutch
intelligence, which dug up the incriminating corporate papers in 1945
and brought them back to the "neutral" bank in Rotterdam. The
pretext was that the Nazis had stolen the crown jewels of his wife,
Princess Juliana, and the Russians gave the Dutch permission to dig up
the vault and retrieve them. Operation Juliana was a Dutch fraud on the
Allies who searched high and low for the missing pieces of the Thyssen
fortune.
In
1945, the former Dutch manager of the Rotterdam bank resumed control
only to discover that he was sitting on a huge pile of hidden Nazi
assets. In 1947, the manager threatened to inform Dutch authorities, and
was immediately fired by the Thyssens. The somewhat naive bank manager
then fled to New York City where he intended to talk to Union Bank
director Prescott Bush. As Gowen's Dutch source recalled, the manager
intended "to reveal [to Prescott Bush] the truth about Baron
Heinrich and the Rotterdam Bank, [in order that] some or all of the
Thyssen interests in the Thyssen Group might be seized and confiscated
as German enemy property. "The manager's body was found in New York
two weeks later.
Similarly,
in 1996 a Dutch journalist Eddy Roever went to London to interview the
Baron, who was neighbors with Margaret Thatcher. Roever's body was
discovered two days later. Perhaps, Gowen remarked dryly, it was only a
coincidence that both healthy men had died of heart attacks immediately
after trying to uncover the truth about the Thyssens.
Neither
Gowen nor his Dutch source knew about the corroborating evidence in the
Alien Property Custodian archives or in the OMGUS archives. Together,
the two separate sets of US files overlap each other and directly
corroborate Gowen's source. The first set of archives confirms
absolutely that the Union Banking Corporation in New York was owned by
the Rotterdam Bank. The second set (quoted by Manning) confirms that the
Rotterdam Bank in turn was owned by the Thyssens.
It is
not surprising that these two American agencies never shared their
Thyssen files. As the noted historian Burton Hersh documented:
"The
Alien Property Custodian, Leo Crowley, was on the payroll of the New
York J. Henry Schroeder Bank where Foster and Allen Dulles both sat as
board members. Foster arranged an appointment for himself as special
legal counsel for the Alien Property Custodian while simultaneously
representing [German] interests against the custodian."
No
wonder Allen Dulles had sent Paul Manning on a wild goose chase to South
America. He was very close to uncovering the fact that the Bush's bank
in New York City was secretly owned by the Nazis, before during and
after WWII. Once Thyssen ownership of the Union Banking Corporation is
proven, it makes out a prima facie case of treason against the Dulles
and Bush families for giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of
war.
PART
TWO
The
first key fact to be proven in any criminal case is that the Thyssen
family secretly owned the Bush's Bank. Apart from Gowen's source, and
the twin American files, a third set of corroboration comes from the
Thyssen family themselves. In 1979, the present Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza
(Fritz Thyssen's nephew) prepared a written family history to be shared
with his top management. A copy of this thirty-page tome entitled
"The History of the Thyssen Family and Their Activities"was
provided by Gowen's source. It contains the following Thyssen
admissions:
"Thus,
at the beginning of World War II the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart had
become the holding of my father's companies - a Dutch firm whose only
shareholder was a Hungarian citizen..Prior to 1929, it held the shares
of .the August Thyssen Bank, and also American subsidiaries and the
Union Banking Corporation, New York.The shares of all the affiliates
were [in 1945] with the August Thyssen Bank in the East Sector of
Berlin, from where I was able to have them transferred into the West at
the last moment"
"After
the war the Dutch government ordered an investigation into the status of
the holding company and, pending the result, appointed a Dutch former
general manager of my father who turned against our family.. In that
same year, 1947, I returned to Germany for the first time after the war,
disguised as a Dutch driver in military uniform, to establish contact
with our German directors"
"The
situation of the Group gradually began to be resolved but it was not
until 1955 that the German companies were freed from Allied control and
subsequently disentangled. Fortunately, the companies in the group
suffered little from dismantling. At last we were in a position to
concentrate on purely economic problems -- the reconstruction and
extension of the companies and the expansion of the organization."
"The
banking department of the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, which also
functioned as the Group's holding company, merged in 1970 with
Nederlandse Credietbank N.V. which increased its capital. The Group
received 25 percent.The Chase Manhattan Bank holds 31%. The name
Thyssen-Bornemisza Group was selected for the new holding company."
Thus
the twin US Archives, Gowen's Dutch source, and the Thyssen family
history all independently confirm that President Bush's father and
grandfather served on the board of a bank that was secretly owned by the
leading Nazi industrialists. The Bush connection to these American
institutions is a matter of public record. What no one knew, until
Gowen's brilliant research opened the door, was that the Thyssens were
the secret employers of the Bush family.
But
what did the Bush family know about their Nazi connection and when did
they know it? As senior managers of Brown Brothers Harriman, they had to
have known that their American clients, such as the Rockefellers, were
investing heavily in German corporations, including Thyssen's giant
Vereinigte Stahlwerke. As noted historian Christopher Simpson repeatedly
documents, it is a matter of public record that Brown Brother's
investments in Nazi Germany took place under the Bush family
stewardship.
When
war broke out was Prescott Bush stricken with a case of Waldheimers
disease, a sudden amnesia about his Nazi past? Or did he really believe
that our friendly Dutch allies owned the Union Banking Corporation and
its parent bank in Rotterdam? It should be recalled that in January
1937, he hired Allen Dulles to "cloak" his accounts. But cloak
from whom? Did he expect that happy little Holland was going to declare
war on America? The cloaking operation only makes sense in anticipation
of a possible war with Nazi Germany. If Union Bank was not the conduit
for laundering the Rockefeller's Nazi investments back to America, then
how could the Rockefeller-controlled Chase Manhattan Bank end up owning
31% of the Thyssen group after the war?
It
should be noted that the Thyssen group (TBG) is now the largest
industrial conglomerate in Germany, and with a net worth of more than
$50 billion dollars, one of the wealthiest corporations in the world.
TBG is so rich it even bought out the Krupp family, famous arms makers
for Hitler, leaving the Thyssens as the undisputed champion survivors of
the Third Reich. Where did the Thyssens get the start-up money to
rebuild their empire with such speed after World War II?
The
enormous sums of money deposited into the Union Bank prior to 1942 is
the best evidence that Prescott Bush knowingly served as a money
launderer for the Nazis. Remember that Union Banks' books and accounts
were frozen by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian in 1942 and not
released back to the Bush family until 1951. At that time, Union Bank
shares representing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of industrial
stocks and bonds were unblocked for distribution. Did the Bush family
really believe that such enormous sums came from Dutch enterprises? One
could sell tulip bulbs and wooden shoes for centuries and not achieve
those sums. A fortune this size could only have come from the Thyssen
profits made from rearming the Third Reich, and then hidden, first from
the Nazi tax auditors, and then from the Allies.
The
Bushes knew perfectly well that Brown Brothers was the American money
channel into Nazi Germany, and that Union Bank was the secret pipeline
to bring the Nazi money back to America from Holland. The Bushes had to
have known how the secret money circuit worked because they were on the
board of directors in both directions: Brown Brothers out, Union Bank
in.
Moreover,
the size of their compensation is commensurate with their risk as Nazi
money launderers. In 1951, Prescott Bush and his father in law each
received one share of Union Bank stock, worth $750,000 each. One and a
half million dollars was a lot of money in 1951. But then, from the
Thyssen point of view, buying the Bushes was the best bargain of the
war.
The
bottom line is harsh: It is bad enough that the Bush family helped raise
the money for Thyssen to give Hitler his start in the 1920's, but giving
aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war is treason. The Bush's bank
helped the Thyssens make the Nazi steel that killed allied soldiers. As
bad as financing the Nazi war machine may seem, aiding and abetting the
Holocaust was worse. Thyssen's coal mines used Jewish slaves as if they
were disposable chemicals. There are six million skeletons in the
Thyssen family closet, and a myriad of criminal and historical questions
to be answered about the Bush family's complicity.
Note:
This article's author, John Loftus, is a former U.S. Department of
Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor, the President of the Florida
Holocaust Museum and the highly respected author of numerous books on
the CIA-Nazi connection including The Belarus Secret and The Secret War
Against the Jews, both of which have extensive material on the
Bush-Rockefeller-Nazi connection.
Click here
for more on the Bush family fortune. |