Speaking to Israel's Knesset on that nation's 60th anniversary, President Bush referred to World War II to excoriate the folly of the "appeasement" mentality. But his attempt to blandish Israel by indirectly damning Hitler's genocidal anti-Semitism has revived interest in his own family's ties to German interests that helped launch that war.
It's not just conspiracy theory, it's a matter of record: Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, had business connections to Nazi firms heavily involved in the war. He was a managing partner of Brown Brothers Harriman, one of whose founders had been Averell Harriman, a business partner of Bush's father-in-law, George Herbert Walker. Brown Brothers Harriman provided financial services to Fritz Thyssen, a German industrialist who was an early financial backer of the Nazi Party.
Bush was also director of Union Banking Corp., a subsidiary of a Dutch bank that Thyssen owned. Thyssen used Union Banking Corp. and Brown Brothers Harriman as part of a network that allowed him to transfer and launder money globally.
And in the 1930s, Harriman made Prescott Bush a director of the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line, which delivered coal, steel, fuel, gold and U.S. Treasury bonds to a Germany gearing up for war.
In 1941, two years after the war started and when the Nazi persecutions of Jews were intensifying, Prescott Bush still worked for Union Banking Corp. His involvement continued when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entered the war. But after the bank's Nazi connection became public knowledge in 1942, the U.S. government seized its shares and the property of the Hamburg-Amerika line.
Certainly other American corporations profited from dealing with the Nazis. Standard Oil principal William Stamps Farish pleaded "no contest" to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis in 1942 (Standard Oil and I.G. Farben built a factory at Auschwitz in 1940, using slave labor to turn coal into artificial rubber). Still, there's little sign that the Bushes have repudiated the use of war as a business enhancement tool, or distanced themselves from others involved in profiting from it now or then. Farish's grandson, W. S. Farish III, managed George H.W. Bush's assets in a trust after Bush became vice-president, and George W. Bush named him ambassador to Great Britain in 2001.
