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by Bob Fitrakis
October 6, 2003
by Harvey Wasserman
October 6, 2003
George W. Bush’s grandfather helped finance the Nazi Party. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Austrian father volunteered for the infamous Nazi SA and became a ranking officer. And Karl Rove can’t hide his joy at witnessing “a Nazi rally” in support of Bush.
Together, they have destabilized California and are on the brink of bringing it a new Reich. With the Schwarzenegger candidacy they have laid siege to America’s largest state, lining it up for the 2004 presidential election.
The Bush family’s ties to the Nazi party are well known. In their 1994 book Secret War Against the Jews, Mark Aarons and John Loftus use official U.S. documents to establish that George Herbert Walker, George W. Bush’s great-grandfather, was one of Hitler’s most important early backers. He funneled money to the rising young fascist through the Union Banking Corporation.
In 1926, Walker arranged to have his new son-in-law, Prescott Bush—father of President George Herbert Walker Bush, grandfather of President George Walker Bush—hired as vice president at W.A. Harriman and Company. Prescott became a senior partner when Harriman merged with a British-American investment company to become Brown Brothers Harriman. In 1934 Prescott Bush joined the board of directors of Union Banking.
The bank helped Hitler rise to power. It also helped him wage war. As late as July 31, 1941—well after the Nazi invasion of Poland—the U.S. government froze $3 million in Union Banking assets linked to Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen was noted in the American press as a “German industrialist and original backer of Adolph Hitler.”
Loftus writes that Thyssen’s “American friends in New York City…[were] Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker, the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States.” That would be the current president’s father, former President George Herbert Walker Bush, also the former CIA director.
On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi Germany’s banking operations in New York City, which were under the direction of Prescott Bush. The government seized control of Union Banking Corporation under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The liquidation yielded a reported $750,000 apiece for Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker.
Loftus documents that “Prescott Bush knowingly served as a money launderer for the Nazis. Remember that Union Bank’s books and accounts were frozen by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian in 1942 and not released back to the Bush family until 1951.”
The book The Splendid Blonde Beast: Money, Law and Genocide also goes into exhaustive detail on the Bush-Harriman Nazi money laundering. More recently, Michael Kranish covers the same Bush-Nazi relationships in The Rise of the Bush Family Dynasty, published in the Boston Globe.
Often ignored are the Bush family’s post-World War II dealings with former Nazis. John Foster Dulles, who had worked with the Bush family in the Harriman Company in laundering money for Nazi Germany, was Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. His brother Allen became CIA director.
As Martin Lee documents in The Beast Reawakens, American intelligence recruited numerous top Nazis to spy on the Soviets during the Cold War. Many established connections to the Bush family that had helped finance their original rise to power.
In 1988, in its top annual award, Project Censored noted that “the major mass media ignored, overlooked or undercovered at least 10 critical stories reported in America’s alternative press that raised serious questions about the Republican candidate, George Bush, dating from his reported role as a CIA ‘asset’ in 1963 to his presidential campaign’s connection with a network of anti-Semites with Nazi and fascist affiliations in 1988.” Investigative reporter Russ Bellant established ties between the Republican Party and former Axis Nazis and fascists.
In 2000 and 2001, the weekly newspaper Columbus Alive published a series of articles documenting further links between the elder President Bush and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his own fascist networks in Japan and Korea.
This sort of shadowy intrigue with authoritarian and anti-democratic networks suits Karl Rove, who serves as “Bush’s Brain” in the current White House and is the political mastermind behind the California coup.
Rove is now being accused of involvement in the outing of a CIA covert operative, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson. A consummate strategist, Rove may have outed Wilson’s wife in retaliation for Wilson’s failure to back up the Bush claim that Saddam Hussein was buying nuclear weapons materials in Africa. According to some published reports, as many as 70 CIA operatives may have been put at risk by Rove’s alleged retaliatory strike.
Rove, who has been based in Utah and associated with the Mormon Church, is widely viewed as the chief engineer of the current Bush administration. He and Tom DeLay are attempting to force the Texas legislature to redistrict its congressional delegations, adding seven sure seats to the Republican column. By controlling the Statehouses in New York, Florida, Texas and California, the GOP would have a lock on the four largest states in the union, and the ability to manipulate vote counts and strip voter registration rolls in the run-up to the 2004 election.
Rove is a prime behind-the-scenes mover in the Schwarzenegger campaign. On May 1, 1939, a year after the Nazis took control of Schwarzenegger’s native Austria, his father Gustav voluntarily joined Hilter’s infamous Strumabteilung (SA), “brown shirt” stormtroopers. This was just six months after the brown shirts played a key role in the bloody Kristallnacht attacks on Germany’s Jewish community.
The Vienna daily Der Standard noted recently that “Gustav, a high-ranking Nazi, brought up the bespectacled, rather frail boy with an iron fist and quite a few slaps in the face.” Arnold’s father favored a Hitler-style mustache in photos.
On October 3, ABC News broke the story of Schwarzenegger’s 1977 interview in which he was asked whom he admired. Schwarzenegger replied, “I admire Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education, up to power. I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it.”
To cover himself, Schwarzenegger has made substantial donations to the Los Angeles-based Wiesenthal Center, which tracks down ex-Nazis. Schwarzenegger has also renounced Hitler.
But he has not renounced his friendship with fellow Austrian Kurt Waldheim, the one-time head of the United Nations with known Nazi ties. The book Arnold: An Unauthorized Biography documents Schwarzenegger toasting Waldheim, who had participated in Nazi atrocities during World War II, at his wedding to Maria Shriver.
“My friends don’t want me to mention Kurt’s name, because of all the recent Nazi stuff and the UN controversy,” Schwarzenegger said. “But I love him and Maria does to, and so thank you, Kurt.”
On May 17, 2001, Schwarzenegger also met with Kenneth “Kenny-Boy” Lay of Enron infamy at the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles. Through the utility deregulation plan signed into law by then-Governor Pete Wilson, now Schwarzenegger’s chief advisor, California was destabilized, bankrupting the state government and opening the door for the recall election. Lay has been George W. Bush’s chief financial backer, and a close associate of Karl Rove’s.
According to Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, Bush attended a New York Yankees game soon after the September 11 World Trade Center disaster. He wore a fireman’s jacket. As he threw out the first pitch, the crowd roared. Thousands of fans stuck out their arms with thumbs up.
Karl Rove, sitting in the box of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, likened the roar of the crowd to “a Nazi rally.”
Apparently he would know.
*Due to the retraction of allegations by a source in the original version of the story, Dr. Fitrakis and Mr. Wasserman have reworked this article. For additional comments about the Rove allegations, and the original version of this text, please view our Letters to the Editor: www.freepress.org/departments.php?strFunc=display&strDept=10
Bob Fitrakis's Spooks, Nukes & Nazis is now available at www.freepress.org. He is co-author with Harvey Wasserman of The SuperPower of Peace v. Bush et. al.. available November 1.
Harvey Wasserman is author of Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States and co-author (with Bob Fitrakis) of The Superpower of Peace v. Bush et. al., soon available from www.freepress.org.
Together, they have destabilized California and are on the brink of bringing it a new Reich. With the Schwarzenegger candidacy they have laid siege to America’s largest state, lining it up for the 2004 presidential election.
The Bush family’s ties to the Nazi party are well known. In their 1994 book Secret War Against the Jews, Mark Aarons and John Loftus use official U.S. documents to establish that George Herbert Walker, George W. Bush’s great-grandfather, was one of Hitler’s most important early backers. He funneled money to the rising young fascist through the Union Banking Corporation.
In 1926, Walker arranged to have his new son-in-law, Prescott Bush—father of President George Herbert Walker Bush, grandfather of President George Walker Bush—hired as vice president at W.A. Harriman and Company. Prescott became a senior partner when Harriman merged with a British-American investment company to become Brown Brothers Harriman. In 1934 Prescott Bush joined the board of directors of Union Banking.
The bank helped Hitler rise to power. It also helped him wage war. As late as July 31, 1941—well after the Nazi invasion of Poland—the U.S. government froze $3 million in Union Banking assets linked to Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen was noted in the American press as a “German industrialist and original backer of Adolph Hitler.”
Loftus writes that Thyssen’s “American friends in New York City…[were] Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker, the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States.” That would be the current president’s father, former President George Herbert Walker Bush, also the former CIA director.
On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi Germany’s banking operations in New York City, which were under the direction of Prescott Bush. The government seized control of Union Banking Corporation under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The liquidation yielded a reported $750,000 apiece for Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker.
Loftus documents that “Prescott Bush knowingly served as a money launderer for the Nazis. Remember that Union Bank’s books and accounts were frozen by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian in 1942 and not released back to the Bush family until 1951.”
The book The Splendid Blonde Beast: Money, Law and Genocide also goes into exhaustive detail on the Bush-Harriman Nazi money laundering. More recently, Michael Kranish covers the same Bush-Nazi relationships in The Rise of the Bush Family Dynasty, published in the Boston Globe.
Often ignored are the Bush family’s post-World War II dealings with former Nazis. John Foster Dulles, who had worked with the Bush family in the Harriman Company in laundering money for Nazi Germany, was Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. His brother Allen became CIA director.
As Martin Lee documents in The Beast Reawakens, American intelligence recruited numerous top Nazis to spy on the Soviets during the Cold War. Many established connections to the Bush family that had helped finance their original rise to power.
In 1988, in its top annual award, Project Censored noted that “the major mass media ignored, overlooked or undercovered at least 10 critical stories reported in America’s alternative press that raised serious questions about the Republican candidate, George Bush, dating from his reported role as a CIA ‘asset’ in 1963 to his presidential campaign’s connection with a network of anti-Semites with Nazi and fascist affiliations in 1988.” Investigative reporter Russ Bellant established ties between the Republican Party and former Axis Nazis and fascists.
In 2000 and 2001, the weekly newspaper Columbus Alive published a series of articles documenting further links between the elder President Bush and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his own fascist networks in Japan and Korea.
This sort of shadowy intrigue with authoritarian and anti-democratic networks suits Karl Rove, who serves as “Bush’s Brain” in the current White House and is the political mastermind behind the California coup.
Rove is now being accused of involvement in the outing of a CIA covert operative, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson. A consummate strategist, Rove may have outed Wilson’s wife in retaliation for Wilson’s failure to back up the Bush claim that Saddam Hussein was buying nuclear weapons materials in Africa. According to some published reports, as many as 70 CIA operatives may have been put at risk by Rove’s alleged retaliatory strike.
Rove, who has been based in Utah and associated with the Mormon Church, is widely viewed as the chief engineer of the current Bush administration. He and Tom DeLay are attempting to force the Texas legislature to redistrict its congressional delegations, adding seven sure seats to the Republican column. By controlling the Statehouses in New York, Florida, Texas and California, the GOP would have a lock on the four largest states in the union, and the ability to manipulate vote counts and strip voter registration rolls in the run-up to the 2004 election.
Rove is a prime behind-the-scenes mover in the Schwarzenegger campaign. On May 1, 1939, a year after the Nazis took control of Schwarzenegger’s native Austria, his father Gustav voluntarily joined Hilter’s infamous Strumabteilung (SA), “brown shirt” stormtroopers. This was just six months after the brown shirts played a key role in the bloody Kristallnacht attacks on Germany’s Jewish community.
The Vienna daily Der Standard noted recently that “Gustav, a high-ranking Nazi, brought up the bespectacled, rather frail boy with an iron fist and quite a few slaps in the face.” Arnold’s father favored a Hitler-style mustache in photos.
On October 3, ABC News broke the story of Schwarzenegger’s 1977 interview in which he was asked whom he admired. Schwarzenegger replied, “I admire Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education, up to power. I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it.”
To cover himself, Schwarzenegger has made substantial donations to the Los Angeles-based Wiesenthal Center, which tracks down ex-Nazis. Schwarzenegger has also renounced Hitler.
But he has not renounced his friendship with fellow Austrian Kurt Waldheim, the one-time head of the United Nations with known Nazi ties. The book Arnold: An Unauthorized Biography documents Schwarzenegger toasting Waldheim, who had participated in Nazi atrocities during World War II, at his wedding to Maria Shriver.
“My friends don’t want me to mention Kurt’s name, because of all the recent Nazi stuff and the UN controversy,” Schwarzenegger said. “But I love him and Maria does to, and so thank you, Kurt.”
On May 17, 2001, Schwarzenegger also met with Kenneth “Kenny-Boy” Lay of Enron infamy at the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles. Through the utility deregulation plan signed into law by then-Governor Pete Wilson, now Schwarzenegger’s chief advisor, California was destabilized, bankrupting the state government and opening the door for the recall election. Lay has been George W. Bush’s chief financial backer, and a close associate of Karl Rove’s.
According to Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, Bush attended a New York Yankees game soon after the September 11 World Trade Center disaster. He wore a fireman’s jacket. As he threw out the first pitch, the crowd roared. Thousands of fans stuck out their arms with thumbs up.
Karl Rove, sitting in the box of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, likened the roar of the crowd to “a Nazi rally.”
Apparently he would know.
*Due to the retraction of allegations by a source in the original version of the story, Dr. Fitrakis and Mr. Wasserman have reworked this article. For additional comments about the Rove allegations, and the original version of this text, please view our Letters to the Editor: www.freepress.org/departments.php?strFunc=display&strDept=10
Bob Fitrakis's Spooks, Nukes & Nazis is now available at www.freepress.org. He is co-author with Harvey Wasserman of The SuperPower of Peace v. Bush et. al.. available November 1.
Harvey Wasserman is author of Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States and co-author (with Bob Fitrakis) of The Superpower of Peace v. Bush et. al., soon available from www.freepress.org.