Harriman Bank was the main Wall Street connection for several German companies and the varied U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen had been an early financial backer of the Nazi party until 1938, but by 1939 had fled Germany and was bitterly denouncing Hitler. He was later jailed by the Nazis for his opposition to the regime. Business transactions with Germany were not illegal when Hitler declared war on the United States (December 11, 1941), but, six days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Trading With the Enemy Act after it had been made public that U.S. companies were doing business with the declared enemy of the United States. On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of German banking operations in New York City. 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 cited only the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), of which Prescott Bush was a director and held one share, which had connections with a Dutch bank owned by Thyssen. Fox News has reported that recently declassified material "The 4,000 Union Banking shares owned by the Dutch bank were registered in the names of the seven U.S. directors, according a document signed by Homer Jones, chief of the division of investigation and research of the Office of Alien Property Custodian, a World War II-era agency that no longer exists"[2]. By 1941 Thyssen no longer had control over his banking empire which was in the hands of the Nazi government.
* E. Roland Harriman--3991 shares (managed and under voting control of Prescott Bush)
* Cornelis Lievense--4 shares (He was the New York banker of the German Nazi Party)
* Harold D. Pennington--1 share (Employed by Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman)
* Ray Morris--1 share (a business partner of the Bush and Harriman families)
* 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 (organized UBC for Von Thyssen, managed UBC in Nazi occupied Netherlands)
* Johann G. Groeninger--1 share (German Industrial Executive, a not unimportant member of the Nazi party)
The Harriman business interests seized under the act in October and November 1942 included:
* Union Banking Corporation (UBC) (for Thyssen and Brown Brothers Harriman). The President of UBC at that time was George Herbert Walker, Prescott Bush's father-in-law. He is the grandfather and great-grandfather of the former and current Presidents Bush.
* Holland-American Trading Corporation (with Harriman)
* the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation (with Harriman)
* Silesian-American Corporation (this company was partially owned by a German entity; during the war the Germans tried to take full control of Silesian-American. In response to that, the American government seized German owned minority shares in the company, leaving the U.S. partners to carry on the business.)
The assets were held by the government for the duration of the war, then returned afterward. UBC was dissolved in 1951. Prescott Bush was on the board of directors of UBC and held one share in the company. For it, he was reimbursed $1,500,000. These assets were later used to launch Bush family investments in the Texas energy industry.
Toby Rogers has claimed that Bush's connections to Silesian businesses (with Thyssen and Flick) make him complicit with the mining operations in Poland which used slave labor out of Auschwitz, where the Auschwitz concentration camp was later constructed.
The New York Herald-Tribune referred to the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, as "Hitler's Angel" and mentioned Bush as an employee of the investment banking firm Thyssen used in the USA. The underlying importance is Hitler's known ideology; intelligent business partners clearly knew who they were doing business with. There is no evidence that Thyssen, Harriman or Bush were willing to do so with Hitler. Some records in the National Archives, including the Harriman papers, document the continued relationship of Brown Brothers Harriman with Thyssen and some of his German investments up until his 1951 death.[4] Investigator John Loftus has said, "As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averell Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany." Two former slave laborers from Poland have filed suit in London against the government of the United States and the heirs of Prescott Bush in the amount of $40 billion. A class-action lawsuit filed in the U.S. in 2001 was dismissed based on the principle of state sovereignty.[5]
