The Dutch Connection
By Attorney John Loftus
. 2000-2002 John Loftus
7-2-2
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.
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. ___
First published September, 2000
This article is provided courtesy of Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz and
Tetrahedron Publishing Group www.tetrahedron.org
http://www.tetrahedron.org/articles/new_world_order/bush_nazis.ht
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