posted on February 5, 2004 05:17:16 PM newShareholders of IG Farben File a Suit Seeking Millions The Associated Press
Published: Feb 5, 2004
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) - Shareholders of IG Farben, the firm that made poison gas used in the Holocaust, are suing a Swiss bank to get billions in reparations they believe should have gone to the chemical giant, their attorney said Thursday.
A company founded by IG Farben and later acquired by Swiss bank UBS received compensation from the U.S. government for assets confiscated in the United States during World War II.
The suit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, New York, alleges that the reparations should have gone to the IG Farben trusteeship, Ed Fagen, the attorney for the shareholders said.
Once the world's largest chemical firm, IG Farben was broken up and ordered into trusteeship by the Allies in 1952. It continued operating as a trust to pay Nazi-era claims for compensation, and its shares are still traded on stock exchanges.
The shareholders are seeking between $1.8 billion and $35 billion from the Swiss bank in damages.
No one at the bank was immediately available for comment Thursday.
Now read this:
There were little warning signs but few were paying attention when George Bush, Sr. ran for president in 1988 and 1992. During the first campaign it surfaced that one of his staffers was a distributor of pro-Nazi propaganda. Before the ink was dry on the individual’s resignation, further revelations showed there were in fact a number of ex-Nazis on Bush’s campaign staff including Laszlo Pastor and Yaroslav Stetsko. Pastor was a member of the Hungarian Arrow Cross during WWII and served as an envoy to Germany. The Arrow Cross was known to be excessively brutal even to their Nazi allies. Stetsko served as the prime minister of the short lived Ukrainian puppet government. During the short reign of this puppet regime over 100,000 Jews were slaughtered in Lvov. George Bush, Sr.’s insensitivity towards victims of the holocaust is underlined by his employment of Fred Malek, a well-known Nazi collaborator, in both of his presidential campaigns.
Upon winning the presidential race, George Bush, Sr. placed his assets in a blind trust headed by his close friend William Stamps Farish III. That appointment should have triggered alarm bells that something very dark and sinister is buried in the Bush family’s past. His grandfather William Stamps Farish sold the Japanese the gasoline used in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Likewise, the elder Farish supplied Hitler’s war machine with oil and tetraethyl lead. George Bush’s father, Prescott was close friends with the elder Farish and remained so even after the elder’s testimony before congress provoked Harry Truman to cry out "This is Treason."
In fact, during the war, Prescott Bush had three companies seized from him for trading with the Nazis. To understand the web of intrigue and follow the money from the Holocaust to the Bush family we need to start with the period immediately surrounding WWI. By 1916 August Thyssen could see that Germany had already lost the Great War and he needed to protect his fortune. His eldest son had been groomed to run the family steel business in the Ruhr. His second son Heinrich discreetly changed his citizenship from German to Hungarian and married the Hungarian aristocrat Baroness Margrit Bornemisza de Kaszon. Near the end of the war August Thyssen opened the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam. Holland was a neutral country during the war and the new bank would serve as the perfect location to launder funds from the Thyssen Bank in Berlin and protect his fortune from allied financial demands. At the end of the war Heinrich now going by the name of Baron Thyssen Bornemisza de Kaszon moved to Rotterdam and became the principal owner of the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart. All that remained to be done in August Thyseen’s plan was to set up an American Bank.
In 1922, Averell Harriman traveled to Germany to set up a branch of W.A. Harriman in Berlin. Harriman had hired George Herbert Walker, George Bush’s grandfather to run both the New York and Berlin branches of his expanding investment firm. During his stay in Germany Harriman had met the Thyseen family and agreed to help the Thyssen’s set up an American bank.
In 1923, Germany was in economic shambles and Thyssen met with his friend General Ludendorff, who advised him that Germany’s hope lay with Hitler and the Nazi Party. Thyssen soon became a financial backer of the Nazis and Hitler.
Early in 1924, Hendrick J. Kouwenhoven, the managing director of Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, traveled to New York. Meeting with Walker and the Harriman brothers, they founded the Union Banking Corporation. In 1926, August Thyssen died. His eldest son Fritz expanded the Thyssen empire by creating United Steel Works. Fritz Thyssen also brought Fredich Flick on board. The Thyssen-Flick union was designed to suppress the union movement. As a result of the merger of Thyssen and Flick, George Walker hired his son-in-law Prescott Bush to manage the United Steel Works account. One division of United Steel Works consisted of both Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation and the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company. Both were located in the mineral rich Silesian area of Poland. The arrangement was extremely profitable for all four men: Thyssen, Flick, Walker and Bush until the depression started in 1929. Congressional investigations after WWII showed that United Steel had supplied 50.8 percent of the pig iron in Nazi Germany and likewise was a major supplier of all other ferrous based metal products needed by Hitler’s war machine. Hence, one of the largest munitions makers in Nazi Germany was funded by Prescott Bush, the father and grandfather of two future US Presidents.
Due to the depression, Harriman merged with Brown forming the Brown Brothers and Harriman firm. Internally the stock of Consolidated Silesian Steel Company was held by the Harriman 15 Corporation formed by Harriman and Bush. Two thirds of the stock was owned by Flick. By 1934, with Hitler in solid control of Germany, the profits from the Thyssen-Flick union soared to over a hundred million. Both Union Bank and the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart were overflowing with money. Prescott Bush became managing director of Union Bank and took over the day-to-day operations of the German plan.
In 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland ending a dispute over taxes between Consolidated and the Polish government. The Nazis original plan was to replace the workers in Polish factories with Soviet prisoners. However, that portion of the Hitler-Stalin agreement was never implemented. Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation was located near the Polish town of Oswiecim. When the plan to use Soviet prisoners as forced labor fell through, the Nazis began shipping Jews, communists, gypsies and other minority populations to the camp the Nazis had set up. This was the beginning of Auschwitz. The reason Auschwitz was located there was because of the abundant supplies of coal which could be processed into aviation fuel. I.G. Farben soon built a plant near Auschwitz to take advantage of not only of the nearby coal deposits but also of the slave labor supply available at Auschwitz. According to a Dutch intelligence agent, Prescott Bush managed a portion of the slave labor force in Poland.
Thyssen and Flick sold Consolidated Steel to UBC. Under the complete control of Harriman and Bush’s management, the company became Silesian American Corporation, which became part of UBC and Harriman's portfolio of 15 corporations. As the 1930s progressed and it became clearer that war was imminent, Bush and Harriman hired the Dulles brothers to conceal the Nazi money and ownership in Union Bank. In concealing the involvement of the Nazis in Union Bank, Prescott Bush and Harriman knew that they were already engaged in an activity that was probably illegal and certainly not in the best of interests of their country. Once war broke out however, Bush’s activities on the behalf of the Nazis through Union Banking became tantamount to treason.
The reader should understand that the concealing of Nazis assets located in the United States through a maze of corporate shells often based in Switzerland was an integral part of the German battle plan. In fact, the Nazis had a word for it - tarnung - "to camouflage". The primary aim of these concealed Nazi corporations was to wage economic warfare by creating production bottlenecks for their adversary. The reader should also be aware that two Americans were present during the secret meeting of the German elite that brought Hitler to power. Those two Americans were John Foster and Allen Dulles.
Two of the directors of Union Banking, Groninger and Kouwenhoven, were Nazi directors of the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, formerly the von Heydt Bank. Von Heydt was also a Nazi and has been identified as the intermediary between the Guaranty Trust and Adolf Hitler. Both Groninger and Kouwenhoven contributed lavishly to Himmler’s Circle of Friends. There were over forty firms around Auschwitz using slave labor from the death camp. Soon the Nazis had a massive store of gold from dental fillings, glasses and jewelry. The Nazis extracted the fillings of its victims after being informed by Degussa that the company could refine it into marketable gold bullion. Degussa was awarded an exclusive contract with the Nazis to refine all gold. The company was also joint owners with I.G. Farben of Degesch, a firm that produced Zyklon-B cyanide tablets used in the gas chambers. Due to the hoard of gold fillings stacking up at Auschweitz, Degussa built a smelter there. The bullion was then shipped back to Berlin and commingled with the Nazis gold stash. Undoubtedly some of it made its way back to the banker in charge of United Steel Works, Prescott Bush.
On October 20, 1942 the United States government seized Union Banking under the Trading with the Enemy Act. During that summer, The New York Tribune had exposed Bush and Thyssen, whom it called Hitler’s Angel. Union Bank’s books revealed a myriad of Nazi money and holding companies. Officials realized they had only scratched the tip of the iceberg. On November 17, 1942, the government seized Silesian American Corporation and placed its operation under the Government Alien Property custodian office.
Following the war, authorities seeking to locate the Dutch Royal family’s jewelry discovered the transaction papers of the Silesian American Corporation in the books of Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart. The bank manager, H.J. Kounhoven came under intense scrutiny and was shocked by the discovery. Soon Kounhoven traveled to New York to inform Prescott Bush. Dutch authorities date the meeting as soon after Christmas 1947. Two weeks later, the otherwise healthy Dutch banker died of a heart attack. Coincidentally, this was the method of choice of the Gehlen network for liquidating people. The Nazis had perfected a method of inducing heart attacks that autopsies could not detect.
On February 8, 1951, Thyssen died in Argentina. Following his death, the Alien Property Custodian released the assets of the Union Banking Corporation to Brown Brothers Harriman. The remaining shareholders quietly cashed in their remaining shares. Prescott Bush received $1.5 million for his share in Union Banking’s blood money.
This brief article has only scratched the surface of the sordid association of Prescott Bush with the Nazis as he had yet a third company seized from him during the war. In his first run for senator, Prescott was defeated after his position within the eugenics movement was disclosed. George Bush, Sr. has followed in his father’s footsteps and retained many of the same family connections with the Nazis. For instance, as chairman of the Republican Party he presided over the formation of the Ethnic Heritage groups of the Republican Party. This was a reward for the Nazi quislings from Eastern Europe for helping in the election of Nixon as president. When two or more ethnic groups were vying for control over a particular group invariably the group with close ties to the Nazis won out. George also shows the same intense interest in population control. Perhaps it was for his beliefs in eugenics, George appointed Draper as his expert on population. Or perhaps it was more of a reward for past services rendered by Draper to the Bush family. Draper was the former general placed in control of the military government‘s economic division after the war. Draper was a rabid racist and member of the Eugenics Society. He was also a former employee of Dillion and Reed, the large Wall Street brokerage house that floated the largest German bond offerings including one for United Steel Works. In his position as economic czar of Germany, he stopped the dismantling of an I.G. Farben plant and was in the ideal slot to protect his former clients that armed Hitler, including Bush.
The same close associations are apparent with George Bush, Jr. One interesting pattern in international relations is readily observed in that the Israeli government moves to the hard right whenever a Bush is in the Oval Office. Considering Israel has one of the best intelligence agencies in the world and perhaps the most extensive data base on the holocaust, could the Israeli hard-liners be blackmailing the Bushes? Do they have a smoking gun that would at once end the political aspirations of the entire Bush clan as well as place the family wealth at risk for damages suffered during the Holocaust? One researcher already says the family wealth is at risk in such suits; the ties are that strong.
Any reasonable person understands that the tragedy of 9-11 was allowed to happen. Only the White House can order the interceptors to stand down, once an aircraft deviates from its flight plan or contact is lost. Within 30 minutes of the time the golfer’s plane that decompressed failed to follow directions from the control tower a fighter was alongside and shadowed the plane until it ran out of fuel and crashed in the midwest. The story that no fighters were available is simply a lot of #*!@. There are probably no less than a dozen or more airports within range of New York and Washington DC with fighter squadrons on standby. Yet, Bush wants us to believe that the entire East Coast was left unprotected with no fighters to provide air cover including the restricted airspace over the White House. The 9-11 tragedy was the Reichstag fire and the Patriot Act, the enabling act for another fascist government.
With American blood staining the sands of the Middle East, why hasn’t the media focused on the merchant of death who armed Saddam? They would need to look no further than George Bush, Sr. and Vice President Dick Cheney. Bush is rubbing his hands with glee counting potential profits for his Carlyle Group. The group holds stocks in defense industries that armed Saddam during the Reagan years and provided arms for the US military. This is the way the Bush family makes it money. Just ask Prescott. It didn’t take Dick long to learn that secret. After the first Bush administration in which Cheney was the head of defense, he became head of Halliburton. While at Halliburton, Dick sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of dual-use equipment to Iraq.
Stand behind the young soldiers and wave a flag for them, as they are mere cannon fodder for this fascist clique. Don’t wave a flag for the most corrupt administration in the history of the country that’s hell-bent on installing a fascist regime beholden to no one other than corporate interests.
