corrente

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have written an article titled "Seige Heil: The Bush-Rove-Schwarzenegger Nazi Nexus and the Destabilization of California" which is published at the Free Press website. The entire article is also mirrored at Common Dreams

Wasserman and Fitrakis detail past Bush family ties to the emerging Nazi Party in Germany and also make mention of their relationship to industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a well known admirer and financial backer of the Nazi cause and it's rise to power. Below are excerpts from the Fitrakis and Wasserman article as well as additional informantion with respect to Fritz Thyssen's association with the Nazi movement.

Fitrakis and Wasserman write:

The Bush family ties to the Nazi party are well known. In their 1994 Secret War Against the Jews, Mark Aarons and John Loftus use official US documents to establish that George Herbert Walker, George W. Bush's maternal great-grandfather, was one of Hitler's most important early backers. He funneled money to the rising young fascist through the Union Banking Corporation.

[...]

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, George Herbert Walker Bush, also the former CIA director.

Read the full Wasserman and Fitrakis article at the links above.

Thyssen - Part 2

In addition to the above, Ian Kershaw, (author of Hitler; Hubris / Nemesis) makes note of Thyssen's involvement with the "Keppler Circle" signatories. Kershaw writes:

On 19 November, the day that Hindenburg received Hitler as part of his meetings with the heads of political parties, the Reich President was handed a petition carrying twenty signatures from businessmen demanding the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor. [...] Eight of the "Keppler Circle", headed by Schacht and the Cologne banker Kurt von Schroeder, signed the petition. The results with indistrialists were disappointing. A single prominent indistrialist, Fritz Thyssen, signed. But he had for long made no secret of his sympathies for the National Socialists.

Thyssen was also fond of Hermann Goring, who apparently enjoyed puttering around his Berlin digs in "a red toga and pointed slippers" like some kind of bloated djinni swine, and who benefited personally from Thyssen's cheerful high livin' largesse.

Likewise, Thyssen contributed at least 100,000 Gold Marks to the early Nazi party efforts in Munich in the early 1920's. In 1931 Thyssen, who was charmed with the National Socialist German Workers Party's corporatist agenda, attended a get to meet Adolph dinner arranged by Goring. Thyssen, at the time, was the United Steel Works supervisory board chairman.
A sidenote: SA (Storm Trooper) membership totaled approximately 80,000 in early 1931. By the end of the summer of 1932 membership had swelled to approximately 450,000.

The Brownshirt House

David Clay Large, author of Where Ghosts Walked - Munich's Road to the Third Reich, describes Hitlers new party headquaters in Munich, financed by Fritz Thyssen.

In January 1931 the party moved into a bombastic new national headquarters, the Brown House. Formerly the Barlow Palace, the building was located on the fashionable Brienerstrasse. Purchased in 1930 with a loan from the industrialist Fritz Thyssen and a tax of two marks on every party member, the building had been thoroughly renovated by the pro-Nazi architect Professor Paul Ludwig Troost. A tour de force of Nazi vulgarity, it boasted a grand entrance with swastikas on either side of a giant bronze door. On the first floor was a Flag Hall containing banners from the early years of the party, including the sacred Blood Flag from the shooting during the Beer Hall Putsch. On the second floor were the offices of the party leadership, the national SA cheif, national treasurer, and - sanctum sanctorum - Hitler's private study.

By the late 1930's the Nazi offensive against the Jewish community had escalated and Thyssen was one of the industrialists who profited from the assault. As Ian Kershaw recounts:

Party activists in the Movement's various formations needed no encouragement to unleash further attacks on Jews and their property. 'Aryans' in business, from the smallest to the largest, looked to every opportunity to profit at the expense of their Jewish counterparts. Hundreds of Jewish businesses - including long-established private banks such as Warburg and Bleichroder - were now forced, often through gangster-like extortion, to sell out for a pittance to 'Aryan' buyers. Big business gained most. Giant concerns like Mannesmann, Krupp, Thyssen, Flick, and IG-Farben, and leading banks such as the Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank.

In any event, Thyssen's close involvement with the early Nazi Party and Adolph Hitler extends beyond any kind of conjectural peripheral business relationship some apologists might try to suggest, and was far more intimate than is even outlined in the Wasserman and Fitrakis article. One can only speculate as to the content of conversation that took place between members of the Bush family and Fritz Thyssen during those years 1934-1942. How'd ya like to be a fly on that oily wall. Yee-Gads.