THE REICHSTAG FIRE

In January 1933, Germany was a free Republic with one of the most educated and cultured populations in the world at that time. Germany was at peace and enjoying a blossoming of democratic freedom under a coalition government of the Weimar Republic. But on February 27, 1933, the German Reichstag or Parliament building was destroyed by fire. In those slower, gentler times, this act was as great a shock to the German people as the destruction of the World Trade Center was to Americans.

As we have noted before, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler and his Nazis blamed the destruction on communist terrorists. They even caught one, a retarded Dutch youth named Marinus van der Lubbe who carried a Communist Party card. After some time in custody, the youth confessed to being the arsonist. However, later investigation found that one person could not have started the mammoth blaze and that incendiaries had been carried into the building through a tunnel which led to the offices of Hitler's closest partner, Hermann Goering, head of the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe.

Despite misgivings in many quarters about the official explanation of the fire, it was announced, “the government is of the opinion that the situation is such that a danger to the state and nation existed and still exists.” Law enforcement agencies quickly moved against, not only the communists, but also pacifists, liberals and democrats.

Less than a month later, on March 24, 1933, at Hitler's urging, a panicky German Parliament voted 441 to 94 to pass an “Enabling Act” which was the starting point for Hitler's dictatorship. As noted earlier, this sequence of events may sound eerily familiar to Americans living today under the PATRIOT Act.

As a result of this act, Germans soon saw national identity cards, racial profiling, the equivalent of a national homeland security chief (SS Commander Heinrich Himmler), gun confiscation and later, mass murders and incarcerations in concentration camps. In fact, according to Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO), a close examination of the US Gun Control Act of 1968 (Public Law 90-618) revealed it to be nearly word for word the gun legislation passed in Germany under Hitler.

“When Germany awoke,” wrote British reporter Douglas Reed, “a man's home was no longer his castle. He could be seized by private individuals, could claim no protection from the police, could be indefinitely detained without preferment of charge; his property could be seized, his verbal and written communications overheard and perused; he no longer had the right to foregather with his fellow countrymen, and his newspapers might no longer freely express their opinions.”

With the German population firmly under control due to massive propaganda and fear of government retaliation, Hitler was free to launch pre-emptive strikes in former German territories, as well as Poland. World War II ensued.

When the war in Europe ended, an immense amount of loot accumulated by the Nazis was missing. It appeared that by late August 1944, many top Nazi officials saw the handwriting on the wall. When the French town of St. Lo, center of the German defense line facing the Normandy beachhead, had fallen on July 18, opening all of southern France to Allied armor and infantry, Nazi leaders knew the end of the war was only a matter of time.

According to captured medical records, Hitler was on a roller coaster ride of euphoria and depression due to large daily doses of amphetamines, and had increasingly lost contact with reality. However, the second most powerful man in the Reich, Hitler's Deputy Martin Bormann, was not so incapacitated. On August 10, 1944, Bormann called together German business leaders and Nazi Party officials. They met in the Hotel Maison Rouge at Strasbourg. Bormann explained the purpose of the meeting to one attendee: “German industry must realize that the war cannot now be won, and must take steps to prepare for a postwar commercial campaign which will in time insure the economic resurgence of Germany.”

These “steps” came to be known as Aktion Adlerflug or “Operation Eagle Flight.” It was nothing less than the perpetuation of Nazism through the massive flight of money, gold, stocks, bonds, patents, copyrights and even technical specialists from Germany. As part of this plan, Bormann, aided by the black-clad SS, the central Deutsche Bank, the steel empire of Fritz Thyssen and the powerful I.G. Farben combine, created 750 foreign front corporations—58 in Portugal, 112 in Spain, 233 in Sweden, 214 in Switzerland, 35 in Turkey and 98 in Argentina.

Bormann's efforts were substantially helped by close connections with foreign banks and businesses begun long before the war. According to former US Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor John Loftus, much of the wealth was passed out of Germany by German banker Thyssen through his bank in Holland, which, in turn, owned the Union Banking Corporation (UBC) in New York City.

Two prominent US business leaders who supported Hitler and served on the board of directors of Union Banking Corporation were George Herbert Walker and his son-in-law Prescott Bush, father of George Herbert Walker Bush and grandfather of President George Walker Bush.

Attorneys for these dealings were the brothers John Foster and Allen Dulles. John was later to become secretary of state under Eisenhower while Allen became one of the longest-serving CIA directors. Both were deeply involved with the Council on Foreign Relations.

On October 20, 1942, the US Alien Property Custodian, operating under the “Trading With the Enemy Act,” seized the shares of UBC and said the bank was financing Hitler. Also seized were Bush's holdings in the Hamburg-America ship line which had been used to ferry Nazi propagandists and arms. Another company essential to the passing of Nazi money was the Holland American Trading Company, a subsidiary of UBC. It was through Fritz Thyssen's Dutch bank, originally founded by Thyssen's father in 1916, that Nazi money was passed. This Dutch connection connected the Bush and Nazi money directly to former SS officer and founder of the Bilderbergers, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.

The leading shareholder in UBC was E. Roland Harriman, son of Edward Harriman, the person who had been a early and important mentor to Prescott Bush. All had been members of the Yale secret society Skull and Bones and all were closely connected to the globalists at the Council on Foreign Relations.

On November 17, 1942, US authorities also seized the Silesian-American Corporation, managed by Prescott Bush and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, and charged the firm with being a Nazi front company supplying vital coal to Germany.

But, according to government documents that have recently come to light and were published by the News Hampshire Gazette in 2003, “the grandfather of President George W. Bush, failed to divest himself of more than a dozen ‘enemy national’ relationships that continued as late as 1951. The newly-released documents also showed that Bush and his associates routinely tried to conceal their business activities from government investigators and such dealings were conducted through the New York private banking firm of Brown Brothers Harriman.

“After the war,” according to the Gazette report, “a total of 18 additional Brown Brothers Harriman and UBC-related client assets were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act, including several that showed the continuation of a relationship with the Thyssen family after the initial 1942 seizures.

“The records also show that Bush and the Harrimans conducted business after the war with related concerns doing business in or moving assets into Switzerland, Panama, Argentina and Brazil—all critical outposts for the flight of Nazi capital after Germany's surrender in 1945.”

Why was Prescott Bush not more openly and aggressively prosecuted for his Nazi dealings? This may be due to the fact that the patriarch Bush was “instrumental in the creation of the USO in late 1941,” according to a news release from the United Service Organization in 2002. After all, how would it have looked during wartime to publicly prosecute as a Nazi asset the man who helped create the USO, so beloved by US servicemen in all subsequent conflicts?

“The story of Prescott Bush and Brown Brothers Harriman is an introduction to the real history of our country,” said publisher and historian Edward Boswell. “It exposes the money-making motives behind our foreign policies, dating back a full century. The ability of Prescott Bush and the Harrimans to bury their checkered pasts also reveals a collusion between Wall Street and the media that exists to this day.”

“It is bad enough that the Bush family helped raise the money for Thyssen to give Hitler his start in the 1920s, but giving aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war is treason,” declared Nazi prosecutor Loftus. “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 complicity.”

Illustrating other interconnecting business associations of this time was ITT’s German chairman Gerhardt Westrick, a close associate of John Foster Dulles, who was a partner to Dr. Heinrich Albert, head of Ford Motor Co. in Germany until 1945. Two ITT directors were German banker Baron Kurt von Schroeder and Walter Schellenberg, head of counterintelligence for the Nazi Gestapo.

Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil also came under investigation during World War II for a series of complex business deals, which resulted in desperately-need gasoline reaching Nazi Germany.

Nazi-American business connections were further buttressed by the 1936 partnership between the J. Henry Schroeder Bank of New York and Rockefeller family members. According to author Charles Higham, “[An entity called] Schroeder, Rockefeller and Company, Investment Bankers, was formed as part of an overall company that Time magazine disclosed as being ‘the economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis.’ The partners in Schroeder, Rockefeller and Company included Avery Rockefeller, nephew of John D., Baron Bruno von Schroeder in London, and Kurt von Schroeder of the Bank of International Settlements and the Gestapo in Cologne...Their lawyers were John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles of Sullivan and Cromwell. Allen Dulles (later CIA director and Warren Commission member) was on the board of Schroeder. Further connections linked the Paris branch of (the Rockefeller) Chase National Bank to Schroeder as well as the pro-Nazi Worms Bank and Standard Oil of New Jersey's interests in France. Standard Oil's Paris representatives were directors of the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, which had intricate connections to the Nazis and to Chase.”

It is interesting to note that throughout the war, Chase maintained its financial connections with the Nazis through its Paris bank and that I.G. Farben chief Hermann Schmitz served as Chase president for seven years prior to the war and eventually held as much stock in Standard Oil of New Jersey as the Rockefellers. “Schmitz's wealth—largely I.G. Farben bearer bonds converted to the Big Three successor firms, shares in Standard Oil of New Jersey...General Motors, and other US blue chip industrial stocks, and the 700 secret companies controlled in his time by I.G., as well as shares in the 750 corporations he helped Bormann establish during the last years of World War II—has increased in all segments of the modern industrial world. The Bormann organization in South America utilizes the voting power of the Schmitz trust long with their own assets to guide the multinationals they control, as they keep steady the economic course of the Fatherland,” wrote journalist Paul Manning, who added, “The Bormann organization is not merely a group of ex-Nazis. It is a great economic power whose interests today supersede their ideology.”

These long-standing banking and business connections coupled with the Schmitz business network allowed Reichsleiter Bormann to forge a formidable Nazi-controlled organization for postwar activities.

Jim Keith, author of numerous conspiracy books, wrote, “...in researching the shape of totalitarian control during this century, I saw that the plans of the Nazis manifestly did not die with the German loss of World War II. The ideology and many of the principal players survived and flourished after the war, and have had a profound impact on postwar history, and on events taking place today.”

Being so closely connected to the Nazis, patriarch Bush must have taken notice of Hitler's method for gaining unwarranted power—fabricate a crisis, call for sweeping powers to protect the population and take totalitarian control.

Luftwaffe chief Goering verbalized this method clearly when he spoke at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials following the war: “Naturally, the common people don't want war; Neither in Russia, not in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Since the Reichstag fire, the Bush family and their associates in the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Bilderbergers have often mimicked Hitler's tactics gained from the philosopher Hegel of creating a problem, offering a draconian solution and advancing their agenda through any resulting compromise. Public notice of such methods is now widespread, particularly in modern Germany.

In mid-2002, when German Justice Minister Herta Daubler-Gmelin commented on President Bush's threats against Iraq, she noted, “Bush wants to distract attention from his domestic problems. That's a popular method. Even Hitler did that.” She was quickly forced to resign for calling attention to this aging but effective ploy.