Trading with the enemy.
In October 1942 — with the United States at war — the government seized a New York bank as an enemy asset. One of its seven directors was Prescott Bush: future US senator, father of one president, grandfather of another. The bank existed to serve the German industrialist who had helped bankroll Hitler.
This is the real, documented Bush–Nazi-finance story — and it is not the Business Plot, which he had nothing to do with. It is also a magnet for overreach: the honest version is damning enough on the paper trail alone, so we hold hard to what the National Archives actually show and reject the “Prescott Bush was a Nazi” embellishment that even the reporters who broke this story called unfair.
US government seizes the Union Banking Corporation, of which Prescott Bush was a director, as an enemy-linked asset
US Alien Property Custodian · Asset seizure (Trading with the Enemy Act) · October 20, 1942 — Vesting Order 248
A US bank tied to the Thyssen industrial fortune, with Prescott Bush on its board, was seized by the federal government during the war under the Trading with the Enemy Act — a matter of the National Archives record.
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Prescott Bush was a founding director and a shareholder of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), a New York bank set up by his father-in-law George Herbert Walker and Averell Harriman's circle to serve the Thyssens — Germany's most powerful industrial family. Fritz Thyssen had helped finance Hitler's rise in the early 1930s. On October 20, 1942, with America at war, the US Alien Property Custodian seized UBC under the Trading with the Enemy Act, followed by several affiliated firms. This is documented in the National Archives and the Harriman papers, and was reported in detail by the Guardian in 2004.
That is the record. What the record does not establish — and what the reporters who surfaced it were careful to say — is that Prescott Bush was a Nazi sympathizer or knowingly aided the regime. This page grades the documented facts as facts, grades the slave-labour and family-fortune claims as unproven-but-smoke, and rejects the “Bush was a Nazi” framing outright. It sits beside the 1930s coup attempt at home as the other face of the same decade: Wall Street's comfort with fascism.
The record, claim by claim
Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of the Union Banking Corporation.
FACTUBC's incorporation documents list Bush as one of seven directors; he owned one share. The bank was founded by his father-in-law George Herbert Walker and Averell Harriman's circle to provide a US bank for the Thyssens. Managing UBC was one of Bush's first jobs in the Walker/Harriman banking world (Brown Brothers Harriman). This is drawn from the Harriman papers at the Library of Congress.
The US government seized UBC and affiliates as enemy assets in 1942.
FACTOn October 20, 1942, the Alien Property Custodian seized UBC's assets under the Trading with the Enemy Act (Vesting Order 248). After examining the books, the government also seized two affiliates — the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation — and, in November, the Silesian-American Company. UBC worked exclusively for, and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands.
Government investigators found UBC was an enemy-owned shell — then it was quietly handed back.
FACTThe Alien Property Custodian's own files tell the story. Investigator Erwin May found UBC was wholly owned by the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart of Rotterdam — the Thyssen family's offshore vehicle — and that UBC's American directors, Prescott Bush among them, held their shares only as nominees for the Dutch bank. The APC's Homer Jones then recommended vesting UBC, naming Bush and writing that the 4,000 shares were 'beneficially owned and held for the interests of enemy nationals.' Across the 1930s, BBH and UBC had bought and shipped millions in gold, fuel, steel, coal and US Treasury bonds to Germany (UBC alone bought over $8m in gold in 1931–33). Jones recommended liquidation — but instead UBC was kept intact, returned to its American shareholders after the war, and the investigation was dropped, with no further action ever taken. The institution's entanglement is documented; what ages worst is that it was buried.
“…beneficially owned and held for the interests of enemy nationals, and are vestible by the APC.”
Fritz Thyssen helped finance Hitler's rise, and UBC was his US vehicle.
FACTThyssen owned Germany's largest steel and coal company and grew rich from Hitler's rearmament; he helped bankroll the Nazis in the early 1930s before breaking with Hitler late in the decade. UBC was one pillar of a multinational network of front companies that let Thyssen move assets internationally, and it was owned by his Dutch bank. That Bush's bank served this fortune is documented, not inferred.
Prescott Bush was a Nazi sympathizer who knowingly financed Hitler.
FALSE / MISLEADINGThis is the popular overreach, and we grade it to reject it. The Guardian — which broke the documentary story — states plainly there is 'no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause,' and that much of the internet 'Bush/Nazi' chatter is 'inaccurate and unfair.' His role was as a businessman and bank director whose firm's assets were seized as enemy-linked; the documents do not show ideological complicity or knowledge of the regime's crimes. The Anti-Defamation League has said the same, calling the charges 'untenable and politically motivated' and stating that Prescott Bush 'was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser.' Documented business ties are not the same as Nazi sympathy, and we won't blur them.
- The Guardian (2004) — 'no suggestion' of Nazi sympathy; 'inaccurate and unfair' chatter
- Anti-Defamation League statement — charges 'untenable and politically motivated'; Bush 'neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser'
Sullivan & Cromwell and John Foster Dulles were pulled in to protect the American CSSC stake.
FACTThis is the documented seam that binds the Bush/Harriman world to the Dulles brothers'. National Archives records include a January 1933 letter from BBH partner (and Bush's fellow Yale 'Bonesman') Knight Woolley to Averell Harriman about the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company, as Poland moved to nationalise the plant. Woolley writes that he brought in the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to protect the American interests, and that John Foster Dulles — a director — was insisting 'their man in Berlin get into the picture.' It is why this piece sits in the Dulles Blueprint hub: the same firm and the same men recur across the finance-fascism story.
“…I have accordingly brought in Sullivan and Cromwell, in order to be sure that our interests are protected. … Foster is a director and he is particularly anxious to be certain that there is no liability attaching to the American directors.”
UBC's network touched a firm that used Auschwitz slave labour — but Bush's exact tie at the time is murky.
SOME SMOKEThrough the Thyssen web, the American interests connected to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC) in Silesia. Thyssen's steel partner Friedrich Flick — who also owned part of IG Farben — ran Polish plants that made heavy use of concentration-camp slave labour; a New York Times report of March 18, 1934 said Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while 'American interests' held the rest, and during the war CSSC used slave labour, including from Auschwitz. But ownership between the 1939 German invasion and the 1942 US seizure is genuinely unclear: the historian Eva Schweitzer notes the American entity (the Silesian-American Corporation) definitely owned CSSC in 1934–35, but 'all concrete evidence of its ownership disappears after 1935.' Two Auschwitz survivors, Kurt Goldstein and Peter Gingold, brought a $40bn class action naming the US government and the Bush family; it was dismissed in US court on state-sovereignty grounds. Graded SOME SMOKE: the network link, the slave-labour history, and the lawsuit are real; a direct, timed Bush role in the slave-labour operation is not established.
- The Guardian (2004) — CSSC, Flick, the 1934 NYT ownership figure, and the survivors' $40bn suit
- Eva Schweitzer, America and the Holocaust — the post-1935 CSSC ownership gap
These dealings built the Bush family fortune and dynasty.
SOME SMOKEIt has been suggested — including in books on the subject — that the money Prescott Bush made in the Walker/Harriman/Thyssen banking world helped establish the family fortune and its political dynasty. That's a plausible and much-repeated claim, but it's an interpretation of his overall banking career rather than a figure the seizure documents establish. Graded SOME SMOKE: real career, real wealth, but 'the Nazi money built the dynasty' is asserted, not proven.
- The Guardian (2004); contemporaneous books on Bush's business history
The paper trail is enough. The caricature isn't needed.
- A seizure is not a verdict on a man's soul. The government seized UBC because it was an enemy-linked asset — a statement about the bank's entanglements, not proof that a particular director shared the enemy's ideology. We report the seizure; we don't read a conscience into it.
- The reporters drew the line, so we keep it. The Guardian explicitly separated the documented record from the “inaccurate and unfair” internet version. Honoring that line is what makes the real story usable rather than dismissible.
- The cover-up outlasts the deal. John Loftus — a former US Nazi-war-crimes prosecutor — put the emphasis in the right place: “You can't blame Bush for what his grandfather did… but what is important is the cover-up, how it could have gone on so successfully for half a century.” He'd argue a case for “aid and comfort to the enemy” against the directors for staying on the boards; that is his prosecutorial opinion, which we attribute rather than adopt. And the legal timeline matters: doing business with the Thyssens was not illegal in the 1930s, and the US was neutral until Pearl Harbor — the sharp fact is that UBC kept operating as a Thyssen vehicle after America entered the war, and that the inquiry then simply stopped.
- Not the Business Plot. Prescott Bush's name gets dragged into the 1933 coup attempt; it doesn't belong there (see that hub). This is the separate, better-documented matter — and it's strong enough on its own that conflating the two only weakens both.
The other face of the 1930s
Two things were true of American high finance in the 1930s: a slice of it flirted with a coup against Roosevelt at home, and a slice of it did profitable business with the industrialists bankrolling fascism abroad. Prescott Bush's UBC directorship is a clean, documented instance of the second — and it anchors the finance-fascism leg of the Wall Street's History of Fascism hub, alongside the Sullivan & Cromwell / Schröder story, because it is the same world: Wall Street law firms and banks moving capital and legitimacy toward Germany right up to (and, in UBC's case, into) the war. It cross-links to the Dulles Blueprint hub, where those same men carry the story into the postwar intelligence world. Read it beside the hub's flagship, The Plot to Seize the White House, and the decade's pattern comes into focus.
Questions worth taking seriously
So was Prescott Bush a Nazi, or did he fund Hitler?
No, on the evidence. He was a director of a bank that served the Thyssen fortune and was seized as an enemy asset in 1942 — documented facts. But the reporting that surfaced this says there's “no suggestion” he was a Nazi sympathizer, and calls the “Bush/Nazi” internet version “inaccurate and unfair.” We document the business ties and the seizure, not sympathy he isn't shown to have had.
What does the 1942 seizure actually prove, then?
That a US bank tied to the Thyssen fortune — with Bush on its board — was entangled enough with enemy interests that the government took it over under the Trading with the Enemy Act during the war. That's a serious, documented fact about the bank and the milieu. It's not, by itself, a finding about any single director's intent.
Is this the same as the Business Plot to overthrow FDR?
No — and conflating them is a common error. Prescott Bush is not established as part of the 1933–34 Business Plot; that's a separate story with a separate (Morgan/du Pont) cast. This is his documented Nazi-finance matter. We keep them apart on purpose — see The Plot to Seize the White House.
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This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The record
- The Guardian (2004) — “How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power” (built on National Archives / Library of Congress files)
- US National Archives — Vesting Order 248 (Oct 20, 1942), Office of Alien Property Custodian, seizure of the Union Banking Corporation and affiliates
- Library of Congress — the Harriman papers (Bush as director/shareholder of Thyssen-linked companies)
- New York Herald-Tribune (Jul 30, 1942) — “Hitler's Angel Has $3m in US Bank” (the report that triggered the APC investigation)
- John Loftus (former US Nazi-war-crimes prosecutor) — commentary on the UBC files and the cover-up, quoted in the Guardian
- Anti-Defamation League — statement rejecting the “Nazi ties” charge against Prescott Bush
- Eva Schweitzer, America and the Holocaust — the post-1935 CSSC ownership gap