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Trading With the Enemy
The same investigation, restaged one beat at a time. Drive it with the arrow keys, space, or autoplay. Nothing is cut from the piece — long runs are split across frames. Read the full investigation or open the Wall Street's History of Fascism hub.
Trading with the Enemy.
In October 1942 — with the United States at war — the government seized a New York bank owned by the family of a man who had helped finance Hitler's rise. Prescott Bush was one of its directors. Then the investigation was quietly dropped.
The documented story is institutional: a Thyssen-owned bank, seized as an enemy asset, its American directors named as nominees — then handed back with no further action. The 'Prescott Bush was a Nazi' myth is the overreach, and the deck rejects it.
Documented business ties are not Nazi sympathy — and we won't blur them.
bought by Union Banking Corporation for German interests in 1931–33 alone — part of the gold, fuel, steel, coal, and US Treasury bonds that BBH and UBC moved to Germany across the 1930s.
Alien Property Custodian files (via The Guardian, 2004)
Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of the Union Banking Corporation.
UBC'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 it was one of Bush's first jobs in the Walker/Harriman world (Brown Brothers Harriman). Drawn from the Harriman papers at the Library of Congress.
On October 20, 1942, the US government seized UBC and its affiliates as enemy assets under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
The Alien Property Custodian seized UBC (Vesting Order 248), then the Holland-American Trading Corporation, the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation, and the Silesian-American Company. UBC worked exclusively for, and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands.
Investigators found UBC was an enemy-owned Thyssen shell whose American directors held shares only as nominees — then it was quietly handed back and the investigation dropped.
APC investigator Erwin May found UBC wholly owned by the Thyssens' Rotterdam bank; Homer Jones recommended vesting, naming Bush and writing the 4,000 shares were 'beneficially owned and held for the interests of enemy nationals,' and recommended liquidation. Instead UBC was kept intact, returned to its American shareholders after the war, with no further action. 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.
Thyssen owned Germany's largest steel and coal company and grew rich from Hitler's rearmament, helping bankroll the Nazis in the early 1930s before breaking with Hitler late in the decade. UBC was one pillar of a multinational front-company network owned by his Dutch bank. That Bush's bank served this fortune is documented, not inferred.
That Prescott Bush was a Nazi sympathizer who knowingly financed Hitler.
This 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.' The Anti-Defamation League called the charges 'untenable and politically motivated,' stating Bush 'was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser.' His role was as a bank director whose firm's assets were seized as enemy-linked; the documents show no ideological complicity. Business ties are not sympathy.
Sullivan & Cromwell and John Foster Dulles were pulled in to protect the American CSSC stake — the seam that binds this to the Dulles Blueprint.
National Archives records include a January 1933 letter from BBH partner Knight Woolley to Averell Harriman about the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company as Poland moved to nationalize the plant: he brought in Sullivan & Cromwell to protect the American interests, noting John Foster Dulles — a director — was insisting 'their man in Berlin get into the picture.' The same firm and men recur across the finance-fascism story.
UBC's network touched a firm that used Auschwitz slave labor — but Bush's exact, timed tie is murky.
Through the Thyssen web the American interests connected to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company; Thyssen's partner Friedrich Flick ran Polish plants that used concentration-camp slave labor, and CSSC used Auschwitz labor during the war. But ownership between the 1939 invasion and the 1942 seizure is genuinely unclear — historian Eva Schweitzer notes 'all concrete evidence of its ownership disappears after 1935.' Two Auschwitz survivors' $40bn suit naming the Bush family was dismissed on state-sovereignty grounds. The link, the slave-labor history, and the suit are real; a direct, timed Bush role is not established.
That these dealings built the Bush family fortune and dynasty.
A plausible and much-repeated claim, but an interpretation of Bush's overall banking career rather than a figure the seizure documents establish. Real career, real wealth — but 'the Nazi money built the dynasty' is asserted, not proven.
Why it matters, and where it connects.
This is the Wall Street's History of Fascism hub at its most careful: an institution's entanglement with a Nazi-linked fortune is documented, the seizure is real, the burial is the scandal — and the 'Bush was a Nazi' myth is rejected in the same breath. The Sullivan & Cromwell / Dulles seam ties it to the Dulles Blueprint: the same firm and the same men recur wherever American capital met European fascism.