November 21, 2009
UTNE READER

Heir to the Holocaust

June 14, 2002 Issue
By Julie Madsen 
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he Bush family fortune owes much to the business mind of George W.'s grandfather, Prescott. But the "business opportunity" that netted so much money for the patriarch, according to Dutch and U.S. documents, was an alleged investment in Nazi Germany. Toby Rogers in Clamor tracks the Bush family fortune from its origin shortly after WWI through today, and says that it is the president's duty to return his inherited wealth to holocaust survivors.

"Throughout the Bush family's decades of public life, the American press has gone out of its way to overlook one historical fact: that through Union Banking Corporation (UBC), Prescott Bush, and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, along with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, financed Adolf Hitler before and during World War II," Rogers alleges.

Rogers says that the contents of the intelligence documents are especially notable in light of Bush's speech last spring on Holocaust Remembrance Day, where the president told an audience of holocaust survivors that humanity is "bound by conscience to remember what happened" and that "the record has been kept and preserved. Their crime showed the world that evil can slip in and blend in amid the most civilized surroundings. In the end only conscience can stop it."

If Bush is serious about his words, Rogers asserts, then "the Bush family needs to donate at least $1.5 million to the proper holocaust reparation fund. Since Prescott Bush is dead, the only way to compensate is for the main inheritors of his estate to make amends with surviving slaves and the families of slaves who died in Bush and Thyssen's coal mines. If the Bush family refuses to contribute the money to compensate for Prescott Bush's involvement in the Holocaust, it is like denying the Holocaust itself and their role in one of the darkest moments in world history."
--Julie Madsen
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