The president of the Florida Holocaust Museum said Saturday
[2001-01-27] that George W. Bush's grandfather derived a portion of his
personal fortune through his affiliation with a Nazi-controlled bank.
John Loftus, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department's Nazi War
Crimes Unit, said his research found that Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush,
was a principal in the Union Banking Corp. in Manhattan in the late 1930s and
the 1940s.
Leading Nazi industrialists secretly owned the bank at that time, Loftus
said, and were moving money into it through a second bank in Holland even
after the United States declared war on Germany. The bank was liquidated in
1951, Loftus said, and Bush's grandfather and great-grandfather received $1.5
million from the bank as part of that dissolution.
"That's where the Bush family fortune came from: It came from the Third
Reich," Loftus said. Loftus made his remarks during a speech as part of the
Sarasota Reading Festival. The author of "Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, The
Nazis and the Swiss Banks," Loftus documented the Swiss bank accounts that
harbored funds confiscated from Holocaust victims and the participation of
Italian priests in smuggling Nazi war criminals to safe haven in Canada,
Central and South America and the United States after the war.
Although he said he had a file of paperwork linking the bank and Prescott
Bush to Nazi money, Loftus did not provide that documentation Saturday.
Loftus pointed out that the Bush family would not be the only American
political dynasty to have ties to the "wrong side of World War II." The
Rockefellers had financial connections to Nazi Germany, he said.
Loftus also reminded his audience that John F. Kennedy's father, an avowed
isolationist and former ambassador to Great Britain, profited during the 1930s
and '40s from Nazi stocks that he owned.
"No one today blames the Democrats because Jack Kennedy's father bought
Nazi stocks," Loftus said. Still, he said, it is important to understand these
historical connections for what they tell us about politics today. The World
War II experience points out how easy it was then — and remains today — to
hide money in multinational funds.
That money flows into American politics today, he said, from "a series of
multinational corporations behaving like pirates. They don't care about
ideology; they care about money." Loftus' speech left many in tears.
"I am absolutely shocked," said Nancy Krauss of Punta Gorda. "I wish this
would have come out before the election. My husband voted for Bush. I
don't think he would have voted for him if he would have known."
BUSH CRIME FAMILY LINKS