December 20, 2002
Prescott Bush and Auschwitz
In summer 2001, my friend Toby Rogers, co-author of the introduction to the first paperpack edition of J.H. Hatfield's Fortunate Son: The Making of an American President, told me he was working on an article he wanted me to look at. Through John Loftus, co-author of The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People, and some files leaked by a Dutch intelligence agent, Rogers was able to link the Bush family fortune to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation and the Upper Silesian Coal and Steel Company located in the Silesian section of Poland. During the Nazi occupation, these enterprises were run in part with slave labor of prisoners in Auschwitz.It's fairly well known that Prescott Bush, George W.'s grandfather, and George Herbert Walker, George W's maternal grandfather, were partners in the Union Banking Trust, which was closed under the Trading With the Enemy Act during World War II for its channeling of investment capital into the Third Reich. Even the Boston Globe has reported that. (A copy of the Globe article is available at baltech.org)The connection with Auschwitz, however, was something new.
Toby put all the pieces together, and was looking for a publication courageous enough to publish it, and then came September 11. It was out of the range of possibility for the foreseeable future. Finally in the summer of 2002, Rogers got the story published in Clamor magazine. I had a link to the site for a long time, then one day realized the link was dead. Today I received the link in an e-mail from Mark Crispin Miller, and lo and behold, it works. So here it is, the link to Clamor Magazine for Toby Roger's essential piece: "Heir to the Holocaust."