from George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton
Chaitkin
Chapter - II - The Hitler Project
Bush Property Seized--Trading with the Enemy
In October 1942, ten months after entering World War II, America was
preparing its first assault
against Nazi military forces. Prescott Bush was managing partner of Brown
Brothers Harriman.
His 18-year-old son George, the future U.S. President, had just begun
training to become a naval
pilot. On Oct. 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi
German banking
operations in New York City which were being conducted by Prescott Bush.
Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took over the Union
Banking
Corporation, in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property
Custodian seized Union
Banking Corp.'s stock shares, all of which were owned by Prescott Bush, E.
Roland "Bunny"
Harriman, three Nazi executives, and two other associates of Bush.
The order seizing the bank "vests" (seizes) "all of the capital stock
of Union Banking
Corporation, a New York corporation," and names the holders of its shares
as:
"E. Roland Harriman--3991 shares" [chairman and director of Union
Banking Corp. (UBC); this is "Bunny"
Harriman, described by Prescott Bush as a place holder who didn't get much
into banking affairs;
Prescott managed his personal investments]
"Cornelis Lievense--4 shares" [president and director of UBC; New York
resident banking functionary for
the Nazis]
"Harold D. Pennington--1 share" [treasurer and director of UBC; an
office manager employed by Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman]
"Ray Morris--1 share" [director of UBC; partner of Bush and the Harrimans]
"Prescott S. Bush--1 share" [director of UBC, which was co-founded and
sponsored by his father-in-law
George Walker; senior managing partner for E. Roland Harriman and Averell
Harriman]
"H.J. Kouwenhoven--1 share" [director of UBC; organized UBC as the
emissary of Fritz Thyssen in
negotiations with George Walker and Averell Harriman; managing director of
UBC's Netherlands
affiliate under Nazi occupation; industrial executive in Nazi Germany;
director and chief foreign
financial executive of the German Steel Trust]
"Johann G. Groeninger--1 share" [director of UBC and of its Netherlands
affiliate; industrial executive in
Nazi Germany] "all of which shares are held for the benefit of ...
members of the
Thyssen family, [and] is property of nationals ... of a designated enemy
country...."
By Oct. 26, 1942, U.S. troops were under way for North Africa. On Oct. 28,
the government
issued orders seizing two Nazi front organizations run by the Bush-Harriman
bank: the Holland-
American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation.
U.S. forces landed under fire near Algiers on Nov. 8, 1942; heavy combat
raged throughout
November. Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation, long managed
by Prescott Bush
and his father-in-law George Herbert Walker, were seized under the Trading
with the Enemy Act
on Nov. 17, 1942. In this action, the government announced that it was
seizing only the Nazi
interests, leaving the Nazis' U.S. partners to carry on the business.
These and other actions taken by the U.S. government in wartime were,
tragically, too little and
too late. President Bush's family had already played a central role in
financing and arming Adolf
Hitler for his takeover of Germany; in financing and managing the buildup
of Nazi war industries
for the conquest of Europe and war against the U.S.A.; and in the
development of Nazi genocide
theories and racial propaganda, with their well-known results.
The facts presented here must be known, and their implications reflected
upon, for a proper
understanding of President George Herbert Walker Bush and of the danger to
mankind that he
represents. The President's family fortune was largely a result of the
Hitler project. The powerful
Anglo-American family associations, which later boosted him into the
Central Intelligence
Agency and up to the White House, were his father's partners in the Hitler
project.
President Franklin Roosevelt's Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley,
signed Vesting Order
Number 248 seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with the
Enemy Act. The
order, published in obscure government record books and kept out of the
news, explained
nothing about the Nazis involved; only that the Union Banking Corporation
was run for the ``
Thyssen family" of "Germany and/or Hungary" --"nationals ... of a
designated enemy country.''
By deciding that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the Union Banking
Corp. were legally
front men for the Nazis, the government avoided the more important
historical issue: In what way
were Hitler's Nazis themselves hired, armed and instructed by the New York
and London clique
of which Prescott Bush was an executive manager? Let us examine the
Harriman-Bush Hitler
project from the 1920s until it was partially broken up, to seek an answer
for that question.
Origin and Extent of the Project
Fritz Thyssen and his business partners are universally recognized as the
most important German financiers of Adolf Hitler's takeover of Germany. At
the time of the
order seizing the Thyssen family's Union Banking Corp., Mr. Fritz Thyssen
had already
published his famous book, I Paid Hitler, admitting that he had financed
Adolf Hitler and the
Nazi movement since October 1923. Thyssen's role as the leading early
backer of Hitler's grab
for power in Germany had been noted by U.S. diplomats in Berlin in 1932.
The order seizing the
Bush-Thyssen bank was curiously quiet and modest about the identity of the
perpetrators
who had been nailed.
But two weeks before the official order, government investigators had
reported secretly that "W.
Averell Harriman was in Europe sometime prior to 1924 and at that time
became acquainted with
Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist." Harriman and Thyssen agreed to
set up a bank for
Thyssen in New York. "[C]ertain of [Harriman's] associates would serve as
directors...."
Thyssen agent "H. J. Kouwenhoven ... came to the United States ... prior
to 1924 for
conferences with the Harriman Company in this connection...."
When exactly was "Harriman in Europe sometime prior to 1924"? In
fact,he was in Berlin in
1922 to set up the Berlin branch of W.A. Harriman & Co. under George
Walker's presidency.
The Union Banking Corporation was established formally in 1924, as a unit
in the Manhattan
offices of W.A. Harriman & Co., interlocking with the Thyssen-owned Bank
voor Handel en
Scheepvaart (BHS) in the Netherlands. The investigators concluded that
``the Union Banking
Corporation has since its inception handled funds chiefly supplied to it
through the Dutch bank by
the Thyssen interests for American investment."
Thus by personal agreement between Averell Harriman and Fritz Thyssen in
1922, W.A.
Harriman & Co. (alias Union Banking Corporation) would be transferring
funds back and forth
between New York and the "Thyssen interests" in Germany. By putting up
about $400,000, the
Harriman organization would be joint owner and manager of Thyssen's banking
operations
outside of Germany.
How important was the Nazi enterprise for which President Bush's father was
the New York
banker?
The 1942 U.S. government investigative report said that Bush's Nazi-front
bank was an
interlocking concern with the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works
Corporation or German
Steel Trust) led by Fritz Thyssen and his two brothers. After the war,
Congressional investigators
probed the Thyssen interests, Union Banking Corp. and related Nazi units.
The investigation
showed that the Vereinigte Stahlwerke had produced the following
approximate proportions of
total German national output:
50.8% of Nazi Germany's pig iron
41.4% of Nazi Germany's universal plate
36.0% of Nazi Germany's heavy plate
38.5% of Nazi Germany's galvanized sheet
45.5% of Nazi Germany's pipes and tubes
22.1% of Nazi Germany's wire
35.0% of Nazi Germany's explosives.
Prescott Bush became vice president of W.A. Harriman & Co. in 1926. That
same year, a friend
of Harriman and Bush set up a giant new organization for their client Fritz
Thyssen, prime sponsor of politician Adolf Hitler. The new German Steel
Trust, Germany's largest industrial
corporation, was organized in 1926 by Wall Street banker Clarence Dillon.
Dillon was the old
comrade of Prescott Bush's father Sam Bush from the "Merchants of Death
'' bureau in World
War I.
In return for putting up $70 million to create his organization, majority
owner Thyssen gave the
Dillon Read company two or more representatives on the board of the new
Steel Trust.
Thus there is a division of labor: Thyssen's own confidential accounts, for
political and related
purposes, were run through the Walker-Bush organization; the German Steel
Trust did its
corporate banking through Dillon Read.
The Walker-Bush firm's banking activities were not just politically neutral
money-making
ventures which happened to coincide with the aims of German Nazis. All of
the firm's European
business in those days was organized around anti-democratic political forces.
In 1927, criticism of their support for totalitarianism drew this retort
from Bert Walker, written
from Kennebunkport to Averell Harriman: "It seems to me that the
suggestion in connection
with Lord Bearsted's views that we withdraw from Russia smacks somewhat of
the impertinent....
I think that we have drawn our line and should hew to it."
Averell Harriman met with Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini. A
representative of the firm
subsequently telegraphed good news back to his chief executive Bert Walker:
"... During these
last days ... Mussolini ... has examined and approved our c[o]ntract 15
June."
The great financial collapse of 1929-31 shook America, Germany and Britain,
weakening all
governments. It also made the hard-pressed Prescott Bush even more willing
to do whatever
was necessary to retain his new place in the world. It was in this crisis
that certain Anglo-
Americans determined on the installation of a Hitler regime in Germany.
W.A. Harriman & Co., well-positioned for this enterprise and rich in assets
from their German
and Russian business, merged with the British-American investment house,
Brown Brothers, on
January 1, 1931. Bert Walker retired to his own G.H. Walker & Co. This left
the Harriman
brothers, Prescott Bush and Thatcher M. Brown as the senior partners of the
new Brown Brothers
Harriman firm. (The London, England branch of the Brown family firm
continued operating under
its historic name--Brown, Shipley.)
Robert A. Lovett also came over as a partner from Brown Brothers. His
father, E.H. Harriman's
lawyer and railroad chief, had been on the War Industries Board with
Prescott's father. Though
he remained a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, the junior Lovett soon
replaced his father as
chief executive of Union Pacific Railroad.
Brown Brothers had a racial tradition that fitted it well for the Hitler
project! American patriots had
cursed its name back in U.S. Civil War days. Brown Brothers, with offices
in the U.S.A. and in
England, had carried on their ships fully 75 percent of the slave cotton
from the American South
over to British mill owners. Now in 1931, the virtual dictator of world
finance, Bank of England
Governor Montagu Collet Norman, was a former Brown Brothers partner, whose
grandfather had
been boss of Brown Brothers during the U.S. Civil War. Montagu Norman was
known as the
most avid of Hitler's supporters within British ruling circles, and
Norman's intimacy with this firm
was essential to his management of the Hitler project.
In 1931, while Prescott Bush ran the New York office of Brown Brothers
Harriman, Prescott's
partner was Montagu Norman's intimate friend Thatcher Brown. The Bank of
England chief
always stayed at the home of Prescott's partner on his hush-hush trips to
New York. Prescott
Bush concentrated on the firm's German activities, and Thatcher Brown saw
to their business in
old England, under the guidance of his mentor Montagu Norman.
Hitler's Ladder to Power
Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany January 30, 1933, and absolute
dictator in March
1933, after two years of expensive and violent lobbying and electioneering.
Two affiliates of the
Bush-Harriman organization played great parts in this criminal undertaking:
Thyssen's German
Steel Trust; and the Hamburg-Amerika Line and several of its executives.
Let us look more closely at the Bush family's German partners.
Fritz Thyssen told Allied interrogators after the war about some of his
financial support for the
Nazi Party: "In 1930 or 1931 ... I told [Hitler's deputy Rudolph] Hess
... I would arrange a credit
for him with a Dutch bank in Rotterdam, the Bank fuer Handel und Schiff
[i.e. Bank voor
Handel en Scheepvaart (BHS), the Harriman-Bush affiliate]. I arranged the
credit ... he would
pay it back in three years.... I chose a Dutch bank because I did not want
to be mixed up with
German banks in my position, and because I thought it was better to do
business with a Dutch
bank, and I thought I would have the Nazis a little more in my hands... .
"The credit was about 250-300,000 [gold] marks--about the sum I had given
before. The loan
has been repaid in part to the Dutch bank, but I think some money is still
owing on it....
''
The overall total of Thyssen's political donations and loans to the Nazis
was well over a million
dollars, including funds he raised from others--in a period of terrible
money shortage in
Germany.
Friedrich Flick was the major co-owner of the German Steel Trust with Fritz
Thyssen, Thyssen's
long-time collaborator and occasional competitor. In preparation for the
war crimes tribunal at
Nuremberg, the U.S. government said that Flick was "one of leading
financiers and
industrialists who from 1932 contributed large sums to the Nazi Party ...
member of `Circle of
Friends' of Himmler who contributed large sums to the SS."
Flick, like Thyssen, financed the Nazis to maintain their private armies
called Schutzstaffel (S.S.
or Black Shirts) and Sturmabteilung (S.A., storm troops or Brown Shirts).
The Flick-Harriman partnership was directly supervised by Prescott Bush,
President Bush's
father, and by George Walker, President Bush's grandfather.
The Harriman-Walker Union Banking Corp. arrangements for the German Steel
Trust had made
them bankers for Flick and his vast operations in Germany by no later than
1926.
The Harriman Fifteen Corporation (George Walker, president, Prescott Bush
and Averell
Harriman, sole directors) held a substantial stake in the Silesian Holding
Co. at the time of the
merger with Brown Brothers, Jan. 1, 1931. This holding correlated to
Averell Harriman's
chairmanship of the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, the American
group owning one-
third of a complex of steel-making, coal-mining and zinc-mining activities
in Germany and
Poland, in which Friedrich Flick owned two-thirds.
The Nuremberg prosecutor characterized Flick as follows:
"Proprietor and head of a large group of industrial enterprises (coal and
iron mines, steel
producing and fabricating plants) ... `Wehrwirtschaftsfuehrer', 1938
[title awarded to
prominent industrialists for merit in armaments drive--`Military Economy
Leader']...."
For this buildup of the Hitler war machine with coal, steel and arms
production, using slave
laborers, the Nazi Flick was condemned to seven years in prison at the
Nuremberg trials; he
served three years. With friends in New York and London, however, Flick
lived into the 1970s
and died a billionaire.
On March 19, 1934, Prescott Bush--then director of the German Steel Trust's
Union Banking
Corporation--initiated an alert to the absent Averell Harriman about a
problem which had
developed in the Flick partnership. Bush sent Harriman a clipping
from the New York
Times of that day, which reported that the Polish government was fighting
back against
American and German stockholders who controlled "Poland's largest
industrial unit, the Upper
Silesian Coal and Steel Company...."
The Times article continued: "The company has long been accused of
mismanagement,
excessive borrowing, fictitious bookkeeping and gambling in securities.
Warrants were issued in
December for several directors accused of tax evasions. They were German
citizens and they
fled. They were replaced by Poles. Herr Flick, regarding this as an attempt
to make the
company's board entirely Polish, retaliated by restricting credits until
the new Polish directors
were unable to pay the workmen regularly."
The Times noted that the company's mines and mills "employ 25,000 men and
account for 45
percent of Poland's total steel output and 12 percent of her coal
production. Two-thirds of the
company's stock is owned by Friedrich Flick, a leading German steel
industrialist, and the
remainder is owned by interests in the United States."
In view of the fact that a great deal of Polish output was being exported
to Hitler Germany under
depression conditions, the Polish government thought that Prescott Bush,
Harriman and their
Nazi partners should at least pay full taxes on their Polish holdings. The
U.S. and Nazi owners
responded with a lockout. The letter to Harriman in Washington reported a
cable from their
European representative: "Have undertaken new steps London Berlin ...
please establish
friendly relations with Polish Ambassador [in Washington]."
A 1935 Harriman Fifteen Corporation memo from George Walker announced an
agreement had
been made "in Berlin" to sell an 8,000 block of their shares in
Consolidated Silesian
Steel. But the dispute with Poland did not deter the Bush family from
continuing its
partnership with Flick.
Nazi tanks and bombs "settled" this dispute in September, 1939 with the
invasion of Poland,
beginning World War II. The Nazi army had been equipped by Flick, Harriman,
Walker and
Bush, with materials essentially stolen from Poland.
There were probably few people at the time who could appreciate the irony,
that when the
Soviets also attacked and invaded Poland from the East, their vehicles were
fueled by oil
pumped from Baku wells revived by the Harriman/Walker/Bush enterprise.
Three years later, nearly a year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
the U.S. government
ordered the seizure of the Nazis' share in the Silesian-American
Corporation under the Trading
with the Enemy Act. Enemy nationals were said to own 49 percent of the
common stock and
41.67 percent of the preferred stock of the company.
The order characterized the company as a "business enterprise within the
United States, owned
by [a front company in] Zurich, Switzerland, and held for the benefit of
Bergwerksgesellschaft
George von Giesche's Erben, a German corporation...."
Bert Walker was still the senior director of the company, which he had
founded back in 1926
simultaneously with the creation of the German Steel Trust. Ray Morris,
Prescott's partner from
Union Banking Corp. and Brown Brothers Harriman, was also a director.
The investigative report prior to the government crackdown explained the ``
NATURE OF
BUSINESS: The subject corporation is an American holding company for German
and Polish
subsidiaries, which own large and valuable coal and zinc mines in Silesia,
Poland and Germany.
Since September 1939, these properties have been in the possession of and
have been
operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable
assistance to
that country in its war effort."
The report noted that the American stockholders hoped to regain control of
the European
properties after the war.
Control of Nazi Commerce
Bert Walker had arranged the credits Harriman needed to take control of
theHamburg-Amerika
Line back in 1920. Walker had organized the American Ship and Commerce
Corp. as a unit of
the W.A. Harriman & Co., with contractual power over Hamburg-Amerika's
affairs.
As the Hitler project went into high gear, Harriman-Bush shares in American
Ship and
Commerce Corp. were held by the Harriman Fifteen Corp., run by Prescott
Bush and Bert
Walker.
It was a convenient stroll for the well-tanned, athletic, handsome Prescott
Bush: From the Brown
Brothers Harriman skyscraper at 59 Wall Street--where he was senior
managing partner,
confidential investments manager and adviser to Averell and his brother ``
Bunny"--he walked
across to the Harriman Fifteen Corporation at One Wall Street, otherwise
known as G.H. Walker
& Co.--and around the corner to his subsidiary offices at 39 Broadway,
former home of the old
W.A. Harriman & Co., and still the offices for American Ship and Commerce
Corp., and of the
Union Banking Corporation.
In many ways, Bush's Hamburg-Amerika Line was the pivot for the entire
Hitler project.
Averell Harriman and Bert Walker had gained control over the steamship
company in 1920 in
negotiations with its post-World War I chief executive, Wilhelm Cuno, and
with the line's
bankers, M.M. Warburg. Cuno was thereafter completely dependent on the
Anglo-Americans,
and became a member of the Anglo-German Friendship Society. In the 1930-32
drive for a Hitler
dictatorship, Wilhelm Cuno contributed important sums to the Nazi Party.
Albert Voegler was chief executive of the Thyssen-Flick German Steel Trust
for which Bush's
Union Banking Corp. was the New York office. He was a director of the
Bush-affiliate BHS Bank
in Rotterdam, and a director of the Harriman-Bush Hamburg-Amerika Line.
Voegler joined
Thyssen and Flick in their heavy 1930-33 Nazi contributions, and helped
organize the final Nazi
leap into national power.
The Schroeder family of bankers was a linchpin for the Nazi activities of
Harriman and Prescott
Bush, closely tied to their lawyers Allen and John Foster Dulles.
Baron Kurt von Schroeder was co-director of the massive Thyssen-Huette
foundry along with
Johann Groeninger, Prescott Bush's New York bank partner. Kurt von
Schroeder was treasurer
of the support organization for the Nazi Party's private armies, to which
Friedrich Flick
contributed. Kurt von Schroeder and Montagu Norman's prote@aage@aa Hjalmar
Schacht
together made the final arrangements for Hitler to enter the government.
Baron Rudolph von Schroeder was vice president and director of the
Hamburg-Amerika Line.
Long an intimate contact of Averell Harriman's in Germany, Baron Rudolph
sent his grandson
Baron Johann Rudolph for a tour of Prescott Bush's Brown Brothers Harriman
offices in New
York City in December 1932--on the eve of their Hitler-triumph.
Certain actions taken directly by the Harriman-Bush shipping line in 1932
must be ranked among
the gravest acts of treason in this century.
The U.S. embassy in Berlin reported back to Washington that the "costly
election campaigns"
and "the cost of maintaining a private army of 300,000 to 400,000 men"
had raised questions
as to the Nazis' financial backers. The constitutional government of the
German republic moved
to defend national freedom by ordering the Nazi Party private armies
disbanded. The U.S.
embassy reported that the Hamburg-Amerika Line was purchasing and
distributing propaganda
attacks against the German government, for attempting this last-minute
crackdown on Hitler's
forces.
Thousands of German opponents of Hitlerism were shot or intimidated by
privately armed Nazi
Brown Shirts. In this connection we note that the original "Merchant of
Death," Samuel Pryor,
was a founding director of both the Union Banking Corp. and the American
Ship and Commerce
Corp. Since Mr. Pryor was executive committee chairman of Remington Arms
and a central
figure in the world's private arms traffic, his use to the Hitler project
was enhanced as the Bush
family's partner in Nazi Party banking and trans-Atlantic shipping.
The U.S. Senate arms-traffic investigators probed Remington after it was
joined in a cartel
agreement on explosives to the Nazi firm I.G. Farben. Looking at the period
leading up to Hitler's
seizure of power, the Senators found that "German political associations,
like the Nazi and
others, are nearly all armed with American ... guns.... Arms of all kinds
coming from America are
transshipped in the Scheldt to river barges before the vessels arrive in
Antwerp. They then can
be carried through Holland without police inspection or interference. The
Hitlerists and
Communists are presumed to get arms in this manner. The principal arms
coming from America
are Thompson submachine guns and revolvers. The number is great."
The beginning of the Hitler regime brought some bizarre changes to the
Hamburg-Amerika Line--
and more betrayals.
Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. notified Max Warburg of
Hamburg,
Germany, on March 7, 1933, that Warburg was to be the corporation's
official, designated
representative on the board of Hamburg-Amerika.
Max Warburg replied on March 27, 1933, assuring his American sponsors that
the Hitler
government was good for Germany: "For the last few years business was
considerably better
than we had anticipated, but a reaction is making itself felt for some
months. We are actually
suffering also under the very active propaganda against Germany, caused by
some unpleasant
circumstances. These occurrences were the natural consequence of the very
excited election
campaign, but were extraordinarily exaggerated in the foreign press. The
Government is firmly
resolved to maintain public peace and order in Germany, and I feel
perfectly convinced in this
respect that there is no cause for any alarm whatsoever."
This seal of approval for Hitler, coming from a famous Jew, was just what
Harriman and Bush
required, for they anticipated rather serious "alarm" inside the U.S.A.
against their Nazi
operations.
On March 29, 1933, two days after Max's letter to Harriman, Max's son,
Erich Warburg, sent a
cable to his cousin Frederick M. Warburg, a director of the Harriman
railroad system. He asked
Frederick to "use all your influence" to stop all anti-Nazi activity in
America, including ``
atrocity news and unfriendly propaganda in foreign press, mass meetings,
etc." Frederick cabled
back to Erich: "No responsible groups here [are] urging [a] boycott [of]
German goods[,] merely
excited individuals." Two days after that, On March 31, 1933, the
American-Jewish Committee,
controlled by the Warburgs, and the B'nai B'rith, heavily influenced by the
Sulzbergers (New
York Times), issued a formal, official joint statement of the two
organizations, counseling "that
no American boycott against Germany be encouraged," and advising "that
no further mass
meetings be held or similar forms of agitation be employed."
The American Jewish Committee and the B'nai B'rith (mother of the ``
Anti-Defamation League
'') continued with this hardline, no-attack-on-Hitler stance all through
the 1930s, blunting the fight
mounted by many Jews and other anti-fascists.
Thus the decisive interchange reproduced above, taking place entirely
within the orbit of the
Harriman/Bush firm, may explain something of the relationship of George
Bush to American
Jewish and Zionist leaders. Some of them, in close cooperation with his
family, played an ugly
part in the drama of Naziism. Is this why "professional Nazi-hunters"
have never discovered
how the Bush family made its money?
The executive board of the Hamburg Amerika Line (Hapag) met jointly with
the North German
Lloyd Company board in Hamburg on Sept. 5, 1933. Under official Nazi
supervision, the two
firms were merged. Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp.
installed Christian J.
Beck, a long-time Harriman executive, as manager of freight and operations
in North America for
the new joint Nazi shipping lines (Hapag-Lloyd) on Nov. 4, 1933.
According to testimony of officials of the companies before Congress in
1934, a supervisor from
the Nazi Labor Front rode with every ship of the Harriman-Bush line;
employees of the New York
offices were directly organized into the Nazi Labor Front organization;
Hamburg-Amerika
provided free passage to individuals going abroad for Nazi propaganda
purposes; and the line
subsidized pro-Nazi newspapers in the U.S.A., as it had done in Germany
against the
constitutional German government.