As the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz comes and goes,
the long-controversial links between American industrialists and the
rise of the Nazi regime have become clearer, thanks to recently
uncovered documents.

The ties between Hitler’s Nazis and American businessmen such as Henry
Ford, Averell Harriman, and Senator Prescott Bush, the father of George
HW Bush, have long been cited in lawsuits filed by Holocaust survivors
seeking compensation for their suffering. The late Senator Prescott
Bush’s German assets were seized in 1942 by President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt under the Trading with the Enemy Act, which also carried
prison penalties which Bush escaped. Historical scholarship over the
last decade shows that Bush was deeply enmeshed in business which was
vital to the rise of Nazi Germany, and almost certainly knew that his
profits were driven by slave labor.

The January 27th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the
Soviets was the last decade anniversary which most survivors expected to
be able to attend.

In groundbreaking reporting, the New Hampshire Gazette said in 2003, in
“Bush-Nazi Link Confirmed,” that:

"“The documents from the [National] Archives…show that the Bushes and
Harrimans shipped valuable U.S. assets, including gold, coal, steel and
U.S. Treasury and war bonds, to their foreign clients overseas as Hitler
geared up for his 1939 invasion of Poland, the event that sparked World
War II.”"

Previously, the families of American industrialists such as Bush have
maintained that their business ties with the Third Reich were at arm’s
length, and that the companies were unaware of what Hitler was doing to
Jews and other “displaced persons.” The American companies were heavily
involved in German business during Hitler’s rise between 1933, when
Adolf Hitler consolidated dictatorial powers after the “Reichstag Fire,”
through the 1939 invasion of Poland, and even after the bombing of Pearl
Harbor and the declaration of war upon Germany by the United States.
Many say that the German “economic miracle” in fact was built on the
slave labor of Jews, Poles, and other “undesirables” under the Nazi regime.