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	J.Z. Holden  photo © 2007 Michael Knigan  All rights reserved   About the Author J.Z. Holden lives in Sag Harbor, New York, where she writes about life, love, art and politics. She is a regular contributing editor to hamptons.com, danspapers.com, and The Southampton Press. She is presently working on a novel entitled, The Illusion  of Memory.		The Bush/Nazi Connection by J.Z Holden © 2007. All rights reserved   A balding, silver-haired Kurt Julius Goldstein opens the door to his hotel room overlooking the United Nations Plaza in New York. He is wearing dark brown corduroy slacks and a beige cotton turtleneck beneath a dark green V-neck pullover. His handshake is firm, and he smiles broadly. Inside the room, the sun reflects off a metal cane leaning against the bureau. Mr. Goldstein strolls past ignoring its presence. Instead, picking up his pace, he walks vigorously towards two chairs arranged by the window where the interview is to be held. His vigor is surprising; he looks like a man in his mid-sixties, rather than a man who is about to turn 91. From 1942 until 1945, this now robust elderly man, bathed in New York’s winter light with the world’s flags fluttering behind him, worked the night shift as a slave laborer in the coal mines at Auschwitz. He is one of two plaintiffs namedin an astonishing lawsuit suing President Bush and the US government for $400 Million. Kurt Julius Goldstein and Peter Gingold, the Auschwitz survivors named as plaintiffs in the litigation against the Bush family, are 91 and 89 years of age respectively. Mr. Goldstein claims to have mined the coal for Consolidated Silesian Steel - coal that fueled furnaces where armaments were made, coal transformed into oil, gasoline and airplane fuel for IG Farben that due to patent arrangements benefited the German war effort, coal for trains to transport Jews to the camp, and coal for the ovens to burn them after they were gassed. Mr. Goldstein said from his hotel room in New York, “Genocide is not forgivable and cannot be swept under the rug.” Both Mr. Goldstein and Mr. Gingold argue that hundreds of thousands of lives should have been saved as a result of an executive order issued by President Roosevelt on January 22, 1944, which established the “policy of the U.S. government to take all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death and otherwise to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war.” Mr. Goldstein describes himself as “a German, a Jew and a Communist, in that order,” with “humanitarian values” learned as a young boy at his father’s bedside, who prior to dying of war wounds in 1920, tutored Mr. Goldstein in the works of Schiller and Goethe. After his father’s death, young Goldstein was absorbed by a large, upper-middle-class Jewish family with a successful textile business in Hamm. By 1927, he had become a member of the Communist party, and by 1935 he had left for Palestine, only to return to Europe by 1939 to fight in the war in Spain. By July of 1942, he had been captured and sent to Auschwitz. In 1945, after the liberation of the concentration camps, many survivors chose to leave Europe for the United States, Israel or South America. Mr. Goldstein chose to return to his homeland in order to “rebuild a better Germany”. He authored two books; one is a compilation of lectures and the other an autobiography entitled “The King of the Jews” in which he describes in detail his Auschwitz experience. He is presently working on a third “installment” which he plans to release on his 100th birthday. In his vast career, Kurt Julius Goldstein has been the Secretary of the KPD, has worked with youth groups  all over Germany instilling in them the compassionate values he learned in childhood. He has always embraced all faiths, and all political parties. Probably best known as the Station Manager for the East German DDR Broadcast Company, he was a popular radio correspondent and considered “the official voice of the DDR”. Currently he is the voice of IPAS, or the Internationalen Projektgruppe Auschwitz-Sammelklage that has brought the class action suit again President Bush and The US Government. The second plaintiff, Peter Gingold is a close associate of Mr. Goldstein’s, who lives in Frankfurt and has been  a mediator between East and West Germany since 1970. Mr. Gingold helped to establish the organization, Friends of Auschwitz and lost most of his family at Auschwitz. The general outline of the story has never been a secret, though of course the Bush family has hardly embraced it. The President’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, graduated from Yale where he had been a member of the secret fraternity known as “Skull and Bones.” Known for its sadistic initiations and outrageous pranks, the fraternity is also recognized for its highly prestigious and influential membership. All the members of the Bush family, including the current President, as well as most of their business partners met and formed lasting associations while members of Skull and Bones. When Prescott Bush married, he went to work for his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker at one of the most prominent private banking firms in America, Brown Brothers Harriman. From 1926 until 1952, George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush together, created an endless series of holding companies and subsidiaries with clearinghouses in Switzerland, from which they could move their German clients’ funds into bank accounts around the world. As a director of Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott Bush was also a director of The  United Banking Corporation or UBC, located at 39 Broadway, NYC. The Union Banking Corporation was comprised of several companies, all of which had holdings in Germany, and all of which played a major role in the German war effort. And most importantly, most were owned by the German Steel magnates, the Thyssen family. On July 31, 1941, two front page articles appeared; one in The New York Herald-Tribune, and the other in The Washington Post, regarding $3,000,000 concealed in the Steel Tycoon, Fritz Thyssen’s accounts at Chase Manhattan Bank, immediately followed on August 6, 1941, by the US Treasury Department’s formal investigation. One year later, on Oct. 9,1942, UBC’s assets were seized by the Office of the Alien Property Custodian of the U.S. Government. It was official, The UBC was being used to launder the money of German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, also known as Hitler’s ‘angel’. At a time when the US andGermany were at war, $3 Million of his fortune had found its way into accounts at The Chase Manhattan Bank. According to former Nazi Prosecutor and author John Loftus, “To aid his sons in their shell game, August Thyssen had established three different banks during the 1920’s, The August Thyssen Bank in Berlin, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam, and the Union Banking Corporation in New York City. To protect their corporate holdings, all the brothers had to do was move the corporate paperwork from one bank to the other. This they did with some regularity. When Fritz Thyssen ‘sold’ the Holland-American Trading Company for a tax loss, the Union Banking Corporation in New York bought the stock. Similarly, the Bush family invested the disguised Nazi profits in American steel and manufacturing corporations that became part of the secret Thyssen empire. When the Nazis invaded Holland in May 1940, they investigated the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam. Fritz Thyssen was suspected by Hitler’s auditors of being a tax fraud and of illegally transferring his wealth outside the Third Reich…The Nazis did  not know that all the documents evidencing secret Thyssen ownership had been quietly shipped back to the August Thyssen Bank in Berlin, under the friendly supervision of  Baron Kurt von Schroeder. Thyssen spent the rest of the war under house arrest… Unfortunately, the August Thyssen Bank had been bombed during the war, and the documents were buried in the underground vaults beneath the rubble. Worse, the vaults lay in the Soviet Zone of Berlin.” The present day lawsuit against President Bush and the US Government has at its center two things: the alleged profits from those transactions, estimated at $1.5 Million in1951, and believed to have been put into a blind trust worth a fortune today, and the fact that the profits from both UBC and another company known as  Silesian Steel, were made by slave labor. Both allegations have their basis in reality. The Silesian-American Corporation was organized in 1926 under the laws of the state of Delaware by the investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman. By October 3, 1942, the company’s assets were vested, like those of UBC, under the Trading with the Enemy Act. At that time, 49% of the company’s capital stock was owned by Bergwerkgesellschaft Georg von Giesche’s Erben, a company located in Breslau, Germany and the other 51% was owned by American interests located at the Anaconda Copper Mining Company at 25 Broadway in New York City. Both Anaconda and Geische’s Erben owned coal mines in Upper Silesia in the areas around Kattowice and Auschwitz, in Poland. Via Brown Brothers Harriman, both Prescott Bush and his father-in-law were directors of the company, and George Herbert Walker was also a shareholder. On the German side, there were several distinct players. Giesche’s Erben held various German and Polish mining subsidiaries which after 1933, continued to function under the watchful eye of the Third Reich. There were also the German controlled Swiss finance companies; a subsidiary of Giesche’s Erben known as Non-Ferrum Gesellschaft zur Finanzierung von Unternehmungen des Bergbaues und der Industrie der Nichteisenmetalle, of Zurich, Switzerland, (known as Non-Ferrum), and the Internationale Anlagen Gesellschaft (known as IKAP) of Switzerland, as well as Erzag Limited, also of Zurich, Switzerland. On the US side, The Anaconda Copper and Mining Company located at 25 Wall St. held bank accounts located at The National City Bank of New York, 55 Wall Street, Irving Trust Company, One Wall Street, Guaranty Trust Company of New York, 140 Broadway, Chemical Bank and Trust Company, 165 Broadway, Bank of the Manhattan Company, 40 Wall Street and Central Hanover Bank and Trust Company, 70 Broadway – all were being investigated by the US government after 1942 and all were within walking distance of one another as well as the offices of UBC, Silesian Steel and Brown Brothers Harriman . Prior to being vested in 1941, representatives of Giesche’s Erben and representatives of Non-Ferrum approached the American partners of Silesian Steel through an intermediary fromthe American investment house, Lazard Freres and Company, offering to purchase the shares owned by Anaconda. When the US government vested Silesian Steel in 1942, the same representative, Otto Jeidels of Lazard Freres approached them again. Despite the war, despite public opinion, despite the fact that they were in partnership with the enemy, despite the fact that money was owed to the shareholders, and most importantly, despite the fact that by 1942 reports of what was happening inside the camps was starting to be known, Anaconda and the Property Custodian for the US government were clear that they were in no particular hurry to sell. In a document written by the Chief of the Division of Investigation and Research for the US government, Homer Jones, on September 25, 1942 the examiner’s report summed up the Silesian Steel investigation this way: “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… These stocks have no present liquidating value to the German occupation of Polish properties. However, Mr. E.O. Sowerwine of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company stated that once the war was over and the properties were returned to their American owners, these stocks would again have considerable value, and that acting on this belief, The Anaconda Copper Mining Company was retaining their shares…” Journalist Burton Hersh, sheds some light on just how intertwined the roles of the various players on all sides of the equation were in his book The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, “The Alien Property Custodian, Leo Crowley, was actually on the payroll of the New York J. Henry Schroeder Bank, General Analine’s depository [and IG Farben’s American based subsidiary], where Foster and Allen Dulles both sat as board members. Foster arranged an appointment for himself as special legal counsel for the Alien Property Custodian while simultaneously representing [another Farben subsidiary] against the custodian…” According to that assessment, Leo Crowley, the Alien Property Custodian played a vital role in preventing the sale of Anaconda’s stock. Standard Oil was I.G. Farben’s largest single shareholder. The companies complemented eachother well: Farben transformed the coal mined at the Silesian Steel Company into synthetic oil and gasoline while Standard Oil and Ibn Saud kept the Nazi war machine afloat with a never ending flow of oil via Franco’s Spain. In the “mutually beneficial” business arrangement that developed between the two, I.G. Farben used Jews for its slave labor force from the Third Reich. The Third Reich purchased its coal and armaments from the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, and its extermination gas Zyklon-B, from I.G. Farben. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were dying in the process, but the New York based, American board of directors seems to have focused on the bottom line. At any rate, the Rockefellers remained partners with I.G. Farben, and Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker remained partners with the Nazis while acting as the directors of the Silesian Steel Corporation, well after it was vested in 1942. How much did people like Bush and Walker really know, when did they know it and what could have been done? According to a day by day accounting entitled Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939-1945, from the Archives of the Auschwitz Memorial and German Federal Archives, by Danuta Czech, “ on August 15, 1941, the Polish Government in exile in London received the first news of inmates being shot and buried in mass graves at Auschwitz.” On June 29, 1942, “Cyryl Ratajski, pseudonym ‘Wrzos,’ the delegate of the Polish Government in Exile, writes a radiogram to the Polish Government in Exile in London: ‘In Auschwitz, 200 persons were shot in retaliation for Heydrich. Moreover, on June 8, 160 persons were shot for the murder of a Gestapo supervisor. At present, there are 14,000 people there, including about 3,000 women. The 70-year-old sculptor, Ludwik Puget, was shot in Auschwitz.’ The report was based on data from inside the camp itself and from the interest zone, which reached the outside world through underground channels.” In Night, Elie Wiesel tells the story of Moishe the Beadle the first person in his town to escape from a deportation in 1942, “He told me what had happened to him and his companions. The train with the deportees had crossed the Hungarian border and, once  in Polish territory, had been taken over by the Gestapo. The train had stopped. The Jews were ordered to get off and onto waiting trucks. The trucks headed toward a forest. There everybody was ordered to get out…Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners…Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns… “Day after day, night after night, he went from one Jewish house to the next, telling his story and that of Malka, the young girl who lay dying for three days, and that of Tobie, the tailor who begged to die before his sons were killed. “Moishe was not the same. The joy in his eyes was gone. He no longer sang. He no longer mentioned either God or Kabbalah. He spoke only of what he had seen. But people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things. Others flatly said that he had gone mad.” In a letter written by Averell Harriman’s daughter Kathleen to his wife Pam from Moscow, dated November 1943, she writes, “I lunched with Lawrence (NY Times), Nichol (Chicago D.N.) and Bill Downs and they were worried as to whether or not they should believe the atrocity story they were told. (50,000 Jews killed and burned in a ravine just outside town.) [Babi Yar] None of the three got any feeling at allof the town or seemed to appreciate it was a great story. Shapiro was the only guy who reacted personally to the town, which prewar had a population of a million and now has 70,000. It’s too bad the US Press can’t send its best correspondents. The bunch here are either tactless as hell or so brow-beaten by the lack of information that they’ve lost all initiative.” Averell Harriman, who was the largest shareholder in Silesian Steel, knew better. On October 30,1943, acting on behalf of the US government as Ambassador to Russia, he attended a conference in West Africa to discuss German atrocities. The countries with representatives scheduled to attend were Great Britain, The United States, the Soviet Union, and China. A month earlier, on Sept. 22,1943, Ambassador Harriman received a memo stating, In addition to Section 38 of Title 22 which forbids an ambassador, minister and other foreign representative from engaging in business in a country to which he is accredited,the Regulations of the Department of State, Section 101.19, provide as follows: Officers of the Foreign Service are forbidden to transact, engage in, or have any interest in any business to, from or within the limits of their respective jurisdictions, either in their own names or in the names or through the agency of any other persons. Officers of the Foreign Service are also forbidden to make any investments of money within the limits of the foreign country to which the officers are accredited or assigned. This prohibition shall apply to the owning of real estate, bonds, shares, stocks, and mortgages, but does not extend to the purchase of a house and land for personal use. You own certain securities of the Imperial Russian Government, together with stock of Russo-Asiatic Consolidated, Ltd. which has a very large claim against the Soviet. Memo of Joe Powell is attached. All of these should be disposed of. Harriman Fifteen once owned stock of American-Russia Industrial Syndicate, Inc., but this was bought by Mr. Walker… Due to his placement within the government, because of his access to information and close ties to world leaders and his powerful business partners, Averell Harriman knew that the companies which he and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman created, and which were making them all rich, were utilizing slave labor. As the memo indicates, whenever he needed to step back into his private role as investment banker, he had someone extremely reliable ready to step in and take over the transaction, Mr. George Herbert Walker. A spokesperson for Brown Brothers Harriman today, Marsha Horowitz, said that, “BBH does not have any information regarding either UBC or The Silesian Holding Company. Prescott Bush left his partnership upon his death in the 1960’s. And to the best of our knowledge, George Herbert Walker never worked for us.” Documents at the US Archives and The Library of Congress prove otherwise. Recently declassified documents at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland,show that Giesche’s Erben, the German half of Silesian Steel was listed as a subsidiary of IG Farben. As of October 1, 1944, the IG Farben plants had 180,000 slave workers and 19,300 miners. Kurt Julius Goldstein was one of those miners. Furthermore, the declassified documents show that the relationship between IG Farben and Silesian Steel had been established years earlier and that banking transactions had taken place between IG Farben’s bankers, Greutert & Cie (subsequently H. Sturzenegger & Cie.) and Anaconda through the Nationalbank located in Basel, Switzerland landing directly in Anaconda’s accounts at The Guarantee Trust of New York. For Mr. Goldstein, his memories of that time are as clear as if they happened yesterday, “In 1942, documents were smuggled out of Auschwitz. They went from Krakow to London and eventually ended up in Washington where they were delivered to President Roosevelt by American Rabbi Stephen Weiss. He personally asked the President to bomb the train tracks at Auschwitz.” That request was not as simple as it seemed. Edwin Black, the author of IBM and The Holocaust, The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation writes, “The war broke out on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. Germany annexed northwestern Poland; the remaining Polish territory in Nazi hands was treated as ‘occupied’ and called the ‘General Government.’ That annexed northwestern quadrant was serviced by IBM’s German subsidiary, Dehomag, mainly to handle the payrolls of Silesian Coal mines and heavy industry.“The trains running to Auschwitz were tracked by a special guarded IBM customer site facility at 22Pawia in Krakow. The millions of punch cards the Nazis in Poland required were obtained exclusively from IBM, including one company print shop at 6 Rymarska Street across the street from the Warsaw Ghetto. The entire Polish subsidiary was overseen by an IBM administrative facility at 24 Kreuz in Warsaw.“ The (newly unearthed) IBM customer site was a huge Hollerith Buro. It was situated in the IG Farben factory complex, housed in Barracks 18 next to German Civil Worker Camp 7, about two kilometers from Auschwitz III, also known as Monowitz Concentration Camp.”   In a recent telephone interview Mr. Black added, “It’s a little known fact that the early numbers tattooed on the arms of the prisoners, were IBM numbers.” IBM has never challenged his findings. On the contrary, they have said publicly that everything in his  book is “factually correct.” There are several indications that the US government had at least a fleeting intention to bomb parts of Auschwitz. According to the Auschwitz Chronicle, photos of Auschwitz, Auschwitz I, II and III, as well as the IG Farben compound were taken by U.S. air reconnaissance on June 26, 1944 from an altitude of 30,000 feet. They did bomb around the perimeter of the camp, but never disturbed the train tracks or the gas chambers. Mr. Goldstein says, “It was John J. McCloy [the assistant secretary of war under Roosevelt] who nixed the bombing.” There is however, enough documentation to indicate that there was tremendous pressure from the Dulles, Harriman, Bush, Rockefeller cabal to let that executive order languish. By July 10, 1944 the Press, seemed more alert. A daily entry in Auschwitz Chronicle says, “The St. Gallen [Switzerland] newspaper, Die Ostschweiz, publishes an article with the title, ‘People Are Disappearing.’ The article’s source is the Foreign Ministry of the Polish Government in Exile in London, and it reports that 400,000 Hungarian Jews have been deported to Poland, of whom the majority have been sent to Auschwitz. The deportations began on May 15 when 62 cars with Jewish children arrived in Poland. Since then, it has been observed that daily six trains of Jews pass the train station in Plaszow near Krakow,whereby the majority are taken to Auschwitz and the people are killed in the gas chambers. According to the Polish Interior Ministry, these gas chambers have a daily capacity of 6000 persons…Among the deported are children between the ages of two and eight… The authorof the article points out further that that according to figures supplied by the Polish Assistance Committee for Jews, two million Polish Jews have died in the three concentration camps.” If the voice of the IPAS lawsuit is Kurt Julius Goldstein, then the engine behind it is Dusseldorf Attorney Peter Wolz. During a recent interview which Mr. Wolz required to be done in writing with the questions sent via email, and his response sent via fax, he described the reasons for his attraction to this case, “On January 1, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by the Russian Army. At that time, my mother who was pregnant, fled on foot to escape the Red Army that was advancing from Sudetendeutschland. [My father was dead.] On January 31, 1945, I was born in an alpine pasture hut, slightly west of the murder factory. Since that time, Auschwitz has not let me go. “In December 1963, the trials against the Auschwitz murders began in Frankfurt A.M.  I had just completed my Abitur Degree, and had not heard anything either in school or at home about the Holocaust. I was in a state of total shock. How could the German Culture-nation have perpetrated an industrialized genocide against the Jews of Europe? And why couldn’t the Allies have intervened? “Looking for answers I studied economics, government and forensic psychiatry. And then one day a former Nazi High School teacher said, ‘Our American friends in the finance world and big business were happy that we could deliver Europe to them free of the Jews.’ Since then, I’ve examined the notion of a US collaboration with the Nazis. And in 1974, I became an attorney.” When Peter Wolz finally began to pursue this case, it was with an obsessive fervor akin to Ahab pursuing Moby Dick. “Plaintiffs Goldstein and Gingold filed a first complaint in October of 2000 in Washington, DC. demanding $400 Million in reparations from the US Government. According to Peter Wolz, President Clinton responded on January 31, 2000 with the following comment,“the validity of the Human Rights established at the Nuremberg trials are recognized by the USA.” Ironically, at precisely the same time, 120 countries had voted to endorse the Rome Statute in The Hague which would eliminate immunity for world leaders and their governments, holding them accountable for war crimes. At the very last minute of his Presidency, President Bill Clinton signed the treaty prior to sending it to the Senate for ratification. The next day, when President Bush entered office as President, he said that his administration would not respect that signature. He then went on to publicly denounce the validity of foreign courts. Clearly, the two are not unrelated. Mr. Wolz claims that, “On January 2, 2001 we received a response from Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the Dept. of Justice, letting us know that the Bush administration would block the progress of the suit.” In April of 2003, after languishing in the courts for two years, the IPAS complaint was dismissed by Judge Rosemary Collyer, on the grounds that the President was protected by sovereign immunity. Only Congress, she pointed out in her response, has the power to waive sovereign immunity. By October of 2005, Mr. Wolz filed another complaint, this time with the U.S. District Court for The Eastern District of New York. The complaint was reviewed by Judge Edward R. Korman who has presided over many Holocaust related cases; the most significant was the restitution decision against the Swiss banks that was settled on March 30, 1999 for $1.25 Million. President Bush was served the papers on December 27, 2005 and was given twenty days in which to respond. After receiving President Bush’s response to the claim, on March 14, 2005, Judge Korman dismissed the charges as “patently frivolous.” Attorney Wolz and his associate Jan Lissmann say that the case is being pursued in The Hague, and they will submit the complaint in the US, until they are acknowledged. Encouraged by the success of the Gold Train Case, the attorneys are planning to file again. Attorney Wolz believes that President Bush is not protected by sovereign immunity, and that the Bush “clan” is liable under International Law. According to the code established at the Nuremberg trials there are four areas to be addressed: 1) a common plan or conspiracy, 2) crimes against peace, 3) war crimes including genocide, and 4) crimes against humanity. The plaintiffs are demanding $400 Million in reparations to be put into a fund for Holocaust survivors and their families. Thanks to the passing of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, since 2000 over 400,000 pages of previously classified OSS files have been released. According to Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman, former Nazi hunter, former member of Congress, member of the Interangency Working Group and former NYC Comptroller, “Democracies prove their strength by their willingness to let the truth out; we will never learn from our mistakes if  we don’t know what they are…the previously classified OSS material raise important moral questions; I suspect we will be debating them for many years to come. In particular, it is crucial to have enough historians and staff available to review the material… and inform the public of its significance.” Those files document that in 1948 Interhandel, a Swiss holding company, also known as I.G. Chemie, the American sister of IG Farben, whose assets were still under the control of the US government as a result of the Trading with the Enemy Act, brought suit against the Attorney General of the US for the return of 93 percent of the stock of General Analine and Film Corporation (GAF), and about $1.8Million in cash. In the US National Archives and Records Administration, under the Holocaust-Era Assets finding aid it says, “The United States charged that from the time of the plaintiff’s incorporation in the 1920’s to the surrender of Germany in 1945 that Interhandel had participated in a conspiracy or common plan with the private Swiss banking house of Hans Sturenegger & Cie. (prior to 1940 known as Eduard Greutert & Co.), IG Farben and others to cloak the ownership, control and domination by IG Farben of properties in the United States in many other countries…The plaintiff, however, because of Swiss secrecy laws, refused to produce the records of Hans Sturzenegger & Cie…While these legal battles were being fought, the Attorney General ran GAF as a vested property. In June 1953 the Interhandel case was legally reinstated when the US Supreme Court decided in favor of Interhandel and reversed the lower courts. It held that Interhandel, even without the submission of the Swiss documents, was entitled to a hearing on the merits of the case. Under the Kennedy administration, the government was persuaded to settle out of court. Congress passed a bill permitting the sale of GAF without court action, and the President signed the bill into law on October 22, 1962.“ On March 9, 1965, the GAF stock was sold in a sealed bid at the largest competitive auction in Wall Street History. A syndicate, headed by Blyth & Company, with a bid of nearly 330 million dollars was the winner. Payment to Interhandel netted 122 million dollars – an impressive amount, especially in light of the fact that in 1950 Interhandel was willing to settle for 14 million dollars.” To date, the only directors of IG Farben to have been prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials after WWII were German. Their American partners were never once mentioned. The Interhandel case took 24 years to be resolved. Should the complaint against President Bush and the US government take as lengthy a route to its conclusion, the plaintiffs Goldstein and Gingold would not live to see the outcome. Their children however, and the attorney Peter Wolz with the full support of the European Association of Rabbis behind him, do not plan to relent any time soon.   © . All rights reserved J.Z . Holden

The Bush/Nazi Connection by J.Z Holden

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	J.Z. Holden  photo © 2007 Michael Knigan  All rights reserved J.Z. Holden lives in Sag Harbor, New York, where she writes about life, love, art and politics. She is a regular contributing editor to www.hamptons.com, www.danspapers.com, and The Southampton Press. She is presently working on a novel entitled, The Illusion of Memory. The Bush/Nazi Connection by J.Z. Holden		photo © 2007 Michael Knigan  All rights reserved About the Author JZ Holden lives in Sag Harbor, New York, where she writes about life, love, art and politics. She is a regular contributing editor to www.hamptons.com, www.danspapers.com , & The Southampton Press. She is presently working on a novel entitled, The Illusion of Memory.   The Bush/Nazi Connection by J.Z Holden A balding, silver-haired Kurt Julius Goldstein opens the door to his hotel room overlooking the United Nations Plaza in New York. He is wearing dark brown corduroy slacks and a beige cotton turtleneck beneath a dark green V-neck pullover. His handshake is firm, and he smiles broadly. Inside the room, the sun reflects off a metal cane leaning against the bureau. Mr. Goldstein strolls past ignoring its presence. Instead, picking up his pace, he walks vigorously towards two chairs arranged by the window where the interview is to be held. His vigor is surprising; he looks like a man in his mid-sixties, rather than a man who is about to turn 91. From 1942 until 1945, this now robust elderly man, bathed in New York’s winter light with the world’s flags fluttering behind him, worked the night shift as a slave laborer in the coal mines at Auschwitz. He is one of two plaintiffs named in an astonishing lawsuit suing President Bush and the US government for $400 Million. Kurt Julius Goldstein and Peter Gingold, the Auschwitz survivors named as plaintiffs in the litigation against the Bush family, are 91 and 89 years of age respectively. Mr. Goldstein claims to have mined the coal for Consolidated Silesian Steel - coal that fueled furnaces where armaments were made, coal transformed into oil, gasoline and airplane fuel for IG Farben that due to patent arrangements benefited the German war effort, coal for trains to transport Jews to the camp, and coal for the ovens to burn them after they were gassed. Mr. Goldstein said from his hotel room in New York, "Genocide is not forgivable and cannot be swept under the rug." Both Mr. Goldstein and Mr. Gingold argue that hundreds of thousands of lives should have been saved as a result of an executive order issued by President Roosevelt on January 22, 1944, which established the "policy of the U.S. government to take all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death and otherwise to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war." Mr. Goldstein describes himself as "a German, a Jew and a Communist, in that order," with "humanitarian values" learned as a young boy at his father’s bedside, who prior to dying of war wounds in 1920, tutored Mr. Goldstein in the works of Schiller and Goethe. After his father’s death, young Goldstein was absorbed by a large, upper-middle-class Jewish family with a successful textile business in Hamm. By 1927, he had become a member of the Communist party, and by 1935 he had left for Palestine, only to return to Europe by 1939 to fight in the war in Spain. By July of 1942, he had been captured and sent to Auschwitz. In 1945, after the liberation of the concentration camps, many survivors chose to leave Europe for the United States, Israel or South America. Mr. Goldstein chose to return to his homeland in order to "rebuild a better Germany". He authored two books; one is a compilation of lectures and the other an autobiography entitled "The King of the Jews" in which he describes in detail his Auschwitz experience. He is presently working on a third "installment" which he plans to release on his 100th birthday. In his vast career, Kurt Julius Goldstein has been the Secretary of the KPD, has worked with youth groups all over Germany instilling in them the compassionate values he learned in childhood. He has always embraced all faiths, and all political parties. Probably best known as the Station Manager for the East German DDR Broadcast Company, he was a popular radio correspondent and considered "the official voice of the DDR". Currently he is the voice of IPAS, or the Internationalen Projektgruppe Auschwitz-Sammelklage that has brought the class action suit again President Bush and The US Government. The second plaintiff, Peter Gingold is a close associate of Mr. Goldstein’s, who lives in Frankfurt and has been a mediator between East and West Germany since 1970. Mr. Gingold helped to establish the organization, Friends of Auschwitz and lost most of his family at Auschwitz. The general outline of the story has never been a secret, though of course the Bush family has hardly embraced it. The President’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, graduated from Yale where he had been a member of the secret fraternity known as "Skull and Bones." Known for its sadistic initiations and outrageous pranks, the fraternity is also recognized for its highly prestigious and influential membership. All the members of the Bush family, including the current President, as well as most of their business partners met and formed lasting associations while members of Skull and Bones. When Prescott Bush married, he went to work for his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker at one of the most prominent private banking firms in America, Brown Brothers Harriman. From 1926 until 1952, George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush together, created an endless series of holding companies and subsidiaries with clearinghouses in Switzerland, from which they could move their German clients’ funds into bank accounts around the world. As a director of Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott Bush was also a director of The United Banking Corporation or UBC, located at 39 Broadway, NYC. The Union Banking Corporation was comprised of several companies, all of which had holdings in Germany, and all of which played a major role in the German war effort. And most importantly, most were owned by the German Steel magnates, the Thyssen family. On July 31, 1941, two front page articles appeared; one in The New York Herald-Tribune, and the other in The Washington Post, regarding $3,000,000 concealed in the Steel Tycoon, Fritz Thyssen’s accounts at Chase Manhattan Bank, immediately followed on August 6, 1941, by the US Treasury Department’s formal investigation. One year later, on Oct. 9,1942, UBC’s assets were seized by the Office of the Alien Property Custodian of the U.S. Government. It was official, The UBC was being used to launder the money of German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, also known as Hitler’s ‘angel’. At a time when the US and Germany were at war, $3 Million of his fortune had found its way into accounts at The Chase Manhattan Bank. According to former Nazi Prosecutor and author John Loftus, "To aid his sons in their shell game, August Thyssen had established three different banks during the 1920’s, The August Thyssen Bank in Berlin, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam, and the Union Banking Corporation in New York City. To protect their corporate holdings, all the brothers had to do was move the corporate paperwork from one bank to the other. This they did with some regularity. When Fritz Thyssen ‘sold’ the Holland-American Trading Company for a tax loss, the Union Banking Corporation in New York bought the stock. Similarly, the Bush family invested the disguised Nazi profits in American steel and manufacturing corporations that became part of the secret Thyssen empire. When the Nazis invaded Holland in May 1940, they investigated the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart in Rotterdam. Fritz Thyssen was suspected by Hitler’s auditors of being a tax fraud and of illegally transferring his wealth outside the Third Reich…The Nazis did not know that all the documents evidencing secret Thyssen ownership had been quietly shipped back to the August Thyssen Bank in Berlin, under the friendly supervision of Baron Kurt von Schroeder. Thyssen spent the rest of the war under house arrest…Unfortunately, the August Thyssen Bank had been bombed during the war, and the documents were buried in the underground vaults beneath the rubble. Worse, the vaults lay in the Soviet Zone of Berlin." The present day lawsuit against President Bush and the US Government has at its center two things: the alleged profits from those transactions, estimated at $1.5 Million in1951, and believed to have been put into a blind trust worth a fortune today, and the fact that the profits from both UBC and another company known as Silesian Steel, were made by slave labor. Both allegations have their basis in reality. The Silesian-American Corporation was organized in 1926 under the laws of the state of Delaware by the investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman. By October 3, 1942, the company’s assets were vested, like those of UBC, under the Trading with the Enemy Act. At that time, 49% of the company’s capital stock was owned by Bergwerkgesellschaft Georg von Giesche’s Erben, a company located in Breslau, Germany and the other 51% was owned by American interests located at the Anaconda Copper Mining Company at 25 Broadway in New York City. Both Anaconda and Geische’s Erben owned coal mines in Upper Silesia in the areas around Kattowice and Auschwitz, in Poland. Via Brown Brothers Harriman, both Prescott Bush and his father-in-law were directors of the company, and George Herbert Walker was also a shareholder. On the German side, there were several distinct players. Giesche’s Erben held various German and Polish mining subsidiaries which after 1933, continued to function under the watchful eye of the Third Reich. There were also the German controlled Swiss finance companies; a subsidiary of Giesche’s Erben known as Non-Ferrum Gesellschaft zur Finanzierung von Unternehmungen des Bergbaues und der Industrie der Nichteisenmetalle, of Zurich, Switzerland, (known as Non-Ferrum), and the Internationale Anlagen Gesellschaft (known as IKAP) of Switzerland, as well as Erzag Limited, also of Zurich, Switzerland. On the US side, The Anaconda Copper and Mining Company located at 25 Wall St. held bank accounts located at The National City Bank of New York, 55 Wall Street, Irving Trust Company, One Wall Street, Guaranty Trust Company of New York, 140 Broadway, Chemical Bank and Trust Company, 165 Broadway, Bank of the Manhattan Company, 40 Wall Street and Central Hanover Bank and Trust Company, 70 Broadway – all were being investigated by the US government after 1942 and all were within walking distance of one another as well as the offices of UBC, Silesian Steel and Brown Brothers Harriman . Prior to being vested in 1941, representatives of Giesche’s Erben and representatives of Non-Ferrum approached the American partners of Silesian Steel through an intermediary from the American investment house, Lazard Freres and Company, offering to purchase the shares owned by Anaconda. When the US government vested Silesian Steel in 1942, the same representative, Otto Jeidels of Lazard Freres approached them again. Despite the war, despite public opinion, despite the fact that they were in partnership with the enemy, despite the fact that money was owed to the shareholders, and most importantly, despite the fact that by 1942 reports of what was happening inside the camps was starting to be known, Anaconda and the Property Custodian for the US government were clear that they were in no particular hurry to sell. In a document written by the Chief of the Division of Investigation and Research for the US government, Homer Jones, on September 25, 1942 the examiner’s report summed up the Silesian Steel investigation this way: "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…These stocks have no present liquidating value to the German occupation of Polish properties. However, Mr. E.O. Sowerwine of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company stated that once the war was over and the properties were returned to their American owners, these stocks would again have considerable value, and that acting on this belief, The Anaconda Copper Mining Company was retaining their shares…" Journalist Burton Hersh, sheds some light on just how intertwined the roles of the various players on all sides of the equation were in his book The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, "The Alien Property Custodian, Leo Crowley, was actually on the payroll of the New York J. Henry Schroeder Bank, General Analine’s depository [and IG Farben’s American based subsidiary], where Foster and Allen Dulles both sat as board members. Foster arranged an appointment for himself as special legal counsel for the Alien Property Custodian while simultaneously representing [another Farben subsidiary] against the custodian…" According to that assessment, Leo Crowley, the Alien Property Custodian played a vital role in preventing the sale of Anaconda’s stock. Standard Oil was I.G. Farben’s largest single shareholder. The companies complemented each other well: Farben transformed the coal mined at the Silesian Steel Company into synthetic oil and gasoline while Standard Oil and Ibn Saud kept the Nazi war machine afloat with a never ending flow of oil via Franco’s Spain. In the "mutually beneficial" business arrangement that developed between the two, I.G. Farben used Jews for its slave labor force from the Third Reich. The Third Reich purchased its coal and armaments from the Consolidated Silesian Steel Corporation, and its extermination gas Zyklon-B, from I.G. Farben. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were dying in the process, but the New York based, American board of directors seems to have focused on the bottom line. At any rate, the Rockefellers remained partners with I.G. Farben, and Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker remained partners with the Nazis while acting as the directors of the Silesian Steel Corporation, well after it was vested in 1942. How much did people like Bush and Walker really know, when did they know it and what could have been done? According to a day by day accounting entitled Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939-1945, from the Archives of the Auschwitz Memorial and German Federal Archives, by Danuta Czech, "on August 15, 1941, the Polish Government in exile in London received the first news of inmates being shot and buried in mass graves at Auschwitz." On June 29, 1942, "Cyryl Ratajski, pseudonym ‘Wrzos,’ the delegate of the Polish Government in Exile, writes a radiogram to the Polish Government in Exile in London: ‘In Auschwitz, 200 persons were shot in retaliation for Heydrich. Moreover, on June 8, 160 persons were shot for the murder of a Gestapo supervisor. At present, there are 14,000 people there, including about 3,000 women. The 70-year-old sculptor, Ludwik Puget, was shot in Auschwitz.’ The report was based on data from inside the camp itself and from the interest zone, which reached the outside world through underground channels." In Night, Elie Wiesel tells the story of Moishe the Beadle the first person in his town to escape from a deportation in 1942, "He told me what had happened to him and his companions. The train with the deportees had crossed the Hungarian border and, once in Polish territory, had been taken over by the Gestapo. The train had stopped. The Jews were ordered to get off and onto waiting trucks. The trucks headed toward a forest. There everybody was ordered to get out…Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners…Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns… "Day after day, night after night, he went from one Jewish house to the next, telling his story and that of Malka, the young girl who lay dying for three days, and that of Tobie, the tailor who begged to die before his sons were killed. "Moishe was not the same. The joy in his eyes was gone. He no longer sang. He no longer mentioned either God or Kabbalah. He spoke only of what he had seen. But people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things. Others flatly said that he had gone mad." In a letter written by Averell Harriman’s daughter Kathleen to his wife Pam from Moscow, dated November 1943, she writes, "I lunched with Lawrence (NY Times), Nichol (Chicago D.N.) and Bill Downs and they were worried as to whether or not they should believe the atrocity story they were told. (50,000 Jews killed and burned in a ravine just outside town.) [Babi Yar] None of the three got any feeling at allof the town or seemed to appreciate it was a great story. Shapiro was the only guy who reacted personally to the town, which prewar had a population of a million and now has 70,000. It’s too bad the US Press can’t send its best correspondents. The bunch here are either tactless as hell or so brow-beaten by the lack of information that they’ve lost all initiative." Averell Harriman, who was the largest shareholder in Silesian Steel, knew better. On October 30,1943, acting on behalf of the US government as Ambassador to Russia, he attended a conference in West Africa to discuss German atrocities. The countries with representatives scheduled to attend were Great Britain, The United States, the Soviet Union, and China. A month earlier, on Sept. 22,1943, Ambassador Harriman received a memo stating, In addition to Section 38 of Title 22 which forbids an ambassador, minister and other foreign representative from engaging in business in a country to which he is accredited, the Regulations of the Department of State, Section 101.19, provide as follows: Officers of the Foreign Service are forbidden to transact, engage in, or have any interest in any business to, from or within the limits of their respective jurisdictions, either in their own names or in the names or through the agency of any other persons. Officers of the Foreign Service are also forbidden to make any investments of money within the limits of the foreign country to which the officers are accredited or assigned. This prohibition shall apply to the owning of real estate, bonds, shares, stocks, and mortgages, but does not extend to the purchase of a house and land for personal use. You own certain securities of the Imperial Russian Government, together with stock of Russo-Asiatic Consolidated, Ltd. which has a very large claim against the Soviet. Memo of Joe Powell is attached. All of these should be disposed of. Harriman Fifteen once owned stock of American-Russia Industrial Syndicate, Inc., but this was bought by Mr. Walker… Due to his placement within the government, because of his access to information and close ties to world leaders and his powerful business partners, Averell Harriman knew that the companies which he and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman created, and which were making them all rich, were utilizing slave labor. As the memo indicates, whenever he needed to step back into his private role as investment banker, he had someone extremely reliable ready to step in and take over the transaction, Mr. George Herbert Walker. A spokesperson for Brown Brothers Harriman today, Marsha Horowitz, said that, "BBH does not have any information regarding either UBC or The Silesian Holding Company. Prescott Bush left his partnership upon his death in the 1960’s. And to the best of our knowledge, George Herbert Walker never worked for us." Documents at the US Archives and The Library of Congress prove otherwise. Recently declassified documents at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, show that Giesche’s Erben, the German half of Silesian Steel was listed as a subsidiary of IG Farben. As of October 1, 1944, the IG Farben plants had 180,000 slave workers and 19,300 miners. Kurt Julius Goldstein was one of those miners. Furthermore, the declassified documents show that the relationship between IG Farben and Silesian Steel had been established years earlier and that banking transactions had taken place between IG Farben’s bankers, Greutert & Cie (subsequently H. Sturzenegger & Cie.) and Anaconda through the Nationalbank located in Basel, Switzerland landing directly in Anaconda’s accounts at The Guarantee Trust of New York. For Mr. Goldstein, his memories of that time are as clear as if they happened yesterday, "In 1942, documents were smuggled out of Auschwitz. They went from Krakow to London and eventually ended up in Washington where they were delivered to President Roosevelt by American Rabbi Stephen Weiss. He personally asked the President to bomb the train tracks at Auschwitz." That request was not as simple as it seemed. Edwin Black, the author of IBM and The Holocaust, The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation writes, "The war broke out on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. Germany annexed northwestern Poland; the remaining Polish territory in Nazi hands was treated as ‘occupied’ and called the ‘General Government.’ That annexed northwestern quadrant was serviced by IBM’s German subsidiary, Dehomag, mainly to handle the payrolls of Silesian Coal mines and heavy industry."The trains running to Auschwitz were tracked by a special guarded IBM customer site facility at 22Pawia in Krakow. The millions of punch cards the Nazis inPoland required were obtained exclusively from IBM, including one company print shop at 6 Rymarska Street across the street from the Warsaw Ghetto. The entire Polish subsidiary was overseen by an IBM administrative facility at 24 Kreuz in Warsaw. "The (newly unearthed) IBM customer site was a huge Hollerith Buro. It was situated in the IG Farben factory complex, housed in Barracks 18 next to German Civil Worker Camp 7, about two kilometers from Auschwitz III, also known as Monowitz Concentration Camp." In a recent telephone interview Mr. Black added, "It’s a little known fact that the early numbers tattooed on the arms of the prisoners, were IBM numbers." IBM has never challenged his findings. On the contrary, they have said publicly that everything in his book is "factually correct." There are several indications that the US government had at least a fleeting intention to bomb parts of Auschwitz. According to the Auschwitz Chronicle, photos of Auschwitz, Auschwitz I, II and III, as well as the IG Farben compound were taken by U.S. air reconnaissance on June 26, 1944 from an altitude of 30,000 feet. They did bomb around the perimeter of the camp, but never disturbed the train tracks or the gas chambers. Mr. Goldstein says, "It was John J. McCloy [the assistant secretary of war under Roosevelt] who nixed the bombing." There is however, enough documentation to indicate that there was tremendous pressure from the Dulles, Harriman, Bush, Rockefeller cabal to let that executive order languish. By July 10, 1944 the Press, seemed more alert. A daily entry in Auschwitz Chronicle says, "The St. Gallen [Switzerland] newspaper, Die Ostschweiz, publishes an article with the title, ‘People Are Disappearing.’ The article’s source is the Foreign Ministry of the Polish Government in Exile in London, and it reports that 400,000 Hungarian Jews have been deported to Poland, of whom the majority have been sent to Auschwitz. The deportations began on May 15 when 62 cars with Jewish children arrived in Poland. Since then, it has been observed that daily six trains of Jews pass the train station in Plaszow near Krakow, whereby the majority are taken to Auschwitz and the people are killed in the gas chambers. According to the Polish Interior Ministry, these gas chambers have a daily capacity of 6000 persons…Among the deported are children between the ages of two and eight…The author of the article points out further that that according to figures supplied by the Polish Assistance Committee for Jews, two million Polish Jews have died in the three concentration camps." If the voice of the IPAS lawsuit is Kurt Julius Goldstein, then the engine behind it is Dusseldorf Attorney Peter Wolz. During a recent interview which Mr. Wolz required to be done in writing with the questions sent via email, and his response sent via fax, he described the reasons for his attraction to this case, "On January 1, 1945, Auschwitz was liberated by the Russian Army. At that time, my mother who was pregnant, fled on foot to escape the Red Army that was advancing from Sudetendeutschland. [My father was dead.] On January 31, 1945, I was born in an alpine pasture hut, slightly west of the murder factory. Since that time, Auschwitz has not let me go. "In December 1963, the trials against the Auschwitz murders began in Frankfurt A.M. I had just completed my Abitur Degree, and had not heard anything either in school or at home about the Holocaust. I was in a state of total shock. How could the German Culture-nation have perpetrated an industrialized genocide against the Jews of Europe? And why couldn’t the Allies have intervened? "Looking for answers I studied economics, government and forensic psychiatry. And then one day a former Nazi High School teacher said, ‘Our American friends in the finance world and big business were happy that we could deliver Europe to them free of the Jews.’ Since then, I’ve examined the notion of a US collaboration with the Nazis. And in 1974, I became an attorney." When Peter Wolz finally began to pursue this case, it was with an obsessive fervor akin to Ahab pursuing Moby Dick. "Plaintiffs Goldstein and Gingold filed a first complaint in October of 2000 in Washington, DC. demanding $400 Million in reparations from the US Government. According to Peter Wolz, President Clinton responded on January 31, 2000 with the following comment, "the validity of the Human Rights established at the Nuremberg trials are recognized by the USA." Ironically, at precisely the same time, 120 countries had voted to endorse the Rome Statute in The Hague which would eliminate immunity for world leaders and their governments, holding them accountable for war crimes. At the very last minute of his Presidency, President Bill Clinton signed the treaty prior to sending it to the Senate for ratification. The next day, when President Bush entered office as President, he said that his administration would not respect that signature. He then went on to publicly denounce the validity of foreign courts. Clearly, the two are not unrelated. Mr. Wolz claims that, "On January 2, 2001 we received a response from Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the Dept. of Justice, letting us know that the Bush administration would block the progress of the suit." In April of 2003, after languishing in the courts for two years, the IPAS complaint was dismissed by Judge Rosemary Collyer, on the grounds that the President was protected by sovereign immunity. Only Congress, she pointed out in her response, has the power to waive sovereign immunity. By October of 2005, Mr. Wolz filed another complaint, this time with the U.S. District Court for The Eastern District of New York. The complaint was reviewed by Judge Edward R. Korman who has presided over many Holocaust related cases; the most significant was the restitution decision against the Swiss banks that was settled on March 30, 1999 for $1.25 Million. President Bush was served the papers on December 27, 2005 and was given twenty days in which to respond. After receiving President Bush’s response to the claim, on March 14, 2005, Judge Korman dismissed the charges as "patently frivolous." Attorney Wolz and his associate Jan Lissmann say that the case is being pursued in The Hague, and they will submit the complaint in the US, until they are acknowledged. Encouraged by the success of the Gold Train Case, the attorneys are planning to file again. Attorney Wolz believes that President Bush is not protected by sovereign immunity, and that the Bush "clan" is liable under International Law. According to the code established at the Nuremberg trials there are four areas to be addressed: 1) a common plan or conspiracy, 2) crimes against peace, 3) war crimes including genocide, and 4) crimes against humanity. The plaintiffs are demanding $400 Million in reparations to be put into a fund for Holocaust survivors and their families. Thanks to the passing of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, since 2000 over 400,000 pages of previously classified OSS files have been released. According to Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman, former Nazi hunter, former member of Congress, member of the Interangency Working Group and former NYC Comptroller, "Democracies prove their strength by their willingness to let the truth out; we will never learn from our mistakes if we don’t know what they are…the previously classified OSS material raise important moral questions; I suspect we will be debating them for many years to come. In particular, it is crucial to have enough historians and staff available to review the material…and inform the public of its significance." Those files document that in 1948 Interhandel, a Swiss holding company, also known as I.G. Chemie, the American sister of IG Farben, whose assets were still under the control of the US government as a result of the Trading with the Enemy Act, brought suit against the Attorney General of the US for the return of 93 percent of the stock of General Analine and Film Corporation (GAF), and about $1.8Million in cash. In the US National Archives and Records Administration, under the Holocaust-Era Assets finding aid it says, "The United States charged that from the time of the plaintiff’s incorporation in the 1920’s to the surrender of Germany in 1945 that Interhandel had participated in a conspiracy or common plan with the private Swiss banking house of Hans Sturenegger & Cie. (prior to 1940 known as Eduard Greutert & Co.), IG Farben and others to cloak the ownership, control and domination by IG Farben of properties in the United States in many other countries…The plaintiff, however, because of Swiss secrecy laws, refused to produce the records of Hans Sturzenegger & Cie…While these legal battles were being fought, the Attorney General ran GAF as a vested property. In June 1953 the Interhandel case was legally reinstated when the US Supreme Court decided in favor of Interhandel and reversed the lower courts. It held that Interhandel, even without the submission of the Swiss documents, was entitled to a hearing on the merits of the case. Under the Kennedy administration, the government was persuaded to settle out of court. Congress passed a bill permitting the sale of GAF without court action, and the President signed the bill into law on October 22, 1962. "On March 9, 1965, the GAF stock was sold in a sealed bid at the largest competitive auction in Wall Street History. A syndicate, headed by Blyth & Company, with a bid of nearly 330 million dollars was the winner. Payment to Interhandel netted 122 million dollars – an impressive amount, especially in light of the fact that in 1950 Interhandel was willing to settle for 14 million dollars." To date, the only directors of IG Farben to have been prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials after WWII were German. Their American partners were never once mentioned. The Interhandel case took 24 years to be resolved. Should the complaint against President Bush and the US government take as lengthy a route to its conclusion, the plaintiffs Goldstein and Gingold would not live to see the outcome. Their children however, and the attorney Peter Wolz with the full support of the European Association of Rabbis behind him, do not plan to relent any time soon.   ?

Last Update 2007-02-14 | Copyright© Charles Mingus 2008 | |