Union Banking Corporation

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The Union Banking Corporation (UBC) was a banking corporation in the US which was seized, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, during World War II in October 1942. The corporation, of which Prescott Bush served as Director and Vice President, was primarily controlled by the Harriman family and was alleged to be a Nazi organization.

Adolf Hitler's financiers, the Thyssen family, formed UBC to manage investments in America. The US congressional report described Union Bank as an "interlocking trust" with the German Steel Trust. UBC was also involved in raising funds for Germany and illegally transferring aviation fuel technology to the Luftwaffe.

The company was established in August 1924 with George Herbert Walker as president. His son-in-law Prescott Bush, the grandfather of current US President George W. Bush, was on the board of directors from 1934 to 1943 with E. Roland Harriman, H. J. Kouwenhoven, Johann G. Groeninger, Harold D. Pennington, Cornelis Lievense, Ray Morris, and E. S. James.

Prescott Bush and Roland Harriman, both also served as Vice Presidents at investment firm W.A. Harriman & Co, both along with another employee, Knight Woolley, ex-Yale-class-of-1917 from Yale and members of the same exclusive Skull and Bones fraternity. George Walker was employed by Roland's brother W. Averell Harriman to run the business, which had been given him by railroad baron father E.H. Harriman.

A July 31, 1941 New York Herald Tribune^[1] front page article about the bank was headlined "Thyssen Has $3,000,000 Cash in New York Vaults"; (Fritz Thyssen was a German steel magnate and one of Hitler's most important Financial backers). This prompted the congressional investigation in which UBC was taken over by the U.S. government under the Trading with the Enemy Act in the fall of 1942.

U.S. National Archives contains Vesting Order number 248 signed by U.S. Alien Property Custodian Leo T. Crowley, which records the seizure of the company. On October 20 1942 the Alien Property Custodian seized the assets of the UBC. The assets were held by the government for the duration of the war, then returned afterward. UBC was dissolved in 1951. Precott Bush's interest in UBC consisted of one share. For it, he was reimbursed $1,500,000. This presupposes that Union Banking Corporation was worth $4 billion, of which almost all would have been paid to the Harrimans.

In August, under the same authority, Congress had seized the first of the Bush-Harriman-managed Thyssen entities, Hamburg-American Line, under Vesting Order No. 126, also signed by Crowley.

Having gone through the books of the bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation (Vesting Order No. 261) and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation (Vesting Order No. 259). By November, the Silesian-American Corporation, another of Prescott Bush's ventures, had also been seized. [1] The company allegedly profited from slave labor at Auschwitz via a partnership with IG Farben, Hitler's third major industrial patron and partner in the infrastructure of the Third Reich. [2] The Auschwitz slave labor camp did not exist until after the nationalization of the Bush-Harriman assets.

[edit] References and footnotes

^ Reprinted in shorter form in the August 3, 1941 edtion of Charleston Daily Mail in West Virginia; the Lima News of Lima, Ohio, August 1, 1941, and Port Arthur News, Port Arthur, Texas, on August 1, 1941

[edit] External links

Heir to the Holocaust by Toby Rogers, Clamor Magazine Issue 14 May/June 2002

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power by Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington, The Guardian September 25, 2004

Bush - Nazi Link Confirmed by John Buchanan, The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 1, October 10, 2003

Cecil Adams on Prescott Bush February 14, 2003.

For much more detailed information see the book "Fleshing Out Skull & Bones: Investigations Into America's Most Powerful Secret Society." Kris Millegan is the editor of this series of essays. Millegan [3]

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