Dutch Connection: Laundering Nazi Loot in the U.S. By John Loftus to the missing billions in assets of the nounce Hitler’s treatment of Jews. It Third Reich. was his son, William Gowen, who or the Bush family, it is a lin- The inquisitors failed utterly. served in Rome after WWII as a Nazi gering nightmare. For their Why? Because what the wily Thyssen hunter and investigator with the U.S. FNazi clients, the Dutch connec- deposed was, in a sense, true. What the Army Counter Intelligence Corps. It tion was the mother of all money laun- Allied investigators never understood was Agent Gowen who first discovered dering schemes. From 1945 until 1949, was that they were not asking Thyssen the secret Vatican Ratline for smug- one of the lengthiest and, it now ap- the right question. gling Nazis in 1949. It was also pears, most futile interrogations of a Thyssen did not need any for- William Gowen who began to uncover Nazi war crimes suspect began in the eign bank accounts because his family the secret Dutch pipeline for smug- American Zone of Occupied Germany. secretly owned an entire chain of gling Nazi money in 1999. A half-cen- Multibillionaire steel magnate Fritz banks. He did not have to transfer his tury earlier, Fritz Thyssen was telling Thyssen – the man whose steel com- Nazi assets at the end of WWII, all he the allied investigators that he had no bine was the cold heart of the Nazi war had to do was transfer the ownership interest in foreign companies, that Hit- machine – talked and talked and talked documents – stocks, bonds, deeds and ler had turned on him and seized most to a joint US-UK interrogation team. trusts – from his bank in Berlin of his property. His remaining assets Allen Dulles As a top Wall Street lawyer with Sullivan & Cromwell, Al- len Dulles helped leading U.S. fascist millionaires invest in Germany (through Brown Brothers Harriman) during the 1920s and 1930s. As the chief U.S. spy in Germany in WWII, Dulles recruited top Nazis into the CIAs post- war crusade against communism. As lawyer for Rockefel- lers Standard Oil, the Nazi weapons giant I.G. Farben and Thyssens Dutch bank, Dulles helped build Hitlers war machine. With much dirty laundry, Dulles became CIA di- rector and helped Prescott Bush in a cloaking scheme to cover up the Union Banks role in laundering Nazi loot. Prescott Bush For four long years, successive teams through his bank in Holland to his were mostly in the Russian Occupied of inquisitors tried to break Thyssen’s American friends in New York City: Zone of Germany (which he knew were simple claim to possess neither foreign Prescott Bush and George Herbert a write-off anyway). bank accounts nor interests in foreign Walker. Thyssen’s partners in crime His distant (and disliked) rela- corporations, no assets that might lead were the father and father-in-law of a tives in neutral nations like Holland As a U.S. Army officer, John Loftus future President of the United States. were the actual owners of a substan- helped train Israelis for a covert operation The allied investigators under- tial percentage of the remaining Ger- in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He resigned estimated Thyssen’s reach, his connec- man industrial base. As innocent vic- his position as a Justice Department pros- tions, his motives and his means. The tims of the Third Reich, they were lob- ecutor in 1981 to expose the U.S. recruit- web of financial entities that Thyssen bying the allied occupation govern- ment of Nazi war criminals. He is presi- helped create in the 1920s remained a ments in Germany, demanding resti- dent of the Florida Holocaust Museum. His mystery for the rest of the twentieth tution of the property that had been books include: The Belarus Secret (Ran- century, an almost perfectly hidden seized from them by the Nazis. Under dom House, 1982), and Prophets of Ter- underground sewer pipeline for mov- the rules of the Allied occupation of ror: Jonathan Pollard and Peace in the Middle East (forthcoming), and (with ing dirty money, money that bankrolled Germany, all property owned by citi- Emily McIntyre) Valhalla’s Wake: The IRA, the post-war fortunes not only of the zens of a neutral nation which had been M16 & the Assassination of a Young Thyssen industrial empire, but the seized by the Nazis had to be returned American (Pub Group West, 1989). He has Bush family as well. It was a secret to the neutral citizens upon proper co-authored books with Mark Aarons (see Fritz Thyssen would take to his grave. presentation of documents showing p.35). “The Loftus Report” is his nightly It was a secret that would lead proof of ownership. Suddenly, all sorts spot on ABC National Radio and “Inside former U.S. intelligence agent William of neutral parties, particularly in Hol- Scoop with John Loftus” airs weekly on Gowen, now pushing 80, to the very land, were claiming ownership of vari- Fox TV. As a private attorney, he has doorstep of the Dutch royal family. The ous pieces of the Thyssen empire. In helped hundreds of whistle-blowing intel- ligence agents to declassify and publish Gowens are no strangers to controversy his cell, Fritz Thyssen just smiled and hidden secrets. In August 2002, Loftus and or nobility. His father was one of Presi- waited to be released from prison while a team of more than 40 lawyers, filed a $1 dent Roosevelt’s diplomatic emissar- members of the Dutch royal family and trillion lawsuit against the Saudi royal fam- ies to Pope Pius XII, leading a futile the Dutch intelligence service reassem- ily for victims of the September 11 attacks. attempt to persuade the Vatican to de- bled his pre-war holdings for him. 14 Press for Conversion! Issue # 54 August 2004 The riman, and its British and affiliate, the American in- Union Bank- terrogators ing Corp. Un- may have ion Bank, in gravely un- turn, was the derestimated Albert Vögler (the iron and steel industry director responsible for Bush family’s Thyssen but holding com- Nazi war production), Adolph Hitler, Fritz Thyssen and Julius Schaub they knew pany for a they were be- (SS General Major and Hitlers close friend and personal secretary). number of ing lied to. Their suspicions fo- other entities, including the Hol- cused on one Dutch Bank in par- land American Trading Co. ticular, the Bank voor Handel en It was a matter of public Scheepvaart, in Rotterdam. It did record that the Bush holdings a lot of business with the were seized by the U.S. govern- Thyssens over the years. In 1923, ment after the Nazis overran Hol- as a favor to Fritz, the Rotterdam land. In 1951, the Bush’s re- bank loaned the money to build claimed Union Bank from the the Nazi’s first headquarters. U.S. Alien Property Custodian, Somehow, allied investigations along with their “neutral” Dutch kept going nowhere, the intelli- assets. I did not realize it, but I gence leads all seemed to dry up. had stumbled across a very large If the investigators real- piece of the missing Dutch con- ized that the U.S. intelligence nection. Bush’s ownership of the chief in postwar Germany, Allen Holland-American investment Dulles, was also the Rotterdam company was the missing link to bank’s lawyer, they might have Manning’s earlier research in the asked some very interesting ques- Joseph Goebbels (Nazi Minister of Propa- Thyssen investigative files. In tions. They did not know that ganda) with Fritz Thyssen. 1981, Manning had written: Thyssen was also a Dulles client. “Thyssen’s first step in a long Nor did they realize that another dance of tax and currency frauds Dulles client, Baron Kurt Von began [in the late 1930’s] when Schroeder, was the Nazi trustee he disposed of his shares in the for Thyssen companies which Dutch Hollandische-Amerikan- now claimed to be owned by the ische Investment Corp. to be Dutch. The Rotterdam Bank was credited to the Bank voor Handel at the heart of Dulles’ cloaking en Scheepvaart, N.V., Rotterdam, scheme, and he guarded its se- the bank founded in 1916 by Au- crets jealously. gust Thyssen Senior.” Several decades after the Hermann Göring (Luftwaffe Commander, In this one obscure para- war, investigative reporter Paul Reichstag President and Hitlers desig- graph, in a little known book, Manning, Edward R. Murrow’s nated successor) with Fritz Thyssen. Manning had unwittingly docu- colleague, stumbled across the mented two intriguing points: Thyssen interrogations in the U.S. Na- ing.’” Dulles sent Manning and his (1) The Bush’s Union Bank apparently tional Archives. Manning intended to manuscript off into the swamps of ob- bought the same corporate stock that write a book about Nazi money laun- scurity. The same “search for Martin the Thyssens were selling as part of dering. Manning’s manuscript was a Bormann” scam was also used to suc- their Nazi money laundering, and dagger at Allen Dulles’ throat: his book cessfully discredit Ladislas Farago, an- (2) the Rotterdam Bank, far from be- specifically mentioned the Bank voor other American journalist probing too ing a neutral Dutch institution, was Handel en Scheepvaart by name, al- far into the laundering of Nazi money. founded by Fritz Thyssen’s father. beit in passing. Dulles volunteered to American investigators had to be sent In hindsight, Manning and I help the unsuspecting Manning with anywhere but Holland. And so the had uncovered different ends of the his manuscript, and sent him on a wild Dutch connection remained unex- Dutch connection.