Hi.

I'm guessing you came here because of this thread, in /r/conspiracy where we banned a user for soapboxing and asking a loaded question. While your comments in that thread imply that we don't want "the truth"^^TM to be revealed, it's actually quite the contrary. We love "the truth"^^TM, and will gladly answer your question since you approached the issue in a non-confrontational way.

So, let's get to answering!

Did Prescott Bush have ties to Nazi Germany?

Yes.

So did Charles Lindbergh, Joe Kennedy, IBM, Coca-Cola, Ford Motor Company, General Electric, Chase Bank. It's likely that anyone with a large stock portfolio from 1933 on, anyone involved in international business or global politics and finance did. That's simply the nature of global politics.

You see Prescott Bush, President George Bush's Father, and President George W. Bush's grandfather was a businessman. Yes, he did sit on the board of the Union Banking Corporation, which was seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemies Act of 1917. Now, interestingly, also on this board with E. Roland Harriman, who was also a noted Wall Street type, but also served as Undersecretary of War during WWII, and was highly praised by President Harry Truman, who was a staunch anti-Fascist and supporter of the early creation of the state of Israel. He also helped build the relationship between Churchill and FDR.

I just throw that out there, that a supposed pro-Nazi man served on the same board as a man who led the procurement and development of the U.S. Army Air Forces in WWII and was appointed by FDR, who had been wanting to fight the Nazi's for years before Germany declared war on the U.S. (See: Lend-Lease and early anti-submarine actions in 1941, as well as the expansion of the Army beginning in 1940 as well as the "Flying Tigers" in Indo-China). Why would a pro-Nazi be working with someone who was trusted by staunch anti-Nazis?

Anyway. Back to UBC. UBC was a Dutch bank allegedly owned largely by the German company United Steel Works which was part of the corporate empire built by the Thyssens, a German business dynasty. Fritz Thyssen, who was the head of the Thyssen family funds and therefore USW and UBC WAS an early pro-Nazi supporter largely because he was extremely anti-Communist and felt they had the best chance of preventing their growth and expansion in Germany. While not being a big fan of Jews himself, going so far as to fire his Jewish workers to stay in good with the Nazi leadership in the 1930's, he was absolutely horrified by anti-Semetic violence. After Kristalnacht, in 1938, he turned against the Nazis and began to denounce them. He ended up having to flee Germany in 1940, had his businesses seized, and many of his family members ended up in concentration camps for being political agitators.

So, what happened was this: Prescott Bush was on the board of a bank that held financial assets of a business that was owned by German who had this business seized by the Nazis. When the war broke out, the bank simply sat on the funds in its accounts held by the business. This is a common practice, that is while not entirely ethical is also not entirely illegal. It's an extremely complex and grey area of international finance. This is why to this day, survivors and descendants of the Holocaust continue to fight Swiss banks in court for holding onto Nazi funds. A modern version of this can be seen in the U.S. and other nations seizing the assets held by the Iranian government after the 1979 revolution, Iraq and Sadam Hussein in 1990, Panama and Manuel Noriega in 1990, and Osama Bin Laden in the 90's.

As for Prescott Bush's ties to the CIA, the closest you can find is that Prescott Bush was apparently a member of the Skull and Bones society at Yale. Skull and Bones was of course a secret society of students that yes, does have a long history of churning out global financial leaders and politicians. But then, you have to remember, the Ivy League schools have turned out a lot of these leaders who were not members of Skull and Crossbones. Now, Yale was among one of the many places William O. Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA, recruited from. They recruited heavily from the universities because these young men had family connections in leadership throughout Europe and could perform "backdoor" style intelligence gathering. They were also usually brilliant men and women who spoke multiple European languages and were skilled in mathematics, which is a necessary skill for code breaking. Now mind you, not all members of the OSS and later CIA were "Hahvahd Men". People as varied as Jewish German ex-pat's to career enlisted intelligence soldiers became part of the organization.

With these family ties, yes, the Bush's do have a history of being Blue Bloods/Old Money/High Society. However, George W. Bush never served in the CIA or OSS. During WWII he served as a combat Navy pilot. He was later made director of the CIA in the 1970's, long after many of the old school OSS types had retired or been put out to pasture. During Bush's tenure, heavy Congressional oversight through the Church Comittee reigned in many of the CIA's excesses, including what is now known to be part of Operation Paperclip.

Operation Paperclip as is well known was the recruiting of former Nazi intelligence agents as well as scientists, specifically in the fields of rocket science and nuclear physics. It's a widely known and accepted fact that without Wehner von Braun's presence, the US space program and NASA would not have achieved what it did. But then, neither would have the Soviets. It's not one of history's prouder moments, but its well known that the Allies and Soviets white washed a lot of former Nazi's histories in order to make them more palatable to a public who had just fought a war against them. However, the conflict between capitalism and communism was older than the democracy versus fascism one. With the growing Cold War and end of the old established power structures of Europe (German, France, England) being replaced with that of the US and USSR, any edge that could be found was. Yes, this did include helping and hiding some former Nazi spies (who really weren't that good at their job) and scientists (who really were).

If you want or need sources, I can provide for you a large number if you would like.