PRESS RELEASE
LaRouche to Rumsfeld:
FDR Defeated the Nazis,
While the Bushes Collaborated
Sept. 4, 2006 (EIRNS)—This release was issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee, and is being circulated as a mass-distribution leaflet.
Lyndon LaRouche responded forcefully and directly on Sept. 3 to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's recent insane accusations that Democrats who opposed the Bush Administration were "appeasers," like those who capitulated to Hitler in the 1930s. Rumsfeld delivered two speeches and penned a Los Angeles Times op-ed during the week of Aug. 28-Sept. 3, repeating the "appeasement" charges, and then sent a letter to Congressional Democrats, ostensibly retracting his remarks, but, in fact, reiterating the same charges.
LaRouche blasted Rumsfeld, reminding him that it was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who defeated Hitler and the Nazis, while many American right-wingers of the 1930s and '40s were promoters of Mussolini, Hjalmar Schacht, and Hermann Goering. And among the extreme American Fascists and Nazis of the period, there were some who openly sympathized with Adolf Hitler, by intention or practice. "Rumsfeld ought to know, unless his mental capacities are failing him, that it was FDR who had to fight the American right wing in order to defeat Hitler," LaRouche said. "Without Franklin Roosevelt leading the fight, Hitler would have almost certainly been victorious, and the world would have perhaps still been under the genocidal boot of Hitler's successors today.
"The anti-FDR tradition in America is the American expression of fascism," LaRouche continued. "It was FDR's alliance with the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin, an alliance that was joined by Winston Churchill, that defeated Hitler and the Nazis."
LaRouche demanded, "The U.S. Congress should hold hearings today on the issue of fascism, and the history of those Americans who collaborated with the Nazis and the Fascists prior to and during World War II—just as the Congress did at the end of the war."
Prescott S. Bush and the UBC
In that context, LaRouche reminded Rumsfeld that the current President's own grandfather Prescott S. Bush was a director of the Union Banking Corporation, an asset of German steel cartel boss Fritz Thyssen, who proudly admitted that he was Adolf Hitler's earliest and biggest financial backer, in his book I Paid Hitler (1941). From 1924-1942, the UBC was the New York City bank holding company for all of Thyssen's U.S. corporate operations. The arrangement was made with Thyssen by W. Averell Harriman, and several Brown Brothers Harriman directors, including Roland Harriman and Prescott Bush, were directors and shareholders of UBC, even after Hitler took power in Germany and invaded Eastern Europe. Bush remained a managing director of UBC right up to the moment that the U.S. government moved to shut the bank down.
On Oct. 20, 1942, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the U.S. Congress seized all of the assets of the Union Banking Corporation of 39 Broadway, New York, New York. The seizure was approved by Leo T. Crowly, the U.S. Alien Property Custodian. By the end of October 1942, the U.S. Congress had seized a total of four Thyssen entities—all run through the UBC. The other seized entities were: Hamburg-American Line, Holland-American Trading Corp., and Seamless Steel Equipment Corp. Far from being shell companies, these entities were involved in supplying crucial materiel to Nazi Germany. U.S. Congressional hearings at the close of World War II revealed that the United Steel Works Corporation of Thyssen, which was interlocked with UBC, had been the main supplier of steel, iron, and explosives for the Nazi war machine ("Elimination of German Resources for War," hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs, United States Senate, July 2, 1945).
"Does Mr. Rumsfeld really want to revisit the issue of Nazi appeasement and collaboration?" LaRouche pointedly asked.
Then and Now
LaRouche next turned to the Bush Administration's own record of totalitarianism, typified by Rumsfeld's and Vice President Dick Cheney's persistent efforts to create a privatized secret military force, and to adopt some of the very same torture techniques perfected by the Nazi SS, at locations like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison.
"Let us not ignore the role of George Shultz, the man behind the Bush Presidency, the power of Vice President Cheney, and the promotion of Don Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Even leading Republicans know Shultz to be an outright totalitarian, who has used the Bush Presidency to impose a 'Pinochet Model' of top-down dictatorship and radical free-market economics upon the United States. Shultz's promotion of the privatization of war, on the SS model, has been backed," LaRouche noted, "by Felix Rohatyn."
LaRouche continued, "Is it not the right-wing current of today, typified by Cheney, Shultz, Rumsfeld, and the foolish George W. Bush, who are the real Nazi appeasers? Isn't that the truth, Mr. Rumsfeld?"
LaRouche concluded: "I call upon the U.S. Congress to launch immediate hearings into this whole issue of appeasement. These hearings should take place prior to the November midterm elections. Nothing on the agenda of the U.S. Congress should take higher priority than this matter. Donald Rumsfeld, a top official of the Bush Administration, has made this an issue of national debate, and the record must be set straight. Congress is the proper venue."
