Bush Forgets His Grandpa Profited from Nazi Slave Labor

Posted by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review at 11:37 AM on January 11, 2008.

George Bush toured the Holocaust memorial in Israel yesterday, and through tears, came up with a telling formulation about what his predecessor, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt, should have done to stop the horror at the German concentration camps:

President George W. Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial's chairman said.

Bush emerged from a tour of the Yad Vashem memorial today calling it a "sobering reminder" that evil must be resisted, and praising victims for not losing their faith.

Wearing a yarmulke, Bush placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims.

Bush was visibly moved as he toured the site, said Yad Vashem's chairman, Avner Shalev.

"Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes," Shalev said.

At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said.

"We should have bombed it," Bush said, according to Shalev.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, the saying goes, then every solution will look like a nail. Thus, in Bush's primitive brain, the best way to stop the horror at the camps would have been to bomb the hell out of them.

Mainly, though, it's hard to get past the cognitive dissonance of reading an utterance from Bush that was not crafted by the White House political shop and focus-grouped in Paramus to ensure the words he speaks do not mean what they say.

It also reminds us of the unique kid-glove treatment George W. Bush receives from the media. It is impossible to imagine any other politician whose grandfather had profited from Nazi slave labor who could tour a Holocaust memorial with the media in tow and not be hounded for a comment on his grandfather's role in the horror.

First the history: Before the war, the Hitler regime's mistreatment of Jews -- particularly the government's policy of ethnically cleansing Jews out of mixed neighborhoods into Jewish-only ghettos -- may have seemed less outrageous in the racially segregated America of the late 1930s than it does today. The same goes for conscripting Jews into forced labor. In 1942, just four years after the Germans began sending Jews to labor camps, the U.S. government sent thousands of Japanese-American citizens into camps in the west, for example.

While the American public had no idea about the mass killings until after the camps were liberated in 1945, the debate continues even now among historians about the extent of FDR's knowledge of the genocide while it was underway. He died in April that year, just four months after Auschwitz was captured.

In the scheme of things, however, the martyrdom of the Jews, Gypsies and gay people in the camps has had a positive effect on European and German society, for the entirety of civilization, because the fact that the camps were intact at the war's end provided irrefutable evidence of the genocide.

For example, after the war, the Allied commanders forced rank and file German citizens, who claimed not to have known that their government was gassing 6 million people literally under their noses, to tour the camps to see with their own eyes the horror wrought in their names (and with their tax dollars) -- and to witness the inevitable result of the bigotry ingrained in their culture. Forcing the Germans to accept the horrible truth about Nazism contributed to bringing an end to Germany's decades of aggression against its neighbors, once and for all.

What has been all but forgotten, however, is the role of Prescott Bush, George W. Bush's grandfather, who was in business with the Nazis even after the U.S. entered the war in late 1941:

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

We will never know if George Bush gave any thought to his grandfather's role in the creation of the Nazi camps while he toured a memorial to the horror they produced. One of his biggest flaws is his instinctive reflex to deflect responsibility for his own failings, so it is unlikely he'd see any connection between himself, the family fortune that paved his way to power and the portion of it that came from profits from his grandfather's business dealings with Hitler's government.

That would hit him a little too close to home.

Tagged as: bush, israel, holocaust, nazis, germany, prescott bush

Jon Ponder is regular blogger for the Pensito Review