The Bush dynasty’s financial and political capital grew out of ties to Nazis and the forced labor of concentration camp inmates

George H. W. Bush, the 41st U.S. president, and George W. Bush, the 43rd, came from a family whose fortune was built on connections to financiers of the Nazi movement, people who helped pave the way for Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. The father of George H. W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush — Prescott Bush — served as a director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC), a bank that handled the financial interests of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, one of the NSDAP’s biggest backers.

Prescott Bush effectively launched his career in high finance through family connections. His father-in-law, banker George Herbert Walker, ran W.A. Harriman & Co., an investment firm owned by the family of Edward Henry Harriman, the American railroad magnate. Through Walker, Bush came into the Harriman business orbit in the 1920s. In 1931, their firm merged with Brown Brothers & Co. to form the investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., with Bush as a partner. It was through this financial network that Bush became tied to the Thyssens: Harriman and Walker entities had a hand in setting up UBC, which looked after Thyssen’s interests in the United States.

The linchpin of this network was Nazi German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, one of Germany’s largest steel and coal barons and one of the most prominent businessmen to back Hitler well before he took power. Thyssen bankrolled the Nazis, helped fund the purchase of the building that became the NSDAP’s Munich headquarters – the Braunes Haus – and introduced Hitler to Germany’s industrial elite. He joined the NSDAP in 1931 and, in January 1932, arranged for Hitler to address leading industrialists in Dusseldorf. Later, Thyssen threw his weight behind the petition urging President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Reich Chancellor.