The German Eagle Order for prominent Americans

January 1, 2006

Compiled from various sources by Brian Harring, Domestic Intelligence Reporter

Adolf  Hitler instituted the Order of the German Eagle in 1937 for presentation to "deserving foreigners."

Of these, a number were presented to Americans. Of these, the First Class medal (a breast star) was presented to Thomas Watson of IBM. Watson's Swiss outlet supplied Mueller's Gestapo with computer parts until early 1945.

In my files is a picture of Watson, wearing the medal and talking with Hitler.

The Second Class, a neck decoration, was presented to Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh and I have photographed it at the Hoover Institute in Palo Alto.

The Third Class, a pin-back ribboned cross, was presented to the later Senator Prescott Bush whose bank was a strong financial supporter of Hitler’s NSDAP. I have a picture of the medal (which was sent to him via the DoS) and the presentation certificate, signed by Adolf Hitler and Otto Meissner, his Secretary of State.

This came from DoJ files (along with an official order forcing Bush to give up his shares in a Nazi bank and which I am publishing as well) and is not currently available to the public.

Watson returned the medal after the outbreak of the war (although IBM did business with the Gestapo until 1945); Lindbergh refused to return either the medal or the certificate and the Bush piece has vanished, but the certificate survives. The German bank Bush was connected to as a director financially supported the Nazi party and was connected with the Schroeder bank of Cologne.

Thomas Watson

February 17, 1874 – June 19, 1956

Thomas J. Watson, Sr. is considered to be the founder of International Business Machines (IBM). He was one of the richest men of his time and called the world's greatest salesman when he died. Watson was born in Campbell, New York. His formal education consisted of only a course in the Elmira School of Commerce. His first job was at age 18 as a bookkeeper in Clarence Risley's Market in Painted Post, New York. Later he sold sewing machines and musical instruments before joining the National Cash Register Company (NCR) as a salesman in Buffalo. He eventually worked his way up to general sales manager. Bent on inspiring the dispirited NCR sales force, Watson introduced the motto, "THINK," which later became a widely known symbol of IBM While at NCR, he was convicted for illegal anti-competitive sales practices (e.g. he used to have people sell deliberately faulty cash registers, either second-hand NCR or from competitors; soon after the second-hand NCR or competitors cash register failed, an NCR salesperson would arrive to sell them a brand new NCR cash register). He was sentenced, along with John H. Patterson (the owner of NCR), to one year of imprisonment. Their conviction was unpopular with the public, due to the efforts of Patterson and Watson to help those affected by the 1913 Dayton, Ohio floods. The Court of Appeals overturned the conviction on appeal in 1915, on the grounds that important defense evidence should have been admitted. Watson blamed the Republicans and became a lifelong Democrat. Watson married Jeanette M. Kittredge on April 17, 1913. The couple had two sons and two daughters

Watson became the president of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company on May 1, 1914. CTR had been founded in 1911 by Herman Hollerith, the inventor of the punch-card system for tabulating data. When Watson took over, the company had fewer than 400 employees. In 1924 he renamed the company International Business Machines. Watson built IBM into such a powerful force that the federal government filed a civil antitrust suit against them in 1952. IBM owned and leased more than 90 percent of all tabulating machines in the United States at the time

In 1937, Watson received the Order of the German Eagle with Star medal from Adolf Hitler, for the help that IBM subsidiary Dehomag and its Hollerith punchcard machines provided the Nazi regime for tabulating census data and which enabled the Gestapo to build up a national surveillance program. IBM continued to supply the Gestapo with parts until 1945, operating through their Swiss entities.. After the outbreak of World War II, Watson returned the medal, and the German government took control of the Dehomag operation.

The growth of IBM's German subsidiary, Dehomag, and the efforts of IBM's chairman, Thomas Watson, to maintain control of that company in the period after Hitler came to power in 1933 represented a "strategic alliance" with Nazism. In fact, these events had a quite different quality. Germany's was the only burgeoning economy in a Europe still wracked by depression, the only one in which the appetite for data-processing equipment was swelling rapidly. But the Reich also capped corporate dividends and required that they be spent in Germany. Virtually the only way to save earnings from confiscatory taxation rates was to reinvest Dehomag's returns and try to hasten the day when Germany abandoned currency controls. Unless Watson was prepared to write off his assets in Germany--in which case his operation would remain there for Hitler to exploit--he had little choice but to put the best face on happenings there, or to bite his tongue, and cultivate good relations with German leaders.

Charles A. Lindbergh

February 4, 1902 – August 26, 1974

Charles Augustus Lindbergh (known as "Lucky Lindy" and "The Lone Eagle", was a pioneering United States aviator famous for piloting the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927.

In 1938 the American ambassador to Germany, Hugh Wilson invited Charles A. Lindbergh to a dinner with Hermann Göring at the American embassy in Berlin. The dinner included diplomats and three of the greatest minds of German aviation, Ernst Heinkel, Adolf Baeumaker, and Dr. Willy Messerschmitt. Göring decorated Lindbergh with German medal of honor (the Verdienstkreuz Deutscher Adler) for his services to aviation and particularly for his 1927 flight. Lindbergh's decoration later caused an outcry in the United States, when Lindbergh's closeness to the Nazis was criticized. Lindbergh's letters and diaries of the time indicate that he approved of Nazi policies and of Hitler's leadership. Lindbergh declined to return the medal to the Germans because he claimed that to do so would be "an unnecessary insult" to the Nazi leadership. He would return to the United States as war broke out in Europe.

Prescott Bush

May 15, 1895-October 8, 1972

Prescott Sheldon Bush,  (father of George Herbert Walker Bush, grandfather of President George W. Bush), a Senator from Connecticut; born in Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio, May 15, 1895; attended the Douglas School of Columbus, Ohio, and St. George’s School, Newport, R.I., 1908-1913; graduated from Yale University in 1917; enlisted in Connecticut National Guard in 1916 and served as captain of Field Artillery in American Expeditionary Forces 1917-1919; engaged in hardware business as a warehouse clerk in St. Louis, Mo.; moved to Greenwich, Conn., in 1924; engaged in banking business in New York City 1926; moderator, Greenwich Representative Town Meeting 1935-1952; trustee, Yale University; unsuccessful Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1950; elected on November 4, 1952, as a Republican to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the death of James O’Brien McMahon; reelected in 1956 and served from November 4, 1952, to January 2, 1963; was not a candidate for reelection in 1962; resumed his career in the banking and investment field; died in New York City, October 8, 1972; interment in Putnam Cemetery, Greenwich, Conn

In 1926, after Prescott Bush had married George Herbert Walker's daughter, Dorothy, Walker brought Bush in as a vice president of the private banking and investment firm of W.A. Harriman & Co., also located in New York. Bush became a partner in the firm that later became Brown Brothers Harriman and the largest private investment bank in the world. Eventually, Bush became a director of and stockholder in UBC.

After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, government documents were located in The National Archives and Library of Congress that clearly reveal that Prescott Bush, served as a business partner of, and U.S. banking operative for, the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his "enemy national" partners.

The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler's rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law.

Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial tycoon for nearly a year after the U.S. entered the war.

For six decades these historical facts have gone unreported by the mainstream U.S. media. The essential facts have appeared on the Internet and in relatively obscure books, but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes. This story has also escaped the attention of "official" Bush biographers, Presidential historians and publishers of U.S. history books covering World War II and its aftermath.

The unraveling of the web of Bush-Harriman-Thyssen U.S. enterprises, all of which operated out of the same suite of offices at 39 Broadway in New York under the supervision of Prescott Bush, began with a story that ran simultaneously in the New York Herald-Tribune and Washington Post on July 31, 1941. By then, the U.S. had been at war with Germany for nearly eight months.

"Hitler's Angel Has $3 Million in U.S. Bank," declared the front-page Herald-Tribune headline. The lead paragraph characterized Fritz Thyssen as "Adolf Hitler's original patron a decade ago." In fact, the steel and coal magnate had aggressively supported and funded Hitler since October 1923, according to Thyssen's autobiography,’ I Paid Hitler.’ In that book, Thyssen also acknowledged his direct personal relationships with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess.

The Herald-Tribune also cited unnamed sources who suggested Thyssen's U.S. "nest egg" in fact belonged to "Nazi bigwigs" including Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, or even Hitler himself.

The bank, founded in 1924 by W. Averell Harriman on behalf of Thyssen and his Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V. of Holland, was Union Banking Corporation (UBC) of New York City. According to government documents, it was in reality a clearing house for a number of Thyssen-controlled enterprises and assets, including as many as a dozen individual businesses. UBC also bought and shipped overseas gold, steel, coal, and U.S. Treasury bonds. The company's activities were administered for Thyssen by a Netherlands-born, naturalized U.S. citizen named Cornelis Lievense, who served as president of UBC. Roland Harriman was chairman and Prescott Bush a managing director.

The Herald-Tribune article did not identify Bush or Harriman as executives of UBC, or Brown Brothers Harriman, in which they were partners, as UBC's private banker. A confidential FBI memo from that period suggested, without naming the Bush and Harriman families, that politically prominent individuals were about to come under official U.S. government scrutiny as Hitler's plunder of Europe continued unabated.

After the "Hitler's Angel" article was published Bush and Harriman made no attempts to divest themselves of the controversial Thyssen financial alliance, nor did they challenge the newspaper report that UBC was, in fact, a de facto Nazi front organization in the U.S.

Instead, the government documents show, Bush and his partners increased their subterfuge to try to conceal the true nature and ownership of their various businesses, particularly after the U.S. entered the war. The documents also disclose that Cornelis Lievense, Thyssen's personal appointee to oversee U.S. matters for his Rotterdam-based Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V., via UBC for nearly two decades, repeatedly denied to U.S. government investigators any knowledge of the ownership of the Netherlands bank or the role of Thyssen in it. Brown Brothers Harriman sent letters to the government seeking reconsideration of the seizures by using false information.

UBC's original group of business associates included George Herbert Walker, President Bush's maternal great-grandfather, who had a relationship with the Harriman family that began in 1919. In 1922, Walker and W. Averell Harriman traveled to Berlin to set up the German branch of their banking and investment operations, which were largely based on critical war resources such as steel and coal.

The Walker-Harriman-created German industrial alliance also included partnership with another German titan who supported Hitler's rise, Friedrich Flick, who partnered with Thyssen in the German Steel Trust that forged the Nazi war machine. For his role in using slave labor and his own steel, coal and arms resources to build Hitler's war effort, Flick was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to prison.

However, the government documents note that Bush, Harriman, Lievense and the other UBC stockholders were in fact "nominees," or phantom shareholders, for Thyssen and his Holland bank, meaning that they acted at the direct behest of their German client.

On October 20, 1942, under authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act, the U.S. Congress seized UBC and liquidated its assets after the war. The seizure is confirmed by Vesting Order No. 248 in the U.S. Office of the Alien Property Custodian and signed by U.S. Alien Property Custodian Leo T. Crowley. (see official report below)

In August, under the same authority, Congress had seized the first of the Bush-Harriman-managed Thyssen entities, Hamburg-American Line, under Vesting Order No. 126, also signed by Crowley. Eight days after the seizure of UBC, Congress invoked the Trading with the Enemy Act again to take control of two more Bush-Harriman-Thyssen businesses - Holland-American Trading Corp. (Vesting Order No. 261) and Seamless Steel Equipment Corp. (Vesting Order No. 259).

The documents from the Archives also show that the Bushes and Harrimans shipped valuable U.S. assets, including gold, coal, steel and U.S. Treasury bonds, to their foreign clients overseas between 1931-33, as Hitler engineered his rise to power.

.  Major U.S. media outlets, including ABC News, NBC News, CNN, The New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times and Miami Herald, as well as Knight-Ridder Newspapers, have repeatedly declined to investigate the story when information regarding discovery of the documents was presented to them beginning Friday, August 29. Newsweek U.S. correspondent Michael Isikoff, famous for his reporting of big scoops during the Clinton-Lewinsky sexual affair of the 1990s, declined twice to accept an exclusive story based on the documents from the archives.

In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate, with no press accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past. There is no record of any U.S. press coverage of the Bush-Nazi connection during any political campaigns conducted by George Herbert Walker Bush, Jeb Bush, or George W. Bush..

In our next edition of TBR News we will discuss more about Third Reich banks and their American friends- Brian Harring