The History of Wall Street’s Unspoken Relationship to Nazi Germany: Dragon Teeth to Be Planted All Over Europe Again

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-history-of-wall-streets-unspoken-relationship-to-nazi-germany-dragon-teeth-to-be-planted-all-over-europe-again/5398757

Many media outlets compare the contemporary situation in Europe with the days before WWII. I would like to make an important correction here. Now we are watching the West fostering another Nazi regime represented by Kiev junta and it makes remember the second half of the 1930s when it did the very same thing cooperating with Germany turned into a fascist state.
Of course, the Ukraine we know today cannot measure up to Hitler’s Germany. But the first blow is half the battle. The running amok Fuhrer started as an unknown corporal preaching xenophobia and revenge.
It’s an open secret that Adolf Hitler was supported by the United States. The US penetration was significant, especially its cooperation with the German war industry. By 1933 the United States controlled key branches of Germany’s economy, as well as several large banks such as Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, etc.
Big business started to trust Hitler. Those were the days of affluence for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as funds from abroad began to pour in. Thanks to large donations from Fritz Thyssen’s group including the United Steelworks (Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG), I.G. Farbenindustrie AG (Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG) and mining industry tycoon Emil Kirdorf the party received 6,4 million votes to become the second largest in the Reichstag (parliament). Hjalmar Schacht (22 January 1877 – 3 June 1970), a German economist, banker, liberal politician, and co-founder in 1918 of the German Democratic Party, became the key connecting link between German industry and foreign donors.
British business and banking interests also started to channel donations to the Nazi party. On January 4, 1932 Montague Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England from 1920 to 1944, met Hitler and German Chancellor Franz von Papen to conclude a secret accord on providing funds for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The US was also represented at this meeting. Both Dulles brothers were present. Western historians shy away from mentioning the fact. John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles were politically connected Wall Street lawyers, servants of corporate power, who led the United States into an unseen war that decisively shaped today’s world.
It is worth noting, that during the 1950s, when the Cold War was at its peak, the two immensely powerful Dulles brothers led the United States into a series of foreign adventures whose effects are still shaking the world. John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State while his brother, Allen Dulles, was director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Federal elections were held in Germany on 5 March 1933. As a result of lavish donations coming in from abroad, the ruling Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler, who was appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933, registered a large increase in votes emerging as the largest party by far. Nevertheless they failed to obtain an absolute majority in their own right and needed the votes of their coalition partner, the German National People’s Party (DNVP), for a Reichstag majority.
The new German government was treated extremely favorably by US and UK ruling circles. Western democracies kept silent when Berlin refused to pay reparations. Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics, went to the United States in May 1933 to meet President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and leading Wall Street bankers. Germany was granted a $1 billion credit. And in June, during a visit to Norman in London, Schacht requested an addition $2 billion in loans as well as a reduction and eventual cessation of payment on old loans. Thus, the Nazis got something that the previous government could not.
In the summer of 1934, Britain signed the Anglo-German Transfer Agreement, which became one of the foundations of British policy towards the Third Reich, and by the end of the 1930′s, Germany developed into Britain’s primary trading partner. Schroeder’s bank turned into Germany and Great Britain’s main agent, and in 1936, its New York branch merged with a Rockefeller holding to create the investment bank «Schroeder, Rockefeller and Co.», which the New York Times described as «economic-propagandist axis of Berlin-Rome».
The ‘Secret Memorandum’ was issued by Adolf Hitler in August 1936. The memorandum went out only to a few senior Nazi leaders and its contents – information about the Four-Year Plan – was formally announced to the party’s faithful in September 1936 at the party rally in Nuremberg. The Secret Memorandum stated that in four years Germany was to develop capable combat-ready armed forces and its economy was to be mobilized to meet the needs of war. As he admitted to himself, Hitler viewed foreign credit as the financial basis for his four-year plan, so this didn’t raise the slightest alarm.
In August 1934, American oil giant Standard Oil purchased 730,000 acres of land in Germany and built large oil refineries that supplied the Nazis with oil. At the same time, the United States secretly provided Germany with the most modern equipment for its airplane factories, which were slated to produce Germany’s military aircraft.
In turn, Germany received a large number of patents from several American companies including Pratt and Whitney, Douglas, and the Bendix Corporation, and the “Junkers-87″ dive-bomber was built using purely American technology. As the war broke out, the monopolies stuck to the good old tried-and-true rule – nothing personal, only business. By 1941, when the Second World War was in full swing, American investment in the German economy totaled $475 million: Standard Oil invested $120 million alone, General Motors — $35 million, ITT — $30 million, and Ford — $17.5 million.
What motivated the interest of Western business in the growing might of Nazi Germany?
The goal was to direct Hitler to the East involving a German invasion of Russia. The conquest of Lebensraum («living space») was for Hitler and the rest of the National Socialists the most important German foreign policy goal. At his first meeting with the leading Generals and Admirals of the Reich («Empire») on February 3, 1933, Hitler spoke of “conquest of Lebensraum” in the East and ruthless ‘Germanization’ as his two ultimate foreign policy objectives.
For Hitler, the land which would provide sufficient Lebensraum for Germany was the Soviet Union, which in Hitler eyes was both a nation that possessed vast and rich agricultural land and was inhabited by what Hitler considered as Slavic Untermenschen (sub-humans) ruled over by what he regarded as a gang of blood-thirsty, but grossly incompetent “Jewish revolutionaries”. These people were not “Germanizable” in his eyes; only the soil was.
The US and Britain, which were firmly opposed to the rise of Communism in the Soviet Union, tacitly endorsed Hitler’s “conquest of Lebensraum” in the East, as initially stated in Mein Kampf:

“We National Socialists consciously draw a line under the direction of our foreign policy war. We begin where we ended six centuries ago. We stop the perpetual Germanic march towards the south and west of Europe, and have the view on the country in the east. We finally put the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-war and go over to the territorial policy of the future. But if we speak today in Europe of new land, we primarily point to Russia and the border states”

In turn, the policy of appeasement was implemented by Western countries in the 1930s against a background of financial and economic cooperation of Anglo-American business interests with Nazi Germany.
In October 1930, Germany withdrew from both the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments of 1932–1934 (sometimes named the World Disarmament Conference or Geneva Disarmament Conference) and the League of Nations.
In March 1936, Hitler ordered his troops to openly re-enter the Rhineland which had been demilitarized under the Versailles Treaty.
In March 1938 Austria was annexed.
The West did not react.
Fall Grün (Operation Green), a German military plan to occupy Czechoslovakia, was approved by Hitler in December 1937. The execution of Operation Green was called off after the Munich Pact was concluded between England, France, Italy and Nazi Germany on September 30, 1938.
While Hitler signed the Munich agreement along with Arthur Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier and Benito Mussolini,  the operation to invade Czechoslovakia prevailed. On October 21 he ordered to start preparations for the military annexation of the rest of Czechoslovakia and the Klaipeda Region (also known as the Memel Territory) which had been part of Lithuania since 1923.
In March 1939, Germany delivered an ultimatum to Poland demanding renegotiation of the Danzig agreement. The Polish Corridor (also known as Danzig Corridor, Corridor to the Sea or Gdansk Corridor) was a territory located in the region of Pomerelia (eastern Pomerania, formerly part of West Prussia), which provided the Second Republic of Poland (1920–1939) with access to the Baltic Sea, thus dividing the bulk of Germany from the province of East Prussia. The Free city of Danzig (now the Polish city of Gdansk) was separate from both Poland and Germany.
But Memel and Danzig were not the ultimate goal of Nazi Germany. Adolph Hitler was fully aware that nobody in the West had any intention to stand in his way. On April 1939 he secretly ordered Poland to be attacked on September 1.
With the seizure of Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s duel-track policy was an open secret even for the most shortsighted politicians and diplomats. The Soviet Union still cherished hope to build a collective system of security in Europe. It managed to make London and Paris start talks on creating a really effective alliance to counter the aggressor. But these talks were to reveal that the Western partners were reluctant to hinder Hitler’s expansionary policy to the East. Sir Alexander Cadogan (Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) cited Chamberlain saying he would rather resign the premiership than conclude an agreement with the Soviets.
When Germany attacked Poland and the Second World War started, Western leaders pointed their finger at both the Soviet Union and Germany which signed the Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939. Supported by a choir of propaganda, they said it was not the Western appeasement policy, but rather the USSR-Germany Non-Aggression Pact which triggered the war.
In the wake of World War II, neither London, nor Washington, nor Paris want to hear the truth about these historical events. They signed the Nuremberg Trial verdict that found Germany guilty of grave crimes and violations of international law and the laws of war, without acknowledging who was behind Nazi Germany?  The political and financial elites of the United States, Great Britain and France were directly involved in fostering Nazi regime. They incited Hitler to move east.
The West has never recognized its responsibility for supporting Hitler’s regime.
In today’s context, it has does its utmost to prevent Russia’s return on the world stage as a leading actor.
Today it is fostering the ulcer of Nazism and xenophobia emerging right in front of our very eyes. To hide the truth it circulates the Washington-invented and Europe-inculcated story about “Russian aggression” against Ukraine.
Russia is demonized and provoked into direct confrontation with a view to triggering its involvement in Ukraine’s internal conflict.
While the Kiev junta is not “in the same league” as Germany’s Nazi regime, history shows that the ulcer of Nazism combined with the thrust of Russophobia is gaining momentum. And sooner or later it may be beyond the control of those who encouraged it in the first place.
The slogan “Ukraine above all” sounds  very much like a remake of Nazi Germany’s “Deutschland über alles”, (Germany above all). “Ukraine above all”  is being used to justify the crimes committed by Ukraine forces in Novorossiya.
Edited by Global Research

The original source of this article is Strategic Culture Foundation

Copyright © Yuriy Rubtsov, Strategic Culture Foundation, 2014

United States-Soviet Space Cooperation during the Cold War

http://www.nasa.gov/50th/50th_magazine/coldWarCoOp.html

By Roald Sagdeev, University of Maryland, and Susan Eisenhower, The Eisenhower Institute

Russian space scientist Roald Z. Sagdeev spent a large part of his career viewing NASA from the Soviet Union’s side of the Cold War divide. Sagdeev, the former head of the Russian Space Research Institute, now is the director of the University of Maryland’s East-West Space Science Center. He wrote this essay with his wife, Susan Eisenhower (President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s granddaughter) that traces the long, hard path to space cooperation until the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991.
The Space Age spawned two outstanding space programs as a result of the hot competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both countries gave primary emphasis in their space efforts to a combination of national security and foreign policy objectives, turning space into an area of active competition for political and military advantage. At first, this charged political environment accommodated nothing more than symbolic gestures of collaboration. Only in the late 1980s, with warming political relations, did momentum for major space cooperation begin to build. As the Soviet Union neared collapse, with its ideological underpinnings evaporating, the impetus for the arms race and competition in space declined, allowing both countries to seriously pursue strategic partnerships in space.
The bumpy U.S.-U.S.S.R. relationship in the years between 1957 and 1991 often was characterized by periods of mistrust and overt hostility (e.g., the U-2 incident, Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam War, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and President Ronald Reagan’s depiction of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”). Periods of détente, in contrast, led to the Limited Test-Ban Treaty in 1963, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty in 1972, and an emerging U.S.-Soviet rapprochement during 1985-1991. Throughout this political roller-coaster period of history, both countries increased areas of coop-eration, including space, as a symbol of warmer relations while cutting cooperation off when ties worsened.
The birth of the Space Age following the Soviet launch of Sputnik came out of the confluence of two seemingly incompatible developments. From the end of World War II, the Soviets made rockets their most important military asset. By the mid-1950s, they were ready to test their first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). In 1957, the International Geophysical Year was launched, a multinational effort to study Earth on a comprehensive, coordinated basis. To highlight the effort, organizers had urged the United States and the Soviet Union to consider launching a scientific satellite. On Oct. 4, 1957, a seemingly routine test launch of a Soviet ICBM (now known as the R-7 rocket) carried the first artificial satellite to orbit.
Sputnik’s launch had dramatic repercussions for the Cold War rivals. After reaping the first political dividends from military rocket technology, the Soviets continued to pursue a highly classified military-industrial approach in developing its space program. Conversely, the U.S. government decided to make NASA a purely civilian enterprise, while focusing its military space efforts in the Pentagon and intelligence community.
Early on, President Dwight D. Eisenhower pursued U.S.-Soviet cooperative space initiatives through a series of letters he sent in 1957 and 1958 to the Soviet leadership, first to Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin and then to Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Eisenhower suggested creating a process to secure space for peaceful uses. Khrushchev, however, rejected the offer and demanded the United States eliminate its forward-based nuclear weapons in places like Turkey as a precondition for any space agreement. Feeling triumphant after Sputnik’s launch, Khrushchev was certain his country was far ahead of the United States in terms of rocket technology and space launch capabilities, unlike the Soviet Union’s more vulnerable geostrategic position in the nuclear arena. This would be the first of many times when space was linked with nuclear disarmament and other political issues.
Meanwhile, the United States energetically proceeded with its multinational initiative under the umbrella of the United Nations to develop a legal framework for peaceful space activities. This eventually led to the Outer Space Treaty and creation of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, which a reluctant Soviet Union eventually joined.
In the scientific community, the role of an international space science union was assumed by the Committee on Space Research, with its unusual charter giving a mandate to both superpowers to appoint vice presidents. This arrangement opened an opportunity for dialogue and informal contacts between American and Soviet space officials. Academician Anatoli A. Blagonravov, the Soviet Union’s representative for negotiating multilateral space science cooperation agreements, became the group’s first appointed vice president. However, nothing could happen in the body without Kremlin approval.
I vividly remember a farewell conversation with Blagonravov, when he was preparing to retire from the Soviet space program. Blagonravov, an outstanding artillery engineer and general of the prerevolutionary Russian army who managed to survive during the Soviet regime, strongly advised me to keep the committee link alive. That would require a lot of domestic diplomacy, he thought. Indeed, my very first hurdle was to persuade the Kremlin not to kill Soviet participation in the 1977 conference in Tel Aviv, Israel.
The civilian nature of NASA, legislated in the 1958 Space Act, made it possible for the American researchers to collaborate on and disseminate scientific advances, an opportunity envied by many of us Soviet scientists. The actual work and industrial efforts for the Soviet space program were run under the classified umbrella of the Ministry of General Machine Building, with its enormous and rapidly expanding network of design bureaus and production facilities. The military was its principal client. The military also owned and operated every launch site and the network of ground control centers. The ministry had to report to the Communist Party’s Central Committee and the Commission on Military-Industrial Issues of the Council of Ministers. Work beyond defense contracts was given secondary priority.
As a result of this critical dependence on the military, the Soviet aerospace industry relied entirely on domestic hardware, all the way down to the tiniest individual micro-components. This resulted in an internationally isolated technological culture that would have created enormous barriers of incompatibility for any joint endeavor.
In April 1960, in advance of a planned Eisenhower-Khrushchev sum-mit meeting, the leadership of Moscow’s scientific community was anticipating a chance for major breakthroughs in bilateral cooperation, perhaps including the space area, following Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative. However, the much expected summit was cancelled in the aftermath of the May 1 downing of a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union. I was beginning my scientific career at the heart of the Soviet nuclear establishment, now known as the Kurchatov Institute, and was very disappointed Eisenhower would not be visiting the institute as had been rumored.
Early in his presidency, John F. Kennedy made repeated attempts to engage the Soviet Union in space cooperation. In his inaugural address, Kennedy said, “Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars.’’ Khrushchev, still persuaded of the eternal supremacy of Soviet rocketry, was not moved. Less than three months after Kennedy’s inauguration, on April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to escape Earth’s gravity. In the aftermath of his brief flight, the piloted component of the Soviet space program rapidly grew to become indisputably dominant over any other type of space activity. Official Soviet propaganda was obsessed with everything that happened in orbit, including elaborate descriptions of the cosmonauts’ menu at their last breakfast and all of the details of their physical exercise program. Every launch produced several more “Heroes of the Soviet Union,” and more photographs of space superstars embraced by Khrushchev. At the same time, the Soviets were left far behind in other key areas of space technology. Their first geostationary telecommunication satellite was launched 11 years after its American counterpart. In the case of getting meteorological data from a geostationary location, the gap was even bigger.
Despite the continued space competition between the United States and U.S.S.R., Khrushchev sent Kennedy a letter raising the possibility of space cooperation on a modest level after John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth on Feb. 20, 1962. That led to two rounds of discussions between NASA’s Deputy Administrator Hugh Dryden and Soviet academician Blagonravov. An agreement led to the opening of cooperation in three areas: 1) the exchange of weather data from satellites and the eventual coordinated launching of meteorological satellites; 2) a joint effort to map the geomagnetic field of Earth; and 3) cooperation in the experimental relay of communications. This link became a primary forum for subsequent U.S.-U.S.S.R. interaction on space.
There were large differences between the two negotiating partners. The Soviet Academy of Sciences did not run the space program, but rather served as an official front for a vast network of secret enterprises controlled by the military and Communist Party apparatus. An asymmetry existed also in the fact that while the Russians knew about the American planning process, everything about the Soviet space program was a classified secret. In meetings among scientists, we often were approached by our colleagues at NASA asking us to disclose plans about what we were going to do next with Mars, Venus and other planets. It was difficult to persuade our Soviet authorities, including the president of the Academy of Sciences, academician Mstislav Keldysh, that we should reciprocate. The Soviet system had a different culture and mentality. Academician Keldysh himself was the subject of paranoid secrecy. For many years, Keldysh’s name was a state secret. He was known only as the anonymous “chief theorist of cosmonautics.” Sergei Korolev, the founder of the Soviet space and rocketry program, was less fortunate. His role as “chief designer of cosmonautics” became official only posthumously.
Following the ouster of Khrushchev in October 1964, the new Soviet leadership of Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues took even a harder line toward overall U.S.-Soviet relations. Brezhnev previously had served as the curator of the military industry on behalf of the Politburo. He knew well there was a “missile gap” in favor of the United States, and he was about to embark on an unprecedented build up of deterrent forces. The negative atmosphere at higher levels was reflected in the Soviet academy’s dealings with NASA. Soviet opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam led to more bitterness.
In December 1968, only weeks after Richard Nixon’s election, Apollo 8 orbited the moon, followed by the lunar landing of Apollo 11 in July 1969. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union experienced a series of failures in its manned lunar program. The opportunity for using dramatic space cooperation efforts as a means of reducing the U.S.-Soviet Cold War rivalry had passed. As painful as it was for the Soviet leadership, the time of their country’s dominance in heavy rocket launching technology was over. Cooperation in space now would have to come at more modest levels. The triumph of the Apollo program signified a crucial benchmark in the superpower space race by ending Soviet leadership in space exploration. The Soviet Union was simply unable to match such large-scale U.S. efforts. Nor did the Soviets have an institutional structure like NASA that was capable of running a program like Apollo in an open and transparent way. While not ready to publicly admit their defeat, the Soviets argued that scientific work on the moon could be better achieved robotically. Unmanned Soviet lunar missions, initially introduced as a shadow program with a much smaller budget than the manned version, occurred at the same time as the Apollo program. The Lunokhod moon rovers and sample return probes earned a great deal of admiration from international scientists. However, inside their close circle, the Soviet leaders, in a rude awakening, conceded that the era of Soviet dominance in space was gone forever. Cynics in the Soviet space community added an insult to the injury in the form of a “bad news, good news” joke drawing on a growing irritant for Kremlin – rapidly deteriorating relations with China. According to the joke, the bad news was, “The Chinese have landed on the moon. So what is the good news? It’s all of them.”
The challenge for both sides was determining where to go next. While the Americans eventually pursued the development of the space shuttle, the Soviets embarked on a program to place crews in space for extended periods of time by building the Salyut series of orbital space stations.
In reality, that space station program was not the result of major brainstorming or serious debates about a new national vision for space exploration. It came from the spontaneous process of internal competition between rivals within the Soviet aerospace industry. The Soviet military initially supported the approach, which was reminiscent of the U.S. Air Force Manned Orbiting Laboratory project, which was canceled in 1969 after a single, unmanned launch. Reflecting military priorities, the key instrument on early Salyut stations was a big optical Earth observation camera, the Soviet version of “open skies” technology. Of course, official propaganda said this mission had nothing to do with military interests. However, sharp tongues inside the space establishment jokingly asked, “Why do these brave men in orbit sleep when flying over our country, but stay alert over America?”
After this type of assignment was passed to unmanned spy satellites, the real motivation for expanding the Salyut program became the desire to undertake long-duration flight. Longevity records for humans in space became the benchmark for judging the success of these flights. In order to move in that direction, the Salyut program worked to excel in two important areas: achieving the safety of its manned flight hardware and developing a solid base in space medicine. Eventually, these would be two of the most important contributions the Russians would make to the International Space Station partnership.
In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration sought to reduce U.S.-Soviet tensions, and launched a major effort to reach a strategic arms limitation breakthrough, as well as new cooperation in space. In 1970, during a meeting with Keldysh, U.S. Academy of Sciences President Philip Handler mentioned an American movie starring Gregory Peck and Gene Hackman called Marooned, in which Soviet cosmonauts helped rescue three U.S. astronauts stranded in Earth orbit. Handler suggested the United States and U.S.S.R. develop a mutually com-patible docking system that would make possible such rescues, as well as non-emergency space dock-ings. This imaginary movie scenario touched a chord within space communities on both sides, which already had experienced emergency situations in real life. Talks led to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project docking mission of 1975, which developed compatible rendezvous and docking systems still in use today, and the establishment of a few topical working groups in different space science and applications disciplines.
Implementation of Apollo-Soyuz cooperation was dictated by the political will of the two countries’ political leadership. The cooperation presented a serious management challenge for both sides, given the overall lack of compatibility between the two space programs. NASA had to work with a counterpart that could not even be clearly identified. The Ministry of General Machine Building was still shrouded in secrecy and Soviet authorities instructed the Academy of Sciences to act as a cover for all activities during Apollo-Soyuz. Soviet industry experts had to introduce themselves as employees of the Institute of Space Research and military officers from Soviet Space Command changed into civilian clothes while insisting that the Soviet academy administered the launch site in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
The huge Soviet space military-industrial “iceberg” at that time could find only a tiny place at the tip of this colossus to deal with foreign visitors. Even if the Institute of Space Research was unable from a practical standpoint to serve as the sole counterpart to NASA’s Apollo team, we were given instructions to at least pretend. We had to puff up our chests and represent the heart of the Soviet space program while it was clear to everyone that we were nothing but a bunch of scientists – the poor relatives of the rich space czars.
Well before the critical moments of the Apollo-Soyuz project when the crowds of American participants went to visit the manned flights control center in the Moscow suburb of Kaliningrad and the Soyuz launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, our authorities issued a long and detailed secret questionnaire. It suggested the appropriate answers to hundreds of questions that might be asked by the “nosy Americans.” The reading of this questionnaire at a board of directors meeting brought great fun and pride to us. These were some of the questions:

“The imaginary American asks at the control center of Kaliningrad, ‘Who is essentially running this installation?’ Or a similar question at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where military servicemen would have most probably just changed their uniforms for civilian clothes: ‘Who is responsible for supervising and running this Cosmodrome?’ We were very excited to respond to these queries. The recommended answer was always ‘the Institute of Space Research and academician Sagdeev.’”

I felt like the Marquis de Carabas from Charles Perrault’s fairy tale, Puss in Boots – the apparent “owner of all the territory the eye could see.”
Despite this artifice, the docking in orbit in July 1975 was a rare and dramatic display of U.S.-Soviet friendliness during the depths of the Cold War. Leonid Brezhnev and President Gerald Ford exchanged messages of friendship and congratulations. This was to be the last dramatic international handshake in space for years to come. Soon after the flight, both sides met to discuss potential follow-on space projects and agreed to establish a special bilateral working group. I chaired the Soviet group and worked with NASA’s Charles Kennel on a scenario in which a specialized science module, a blend of Russian and American station designs, could be delivered to orbit by the U.S. space shuttle. Unfortunately, politics intervened again. Incoming President Jimmy Carter was concerned by congressional charges that the Soviets had obtained valuable U.S. technology during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. By late 1978, the Carter administration had ended discussions on additional cooperation with the Soviets. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, any hope of significant cooperation in space was gone. The United States pursued cooperation with Europe through projects such as a Spacelab module that could ride aboard the space shuttle, while the Soviets maintained their focus on flying the manned Salyut space stations.
On the planetary exploration front, we were quite impressed by the successes of the Mars Viking missions and the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and the outer limits of the solar system. At the same time the principal Soviet robotic missions were repeatedly directed toward Venus.
Every year as director of the Soviet Space Research Institute, I had to report on the completion of each important mission to a very large audience in Moscow at the Polytechnic Museum, which is a counterpart to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Each time, while learning about the new steps in a deeper penetration into the mysteries of Venus, my audience would ask, “While we keep sending spacecraft to Venus only, the American spacecraft visit Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn and so on. Why couldn’t we have such projects?”
“You know,” I responded, “we have a silent gentleman’s agreement to share responsibilities in space. While the Americans are doing wide-range reconnaissance in the solar system, we are carrying on an intensive study of Venus, just as if that planet were declared the planetary test range of our space science.” At another meeting, while reporting on the latest Venera spacecraft landing on the surface of Venus, I had to confront the same questions. This time, I was literally bewildered and without much thinking, immediately answered the question of why Americans do such and such:
“Because they are sons of bitches,” I replied.
For several minutes, the audience gave a standing ovation. It was clear they were applauding the Americans and their space program, which had captured the imagination of the Soviets, despite the attempts of our official propaganda to undermine the achievements of those “sons of bitches.”
Nevertheless, the Soviet robotic space program advanced by learning from and adapting to U.S. achievements. Anticipating the success of the U.S. Viking mission, the Soviet Academy of Sciences decided to abandon Mars as a priority and see how the American program would develop. The open and predictable nature of the U.S. space program gave Soviet scientists an opportunity to find their own niche with realistic projects that would have a scientific impact and avoid direct competition.
Our Venera program to Venus was quite successful. Following simplistic probes in the late 1960s, we managed to deliver sophisticated hardware to the planet’s surface in 1975 and send back panoramic pictures. Because the United States and U.S.S.R. agreed to share the results of NASA’s Pioneer Venus mission in 1978 and the Soviet Venera missions, scientists and space experts on both sides placed enormous symbolic and scientific value on the results of these joint efforts.
U.S.-Soviet cooperation in life sciences and biomedical research also took root in the 1970s. In 1977, seven U.S. biological experiments or medical devices flew aboard the Soviet Cosmos 936 mission, which also carried experiments from France and a number of Soviet bloc countries. This mission investigated the impact of long-duration spaceflight on the human body. A later Cosmos mission, Cosmos 1129 in 1979, carried 17 additional U.S. experiments and devices. And on May 6, 1979, the United States and U.S.S.R signed a treaty that provided for the deployment of an international system of emergency beacon receivers aboard satellites.
When Ronald Reagan was elected to the presidency in 1981, Cold War tensions were rising. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, imposition of martial law in Poland and NATO’s placement of Pershing rockets and cruise missiles in Europe – which was countered by hurried deployment of the Soviets’ SS-20 medium-range nuclear missiles – characterized the tenor of the period. In the midst of the Poland martial law crisis, the Reagan administration announced on Dec. 29, 1981, that it would allow the U.S.-Soviet space cooperation agreement, due for renewal in May 1982, to lapse. Mutual suspicion grew to the point that the Soviets began attributing potentially aggressive intentions to the Space Shuttle Program. It would be another 10 years before the conditions finally were ripe again for cooperation.
Nevertheless, in the absence of a formal intergovernmental agreement, the White House authorized low-profile cooperation on a case-by-case basis. Among the activities that continued were the satellite-based search and rescue efforts, which was based on the coordinated use of the U.S.-Canadian-French SARSAT and the Soviet COSPAS satellites to locate airplanes or ships in distress. By the mid-1980s, the effort had helped save more than 400 people. NASA also was allowed to continue working with the Soviet Union in space biology and medicine. As part of that effort, four U.S. medical devices were used in experiments on the 1983 Cosmos 1514 mission, which was devoted to primate research. That tacit format of interaction led by Soviet academicians Oleg Gazenko and Anatoly Grigoriev and NASA’s Dr. Arnauld Nicogossian, later would serve as an example for future cooperation between the Russian space station Mir and space shuttle programs and on the International Space Station. Meanwhile, exchanges of planetary data continued, but discussions of future cooperation in planetary exploration were cancelled.
The U.S. side was pragmatic about keeping up its contacts with Soviet scientists during these times times of political tensions. Regular consultations on space science-related issues, for example, were carried out through a channel between the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Americans were keenly interested in learning about the effects of long-duration flights on the human body – an area where the Soviets enjoyed a monopoly during NASA’s six-year hiatus in human spaceflight from 1975-1981.
In addition to these cooperative activities, Soviet and American space scientists regularly met at Committee on Space Research sessions. Aerospace engineers and officials from industry also maintained a similar engagement under the umbrella of the International Astronautical Federation.
During what many would consider the coldest period of bilateral relations in the early 1980s, these contacts produced a very special cooperative project that sought to explore Halley’s comet. The United States and U.S.S.R. both participated in the Interagency Consultative Group, which was set up in 1981 to bring together space and ground-based studies of the comet during its 1986 passage through the inner solar system.
After deciding not to send a spacecraft to view the comet, the United States agreed to play a supporting role, which involved providing ground-based observation data on the comet. This data was used to support the parallel Soviet Vega 1, Vega 2 and European Space Agency Giotto missions. The success of the encounter with the comet was to be critically dependent on precise navigation. Scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, suggested a brilliant technical scenario for the Vega and Giotto spacecraft to use at the approach to the comet. This had to be done a few days prior to the arrival of Giotto in order to help it home in on the celestial whereabouts of the ultimate target: the comet’s elusive nucleus. The whole procedure required close cooperation in real time. NASA’s Deep Space Network was given all of the necessary parameters from the Soviet spacecraft communications systems, then both sides performed pre-flight calibration tests of the hardware. This helped Giotto navigate much closer to the comet’s nucleus, providing scientists with outstanding data and producing some of the most awe-inspiring video footage ever taken in space. Several months before, when the Soviet Vega spacecraft had to release meteorological ballons in the atmosphere of Venus, the Deep Space Network played a crucial role in getting the first direct signals from these balloons and continued to track them as they were buffeted by Venus’ unusual atmospheric circulation.
Ironically, such successes were achieved despite continued chilly relations between the two governments. Several private groups, however, worked to keep U.S.-Soviet space ties alive. Among them was the new Planetary Society, which was created in 1979 by well-known astronomer Carl Sagan, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Director Bruce Murray, and their associate, physicist Louis Friedman. After its founding in 1985, the Association of Space Explorers, composed of people who had flown in space, also became an important forum for discussions on the benefits of U.S.-Soviet cooperation in human spaceflight. These efforts would provide a powerful impetus for getting stalled U.S.-Soviet space cooperation back on track.
Not long after Ronald Reagan was elected president, NASA urged him to approve a space station to rival the Soviet station program. In his January 1984 State of the Union address, Reagan announced he was directing NASA to “develop a permanently manned space station … within the decade” and “invite other countries to participate.” Peggy Finarelli, a senior official in NASA’s international office at the time, recalled that Reagan’s approval of what became known as Space Station Freedom was “a leadership issue very much in the context of the Cold War. We were challenging the Soviets in the high ground of space. We had to say that Freedom would be bigger and better than the Soviet space station.” The original estimate was that Freedom would cost about $8 billion. It was envisioned to be in orbit by 1992 in order to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America.
While the Soviets were not invited to join the Freedom project, the Reagan administration indicated its willingness to resume space cooperation with the U.S.S.R. prior to the 1984 State of the Union address. Only days before the speech, the administration privately suggested to Moscow a simulated space rescue demonstration mission in which U.S. astronauts from the space shuttle would assist Soviet cosmonauts aboard a Salyut station. Both privately and publicly, the Soviet response was cool, because of the perceived asymmetry of a mission in which the Soviet crew was in trouble and the U.S. crew would act as rescuers.
The Soviet government also revived the notion from the Khrushchev era that space cooperation would be possible only if there were progress in space arms control. The primary point of contention was the Reagan administration’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, which had been announced in March 1983. From the start of the Reagan administration, however, pressure for cooperation in space had been mounting. For example, Sen. “Spark” Matsunaga from Hawaii was among those warning of the dangers of weaponizing space and calling for an “internationally developed space station as an alternative.”
The U.S. Senate issued a more formal call for renewal of U.S.-Soviet space cooperation with passage of Joint Resolution 236 on Oct. 10, 1984. President Reagan signed the resolution on Oct. 30, noting U.S. readiness “to work with the Soviets on cooperation in space in pro-grams which are mutually beneficial and productive.”
When Mikhail Gorbachev emerged as the Soviet leader in 1985, Reagan thought he had found a willing partner. Gorbachev was interested in reducing the Soviet defense budget, and with the so-called Euromissile issue still unresolved, his government quickly signaled its readiness for a new round of arms control negotiations with the United States. When Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva that November to discuss arms control, they also signed an agreement on scientific cooperation. Once again, cooperation was symbolic of a thaw in the Cold War. However, Gorbachev still expressed strong Soviet opposition to the Strategic Defense Initiative and space was not included in the agreement. The Soviets had linked space cooperation to a demand that the United States abandon its plans for the initiative altogether.
Only three months after the Geneva summit, a tragedy occurred that would set the U.S. space program back several years – the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Little noticed at the time was a diplomatic breakthrough that occurred only a few weeks after the Challenger accident. On Feb. 20, 1986, the Soviets launched the first of six modules that eventually would comprise the Mir space station, and in the wake of the Challenger accident and the launch of Mir, the Kremlin finally agreed to decouple non-military space issues from the Strategic Defense Initiative. The United States and the Soviet Union subsequently signed a five-year agreement on space cooperation in April 1987. A number of joint scientific projects were agreed to, although there was no mention of cooperation in human spaceflight. More importantly, in an exchange of letters between Gorbachev and Reagan the previous summer, the link between arms control progress and renewed space cooperation was dropped. This paved the way for both sides to take meaningful steps toward actual cooperation.
During their last Moscow summit in May 1988, Gorbachev invited Reagan to walk inside the Kremlin yard. Passing by impressive historic artifacts like the “Czar Cannon” that never fired, and the “Czar Bell,” that never tolled, the last Soviet president tried to lure his guest into agreeing to support a joint manned mission to Mars. Only time will tell if this project will come to pass or serve as another dead artifact of history.

Professor John Logsdon from George Washington University also contributed to this article.

New UN report reveals collaboration between Israel and Syrian rebels

The syrian ambassador to the UN has long complained of a Zionist conspiracy working with the Syrian rebels to overthrow President Bashar Assad.

Now, a report from the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) reveals that Israel has been working closely with Syrian rebels in the Golan Heights and have kept close contact over the past 18 months. The report was submitted to the UN Security Council at the beginning of the month.

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The documents show that Israel has been doing more than simply treating wounded Syrian civilians in hospitals. This and a few past reports have described transfer of unspecified supplies from Israel to the Syrian rebels, and sightings of IDF soldiers meeting with the Syrian opposition east of the green zone, as well as incidents when Israeli soldiers opened up the fence to allow Syrians through who did not appear to be injured.

At one point, a small tent city was erected around 300 meters away from the Israeli sector for about 70 families of Syrian deserters, the report said.

The Syrian army then sent a letter of complaint to UNDOF, warning them to evacuate the camp or it would be considered a target, and claiming that terrorists were using the camp to cross into Israel.

Israel’s health ministry says around 1,000 Syrians have received treatment in Golan hospitals, but maintains that only civilians are treated. The UNDOF report, on the other hand, says they have seen Israelis treating civilians as well as insurgents, including members of al-Qaida and Islamic State.

The report said UNDOF “observed at least 10 wounded persons being transferred by armed members of the opposition from the Bravo side across the cease-fire line.”

UNDOF has monitored the Golan Heights buffer zone between Israel and Syria since 1974. Six countries contributed to the 1,200-strong brigade.

UNDOF peacekeepers have been the target of kidnappings and attacks carried out by al-Qaida on the Syrian side since September, causing hundreds of troops to withdraw to across Israeli border.

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/New-UN-report-reveals-collaboration-between-Israel-and-Syrian-rebels-383926

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar

Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today's president

Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington

Saturday 25 September 2004 23.59 BST

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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.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

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The debate over Prescott Bush's behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the "Bush/Nazi" connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Remarkably, little of Bush's dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush's business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen's US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

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Tantalising

Bush was also on the board of at least one of the companies that formed part of a multinational network of front companies to allow Thyssen to move assets around the world.

Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal company in Germany and grew rich from Hitler's efforts to re-arm between the two world wars. One of the pillars in Thyssen's international corporate web, UBC, worked exclusively for, and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands. More tantalising are Bush's links to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC), based in mineral rich Silesia on the German-Polish border. During the war, the company made use of Nazi slave labour from the concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The ownership of CSSC changed hands several times in the 1930s, but documents from the US National Archive declassified last year link Bush to CSSC, although it is not clear if he and UBC were still involved in the company when Thyssen's American assets were seized in 1942.

Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush's involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland.

The first set of files, the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress, show that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen.

The second set of papers, which are in the National Archives, are contained in vesting order number 248 which records the seizure of the company assets. What these files show is that on October 20 1942 the alien property custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director. Having gone through the books of the bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. By November, the Silesian-American Company, another of Prescott Bush's ventures, had also been seized.

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The third set of documents, also at the National Archives, are contained in the files on IG Farben, who was prosecuted for war crimes.

A report issued by the Office of Alien Property Custodian in 1942 stated of the companies that "since 1939, these (steel and mining) properties have been in possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country's war effort".

Prescott Bush, a 6ft 4in charmer with a rich singing voice, was the founder of the Bush political dynasty and was once considered a potential presidential candidate himself. Like his son, George, and grandson, George W, he went to Yale where he was, again like his descendants, a member of the secretive and influential Skull and Bones student society. He was an artillery captain in the first world war and married Dorothy Walker, the daughter of George Herbert Walker, in 1921.

In 1924, his father-in-law, a well-known St Louis investment banker, helped set him up in business in New York with Averill Harriman, the wealthy son of railroad magnate E H Harriman in New York, who had gone into banking.

One of the first jobs Walker gave Bush was to manage UBC. Bush was a founding member of the bank and the incorporation documents, which list him as one of seven directors, show he owned one share in UBC worth $125.

The bank was set up by Harriman and Bush's father-in-law to provide a US bank for the Thyssens, Germany's most powerful industrial family.

August Thyssen, the founder of the dynasty had been a major contributor to Germany's first world war effort and in the 1920s, he and his sons Fritz and Heinrich established a network of overseas banks and companies so their assets and money could be whisked offshore if threatened again.

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By the time Fritz Thyssen inherited the business empire in 1926, Germany's economic recovery was faltering. After hearing Adolf Hitler speak, Thyssen became mesmerised by the young firebrand. He joined the Nazi party in December 1931 and admits backing Hitler in his autobiography, I Paid Hitler, when the National Socialists were still a radical fringe party. He stepped in several times to bail out the struggling party: in 1928 Thyssen had bought the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse, in Munich, which Hitler converted into the Brown House, the headquarters of the Nazi party. The money came from another Thyssen overseas institution, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvarrt in Rotterdam.

By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman, which claimed to be the world's largest private investment bank, and UBC had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler's build-up to war.

Between 1931 and 1933 UBC bought more than $8m worth of gold, of which $3m was shipped abroad. According to documents seen by the Guardian, after UBC was set up it transferred $2m to BBH accounts and between 1924 and 1940 the assets of UBC hovered around $3m, dropping to $1m only on a few occasions.

In 1941, Thyssen fled Germany after falling out with Hitler but he was captured in France and detained for the remainder of the war.

There was nothing illegal in doing business with the Thyssens throughout the 1930s and many of America's best-known business names invested heavily in the German economic recovery. However, everything changed after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Even then it could be argued that BBH was within its rights continuing business relations with the Thyssens until the end of 1941 as the US was still technically neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor. The trouble started on July 30 1942 when the New York Herald-Tribune ran an article entitled "Hitler's Angel Has $3m in US Bank". UBC's huge gold purchases had raised suspicions that the bank was in fact a "secret nest egg" hidden in New York for Thyssen and other Nazi bigwigs. The Alien Property Commission (APC) launched an investigation.

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There is no dispute over the fact that the US government seized a string of assets controlled by BBH - including UBC and SAC - in the autumn of 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy act. What is in dispute is if Harriman, Walker and Bush did more than own these companies on paper.

Erwin May, a treasury attache and officer for the department of investigation in the APC, was assigned to look into UBC's business. The first fact to emerge was that Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush and the other directors didn't actually own their shares in UBC but merely held them on behalf of Bank voor Handel. Strangely, no one seemed to know who owned the Rotterdam-based bank, including UBC's president.

May wrote in his report of August 16 1941: "Union Banking Corporation, incorporated August 4 1924, is wholly owned by the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My investigation has produced no evidence as to the ownership of the Dutch bank. Mr Cornelis [sic] Lievense, president of UBC, claims no knowledge as to the ownership of the Bank voor Handel but believes it possible that Baron Heinrich Thyssen, brother of Fritz Thyssen, may own a substantial interest."

May cleared the bank of holding a golden nest egg for the Nazi leaders but went on to describe a network of companies spreading out from UBC across Europe, America and Canada, and how money from voor Handel travelled to these companies through UBC.

By September May had traced the origins of the non-American board members and found that Dutchman HJ Kouwenhoven - who met with Harriman in 1924 to set up UBC - had several other jobs: in addition to being the managing director of voor Handel he was also the director of the August Thyssen bank in Berlin and a director of Fritz Thyssen's Union Steel Works, the holding company that controlled Thyssen's steel and coal mine empire in Germany.

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Within a few weeks, Homer Jones, the chief of the APC investigation and research division sent a memo to the executive committee of APC recommending the US government vest UBC and its assets. Jones named the directors of the bank in the memo, including Prescott Bush's name, and wrote: "Said stock is held by the above named individuals, however, solely as nominees for the Bank voor Handel, Rotterdam, Holland, which is owned by one or more of the Thyssen family, nationals of Germany and Hungary. The 4,000 shares hereinbefore set out are therefore beneficially owned and help for the interests of enemy nationals, and are vestible by the APC," according to the memo from the National Archives seen by the Guardian.

Red-handed

Jones recommended that the assets be liquidated for the benefit of the government, but instead UBC was maintained intact and eventually returned to the American shareholders after the war. Some claim that Bush sold his share in UBC after the war for $1.5m - a huge amount of money at the time - but there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. No further action was ever taken nor was the investigation continued, despite the fact UBC was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family eight months after America had entered the war and that this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler's rise to power.

The most tantalising part of the story remains shrouded in mystery: the connection, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC) and Auschwitz.

Thyssen's partner in United Steel Works, which had coal mines and steel plants across the region, was Friedrich Flick, another steel magnate who also owned part of IG Farben, the powerful German chemical company.

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Flick's plants in Poland made heavy use of slave labour from the concentration camps in Poland. According to a New York Times article published in March 18 1934 Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while "American interests" held the rest.

The US National Archive documents show that BBH's involvement with CSSC was more than simply holding the shares in the mid-1930s. Bush's friend and fellow "bonesman" Knight Woolley, another partner at BBH, wrote to Averill Harriman in January 1933 warning of problems with CSSC after the Poles started their drive to nationalise the plant. "The Consolidated Silesian Steel Company situation has become increasingly complicated, and I have accordingly brought in Sullivan and Cromwell, in order to be sure that our interests are protected," wrote Knight. "After studying the situation Foster Dulles is insisting that their man in Berlin get into the picture and obtain the information which the directors here should have. You will recall that Foster is a director and he is particularly anxious to be certain that there is no liability attaching to the American directors."

But the ownership of the CSSC between 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland and 1942 when the US government vested UBC and SAC is not clear.

"SAC held coal mines and definitely owned CSSC between 1934 and 1935, but when SAC was vested there was no trace of CSSC. All concrete evidence of its ownership disappears after 1935 and there are only a few traces in 1938 and 1939," says Eva Schweitzer, the journalist and author whose book, America and the Holocaust, is published next month.

Silesia was quickly made part of the German Reich after the invasion, but while Polish factories were seized by the Nazis, those belonging to the still neutral Americans (and some other nationals) were treated more carefully as Hitler was still hoping to persuade the US to at least sit out the war as a neutral country. Schweitzer says American interests were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The Nazis bought some out, but not others.

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The two Holocaust survivors suing the US government and the Bush family for a total of $40bn in compensation claim both materially benefited from Auschwitz slave labour during the second world war.

Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, began a class action in America in 2001, but the case was thrown out by Judge Rosemary Collier on the grounds that the government cannot be held liable under the principle of "state sovereignty".

Jan Lissmann, one of the lawyers for the survivors, said: "President Bush withdrew President Bill Clinton's signature from the treaty [that founded the court] not only to protect Americans, but also to protect himself and his family."

Lissmann argues that genocide-related cases are covered by international law, which does hold governments accountable for their actions. He claims the ruling was invalid as no hearing took place.

In their claims, Mr Goldstein and Mr Gingold, honorary chairman of the League of Anti-fascists, suggest the Americans were aware of what was happening at Auschwitz and should have bombed the camp.

The lawyers also filed a motion in The Hague asking for an opinion on whether state sovereignty is a valid reason for refusing to hear their case. A ruling is expected within a month.

The petition to The Hague states: "From April 1944 on, the American Air Force could have destroyed the camp with air raids, as well as the railway bridges and railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. The murder of about 400,000 Hungarian Holocaust victims could have been prevented."

The case is built around a January 22 1944 executive order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt calling on the government to take all measures to rescue the European Jews. The lawyers claim the order was ignored because of pressure brought by a group of big American companies, including BBH, where Prescott Bush was a director.

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Lissmann said: "If we have a positive ruling from the court it will cause [president] Bush huge problems and make him personally liable to pay compensation."

The US government and the Bush family deny all the claims against them.

In addition to Eva Schweitzer's book, two other books are about to be published that raise the subject of Prescott Bush's business history. The author of the second book, to be published next year, John Loftus, is a former US attorney who prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the 70s. Now living in St Petersburg, Florida and earning his living as a security commentator for Fox News and ABC radio, Loftus is working on a novel which uses some of the material he has uncovered on Bush. Loftus stressed that what Prescott Bush was involved in was just what many other American and British businessmen were doing at the time.

"You can't blame Bush for what his grandfather did any more than you can blame Jack Kennedy for what his father did - bought Nazi stocks - but what is important is the cover-up, how it could have gone on so successfully for half a century, and does that have implications for us today?" he said.

"This was the mechanism by which Hitler was funded to come to power, this was the mechanism by which the Third Reich's defence industry was re-armed, this was the mechanism by which Nazi profits were repatriated back to the American owners, this was the mechanism by which investigations into the financial laundering of the Third Reich were blunted," said Loftus, who is vice-chairman of the Holocaust Museum in St Petersburg.

"The Union Banking Corporation was a holding company for the Nazis, for Fritz Thyssen," said Loftus. "At various times, the Bush family has tried to spin it, saying they were owned by a Dutch bank and it wasn't until the Nazis took over Holland that they realised that now the Nazis controlled the apparent company and that is why the Bush supporters claim when the war was over they got their money back. Both the American treasury investigations and the intelligence investigations in Europe completely bely that, it's absolute horseshit. They always knew who the ultimate beneficiaries were."

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"There is no one left alive who could be prosecuted but they did get away with it," said Loftus. "As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averill Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany."

Loftus said Prescott Bush must have been aware of what was happening in Germany at the time. "My take on him was that he was a not terribly successful in-law who did what Herbert Walker told him to. Walker and Harriman were the two evil geniuses, they didn't care about the Nazis any more than they cared about their investments with the Bolsheviks."

What is also at issue is how much money Bush made from his involvement. His supporters suggest that he had one token share. Loftus disputes this, citing sources in "the banking and intelligence communities" and suggesting that the Bush family, through George Herbert Walker and Prescott, got $1.5m out of the involvement. There is, however, no paper trail to this sum.

The third person going into print on the subject is John Buchanan, 54, a Miami-based magazine journalist who started examining the files while working on a screenplay. Last year, Buchanan published his findings in the venerable but small-circulation New Hampshire Gazette under the headline "Documents in National Archives Prove George Bush's Grandfather Traded With the Nazis - Even After Pearl Harbor". He expands on this in his book to be published next month - Fixing America: Breaking the Stranglehold of Corporate Rule, Big Media and the Religious Right.

In the article, Buchanan, who has worked mainly in the trade and music press with a spell as a muckraking reporter in Miami, claimed that "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".

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Buchanan suffers from hypermania, a form of manic depression, and when he found himself rebuffed in his initial efforts to interest the media, he responded with a series of threats against the journalists and media outlets that had spurned him. The threats, contained in e-mails, suggested that he would expose the journalists as "traitors to the truth".

Unsurprisingly, he soon had difficulty getting his calls returned. Most seriously, he faced aggravated stalking charges in Miami, in connection with a man with whom he had fallen out over the best way to publicise his findings. The charges were dropped last month.

Biography

Buchanan said he regretted his behaviour had damaged his credibility but his main aim was to secure publicity for the story. Both Loftus and Schweitzer say Buchanan has come up with previously undisclosed documentation.

The Bush family have largely responded with no comment to any reference to Prescott Bush. Brown Brothers Harriman also declined to comment.

The Bush family recently approved a flattering biography of Prescott Bush entitled Duty, Honour, Country by Mickey Herskowitz. The publishers, Rutledge Hill Press, promised the book would "deal honestly with Prescott Bush's alleged business relationships with Nazi industrialists and other accusations".

In fact, the allegations are dealt with in less than two pages. The book refers to the Herald-Tribune story by saying that "a person of less established ethics would have panicked ... Bush and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman informed the government regulators that the account, opened in the late 1930s, was 'an unpaid courtesy for a client' ... Prescott Bush acted quickly and openly on behalf of the firm, served well by a reputation that had never been compromised. He made available all records and all documents. Viewed six decades later in the era of serial corporate scandals and shattered careers, he received what can be viewed as the ultimate clean bill."

The Prescott Bush story has been condemned by both conservatives and some liberals as having nothing to do with the current president. It has also been suggested that Prescott Bush had little to do with Averill Harriman and that the two men opposed each other politically.

However, documents from the Harriman papers include a flattering wartime profile of Harriman in the New York Journal American and next to it in the files is a letter to the financial editor of that paper from Prescott Bush congratulating the paper for running the profile. He added that Harriman's "performance and his whole attitude has been a source of inspiration and pride to his partners and his friends".

The Anti-Defamation League in the US is supportive of Prescott Bush and the Bush family. In a statement last year they said that "rumours about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush ... have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated ... Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser."

However, one of the country's oldest Jewish publications, the Jewish Advocate, has aired the controversy in detail.

More than 60 years after Prescott Bush came briefly under scrutiny at the time of a faraway war, his grandson is facing a different kind of scrutiny but one underpinned by the same perception that, for some people, war can be a profitable business.