Editor's Note: Max Wallace, journalist, Holocaust researcher and author of Who Killed Curt Kobain?, discusses his new book, The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of the Third Reich, (St. Martin's Press). In The American Axis, Mr. Wallace suggests that American industrialist, Henry Ford, and American hero and pilot, Charles Lindbergh, helped to spread anti-Semitism throughout the United States in the last century.

If Edsel Ford violated federal laws by continuing to do business with the Nazis after Pearl Harbor, he was not alone. In a small box that I discovered housed among the Trading With the Enemy files at the US National Archives, sits an explosive series of documents implicating another prominent American family in this serious crime. On October 20, 1942, ten months after the United States entered the Second World War, the US Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, issued Vesting Order 248 under the Trading With the Enemy Act, seizing all assets of the Union Banking Corporation of New York, which was being operated as a front for "enemy nationals." It amounted to corporate treason. According to a federal government investigation, Union Banking was not a bank at all, but a cloak operation, laundering money for Germany's powerful Thyssen family. The Thyssens were instrumental in financing Hitler's rise to power and had supplied the Nazi regime with much of the steel it needed to prosecute the war.

One of the partners of the Union Banking Corporation, the man who oversaw all investments on behalf of the Nazi-affiliated owners, happened to be Prescott Bush, grandfather of the current American president, George W. Bush. Through the connections of his father-in-law, Bert Walker (George W.'s maternal great-grandfather), who has been described by a US Justice Department investigator as "one of Hitler's most powerful financial supporters in the United States," Prescott Bush specialized in managing the investments for a number of German companies, many with extensive Nazi ties.

These included the North American operations of another Nazi front, the Hamburg-Amerika Line, which was directly linked to a network set up by IG Farben to smuggle agents, money and propaganda for Germany. According to a 1934 Congressional investigation, the Hamburg-Amerika line "subsidized a wide range of pro-Nazi propaganda efforts both in Germany and the United States." Both Walker and Bush were directors of a holding company, the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, that directly financed the line. Shortly before the government seized the assets of the Union Banking Corporation, in fact, it had also seized American-held assets of the Hamburg-Amerika Line under the Trading With the Enemy Act. A few weeks after the government seized Bush's shares in Union Banking, it seized the assets of three other Nazi front companies whose investments were handled by Bush — the Holland-American Trading Corporation, the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation and the Silesian-American Corporation. The paper trail indicated that the bulk of Prescott Bush's financial empire was being operated on behalf of Nazi Germany.

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