Needless to say, the irony was totally lost on George W. Bush when, on May 15, 2008, he stood before the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding and, by resort to the ‘some-seem-to-believe’ ploy, mocked Democratic presidential frontrunner Barack Obama for wanting to talk directly to America’s adversaries. He called it "the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

Laray Polk, writing in CounterPunch magazine, noted, "By making remote inferences with a highly charged historical reference on a significant day in a significant location, one gets the most out of implied meaning. While some may view President Bush’s politically motivated references to a violent historic past as appropriate for the times, others view such staged manipulation of circumstance and name-calling as disrespectful to all people anywhere who have suffered the tyranny and torment of the Nazi regime."

The Bush family is, in fact, guilty of far more than mere appeasement. Archival records prove that George’s grandfather and other members of his family actually aided and abetted the Nazis for profit, providing banking and industrial assistance to the young Adolf Hitler as he built Germany’s war machine in the 1930s.

Here’s what Max Wallace wrote in The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich:

"Fortunately for Bush, who was later elected a United States senator, his name never surfaced in the news when his Union Banking shares were seized by the US government. The only media reference related to the seizure was a brief 1944 item in the New York Times announcing that ‘The Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway.’ The article neglected to point out that the company’s assets had been seized under the Trading With the Enemy Act (TWEA) or that 120 Broadway was the address of the US Alien Property Custodian. If the news had been publicized, it might well have derailed Bush’s political career as well as the future presidential aspirations of both his son and grandson."

Robert Parry, author of Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, has spent much time and effort in recent years poring over archival records from the pre-war era that had been assembled, drawing from the Harriman family papers at the Library of Congress, documents at the National Archives, and records from war-crimes trials after Germany’s surrender.

In a recent article in Consortium News titled ‘The Bushes and Hitler’s Appeasement’ – written following the President’s May 15 address to the Israeli Knesset - Parry claims the archival evidence now makes clear that Prescott Bush, George’s grandfather, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from, and collaborated with, key financial backers of Nazi Germany.

That business relationship had continued after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and even after Germany declared war on the United States following Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It stopped only when the US government seized assets of Bush-connected companies in late 1942 under the TWEA.

Parry suggested that in his speech in Israel, Bush might have noted that his family’s wealth, which fueled his own political rise, was partly derived from Nazi collaboration and possibly from slave labour provided by Auschwitz and other concentration camps. "A more honest speech might have contained an apology to the Jewish people from a leading son of the Bush family for letting its greed contribute to Nazi power and to the horrors of the Holocaust."

President Bush apparently saw no reason to remind the world of a dark chapter from the family history, says Parry. "After all, those ugly facts mostly disappeared from public consciousness soon after World War II."

The story goes back more than a century to the emergence of Samuel Bush, George W. Bush’s great-grandfather, as a key manager for a set of powerful American business families, including the Rockefellers and the Harrimans. Then, in 1919, investment banker George Herbert Walker teamed up with Averell Harriman, scion to a railroad fortune, to found a new investment banking firm, W.A. Harriman Company.

In 1921, Walker’s favourite daughter, Dorothy, married Samuel Bush’s son Prescott, a young and handsome Yale graduate with the easy grace of one born into the comfortable yet competitive world of upper-crust contacts. In 1924, Dorothy gave birth to George Herbert Walker Bush, aka Papa Bush. In 1926, father-in-law Walker took Prescott Bush into the Harriman banking firm as a vice-president.

The archival records show that by the mid-Thirties, Prescott Bush had become a managing partner at the merged firm of Brown Brothers Harriman, a firm which served as the US financial service arm for German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, an admirer of Adolf Hitler since the 1920s and an early funder of the Nazi Party he had joined in 1931 when it was still a fringe organization. He helped bail the struggling party out with financial help, even providing its headquarters building in Munich.

Meanwhile, Averell Harriman had launched the Hamburg-Amerika line of steamships to facilitate the bank’s dealings with Germany, and made Prescott Bush a director. The ships delivered fuel, steel, coal, gold and money to Germany as Hitler consolidated his power and built his war machine.

Other evidence shows that Prescott Bush served as the director of the Union Banking Corp. of New York, which represented Thyssen’s interests in the United States. As a steel magnate, Thyssen was amassing a fortune as Hitler rearmed Germany. Documents also linked Bush to Thyssen’s Consolidated Silesian Steel Company, which was based in mineral-rich Silesia on the German-Polish border and exploited slave labour from Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

In 1941, Thyssen had a falling out with Hitler and fled to France where he was captured. Much of Thyssen’s empire went under the direct control of the Nazis, but even that did not shatter the business ties that existed with Prescott Bush and Harriman’s bank.

It wasn’t until August 1942 that newspaper stories disclosed the secretive ties between Union Banking Corp. and Nazi Germany. After an investigation, the US government seized the property of the Hamburg-Amerika line and moved against affiliates of the Union Banking Corp. In November 1942, the government seized the assets of the Silesian-American Corp.

For most public figures, allegations of trading with the enemy would have been a political kiss of death, notes Parry, "but the disclosures barely left a lipstick smudge on Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush and other business associates implicated in the Nazi business dealings."

Kevin Phillips, author of American Dynasty wrote, "Politically, the significance of these dealings – the great surprise – is that none of it seemed to matter much over the next decade or so. A few questions would be raised, but Democrat Averell Harriman would not be stopped from becoming federal mutual security administrator in 1951 or winning election as Governor of New York in 1954 . . . Nor would Republican Prescott Bush (who was elected Senator from Connecticut in 1952) and his presidential descendants be hurt in any of their future elections. Indeed, the quick dissipation of the Nazi financial scandal was only a portent of the Bush family’s future. Unlike politicians of lower classes, the Bushes seemed to travel in a bubble impervious to accusations of impropriety."