Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathizer.

[cali]

47. So was Averell Harriman a Nazi? If Prescott was than surely he was too, right?

is that none of those who go on about it and point to his ties to Brown Brothers Harriman, care to follow the Harriman part of the story.

While Averell Harriman served as Senior Partner of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., Harriman Bank was the main Wall Street connection for German companies and the varied U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen, who had been an early financial backer of the Nazi party until 1938, but who by 1939 had fled Germany and was bitterly denouncing Adolf Hitler. Under the Trading With the Enemy Act (enacted 6 October 1917), business transactions for profit with Nazi Germany were illegal when Hitler declared war on the United States. On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City.[4]

The Harriman business interests seized under the act in October and November 1942 included:[citation needed]

Union Banking Corporation (UBC) (from Thyssen and Brown Brothers Harriman)
Holland-American Trading Corporation (from Harriman)
Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation (from Harriman)
Silesian-American Corporation (this company was partially owned by a German entity; during the war the Germans tried to take the full control of Silesian-American. In response to that, American government seized German owned minority shares in the company, leaving the U.S. partners to carry on the portion of the business in the United States.)

The assets were held by the government for the duration of the war, then returned afterward; UBC was dissolved in 1951.
World War II diplomacy

Harriman was a candidate for the Democratic Presidential Nomination in 1952, and again in 1956 when he was endorsed by Truman but lost (both times) to Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson. Harriman was generally considered to be on the left or liberal wing of the Democratic party, hence his losing out to the more moderate Stevenson.

His presidential ambitions defeated, Harriman became a widely respected elder statesman of the party. In January 1961, he was appointed Ambassador at Large in the Kennedy administration, a position he held until November, when he became Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. In December 1961, Anatoliy Golitsyn defected from the Soviet Union and accused Harriman of being a Soviet spy, but his claims were dismissed by the CIA and Harriman remained in his position until April 1963, when he became Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. He retained that position through the transition to the Lyndon Johnson administration until March 1965 when he again became Ambassador at Large. He held that position for the remainder of Johnson's presidency. Harriman was the chief U.S. negotiator at the Paris peace talks on Vietnam.