Business, U.S.-Third Reich
Well before the the 1941 Trading with the Enemy Act set legal prohibitions on trade with Axis nations, General Motors and Ford Motor Company disregarded antiNazi public sentiment and vigorously competed for Nazi military contracts.
In 1938 General Motors president Alfred Sloan publicly stated that as an international business, General Motors ought to conduct its international operations in purely business terms without consideration of the political ideologies or policies of nation-states. Referencing contemporary debate surrounding international relations with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, Sloan’s commentary reflected a general philosophy shared with Ford Motor Company executives of both political apathy and tacit support for the Nazi regime. Although General Motors and Ford executives were not the only prominent Americans supportive of Nazi Germany before the war, including such household names as Joseph Kennedy, Prescott Bush, and Charles Lindbergh, their corporate actions just prior to and during the war have been a source of recent legal and public inquiry. The story of General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and the Nazi authorities is not simply one of totalitarian coercion by a monolithic state but of complex motivations tempered by acts of consensual collaboration and corporate greed in adopting a “business as usual” attitude under the Third Reich.Like many industrialists worldwide, executives at General Motors were generally intrigued with Hitler and supportive of his economic policies. Throughout the 1930s, it was not uncommon for top General Motors executives like Alfred Sloan, William Knudsen, or vice presidents James Mooney and Graeme Howard to make public statements in support of Hitler and Nazi Germany. After a trip to Germany in 1933, Knudsen referred to the Third Reich as one of the great miracles of the twentieth century.
In 1938 James Mooney, along with Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Benito Mussolini, received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest award available to foreigners to reward invaluable service to the Third Reich. In 1940 Howard wrote a book entitled America and a New World Order that supported Hitler’s corporate-friendly economic policies; a piece that placed Howard on an FBI surveillance list throughout the war.General Motors played an important role in prewar military production and the sharing of advanced technologies with the Third Reich through its German subsidiary, Adam Opel AG. As consumer spending decreased before the war, General Motors sought new production markets through military contracts. In 1935 the Wehrmacht encouraged General Motors to open a new truck plant in Brandenburg, producing the “Opel Blitz” truck exclusively for the German armed forces. The Brandenburg plant had an annual production capacity of 25,000 trucks for the Nazi military. In order to protect General Motors’ investments from “nationalization” by the Nazis and to keep profits up, James Mooney negotiated a deal with the Nazi authorities in Berlin to convert all Opel production to war materials in 1940. Outside of basic production before the war, General Motors technologies became vital to Nazi military strategy. In a 1977 interview with Bradford Snell, Hitler’s minister for armaments Albert Speer asserted that without the synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors to IG Farben at the request of the Nazi regime, Germany would never have even considered invading Poland.
Henry Ford, inspired by the fabricated Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, purchased a small newspaper in 1918 called the Dearborn Independent and set aside $10 million to finance his public exposure of a “Jewish plot against humanity.” Faced with consumer boycotts and a pending lawsuit for slander, Ford discontinued the publication of his newspaper in 1922 and focused upon spreading his antisemitic tracts through the international publication of his book, The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem. Ford’s book, a piece still praised and published by antisemites worldwide on the Internet, also caught the attention of men like Adolf Hitler, who came to deeply respect and admire Ford as an industrialist and fellow antisemite.
The Nazi Party distributed a German translation of Ford’s book and Hitler himself kept a large photo of Ford in his Munich office, stating once in a 1931 interview that he considered Henry Ford to be his personal inspiration. During the Nuremberg trials Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth program, stated he developed his antisemitic views at the age of seventeen not from reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Battle), but from Ford’s The International Jew.In 1938 Ford Motor Company’s German subsidiary Ford-Werke AG began producing troop transport trucks for the German military. General Motors had faced certain challenges under the Third Reich due to the foreign ownership of Adam Opel AG, whereas the Opel company had been manufacturing in Germany since 1862 and had a long-standing German identity. Since Ford-Werke AG was an American-built and -owned company, Ford felt threatened by the nationalist sentiment of the German public and Nazi authorities and felt compelled to convert its production facilities to fulfill military contracts. In order to protect its subsidiary, Ford forged closer bonds with the Nazi Party and IG Farben, each corporation owning large shares in each other’s foreign subsidiaries to protect their investments from state interference or liquidation. This process of “Germanizing” the business came in the late 1930s under direction from Ford management in Dearborn, showing loyalty to the production needs of Hitler’s government while maintaining a majority American ownership. Continued American involvement had a dual benefit for Ford and the Nazis, allowing the Nazis to exploit Ford technologies and resources while Ford exerted control and influence on its subsidiaries in occupied territories in the event of Nazi European expansion.
Although both General Motors and Ford Motor Company claim to have played a vital role to the Allied powers in armament production throughout the war, boasting to be “the arsenal of democracy,” it is clear that neither corporation can claim a guilt-free record in their relations with the Third Reich.
As Allied troops began their push through western Europe, they were astonished when they encountered an enemy that was driving trucks and jeeps built by General Motors and Ford. Once German cities like Cologne were liberated, Allied soldiers found large numbers of slave laborers residing at a Ford-Werke plant that had been virtually untouched by Allied bombing raids that had leveled the rest of the city. After Europe began its postwar path to economic recovery and restored consumer spending, General Motors and Ford Motor Company assumed a leading and profitable role in the European automotive market, while many of their prewar competitors faded into obscurity.Joel Lewis
See also Ford, Henry Augustus; Lindbergh, Charles; World War II
References and Further Reading
Billstein, Reinhold, Karola Fings, Anita
Kugler, and Nicholas Levis. Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor in Germany during the Second World War. Ed. Nicholas Levis. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000.
Higham, Charles. Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi American Money Plot, 1933—1949.
New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1983.
Reich, Simon. The Fruits of Fascism: Postwar
Prosperity in Historical Perspective. London: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Turner, Henry A. German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.