Henry Ford & Adolf Hitler relationship

[V2]

Does anyone here know of the relationship between Ford and Hitler?
was it purley platonic?or were their ideals very much the same? also would like to know about Ford Motor operations in Germany during this time? I've heard slave labor was used,also heard about the Ford Motor Co. being sued for reperations

[Invertedgc]

Ford's anti semitic views were well known by the time Hitler came to power, due to several public statements and the authoring of a book titled The International Jew, which built upon his articles and essays in papers such as the New York World in which he said "International financiers are behind all war. They are what is called the international Jew...the Jew is a real threat." Although Ford and Hitler developed their views at different times, their shared anti-semitic fascist ideology brought their professional relationship into more of a personal, though distant friendship. In fact Ford was "one of the few people singled out for praise in Mein Kampf." According to Charles Higham's book Trading With the Enemy a portrait of Ford also hung in Adolf Hitler's study in the Brown House in Munich, and stacks of The International Jew sat on a table in a hall outside the office available for visitors to take. Although I haven't heard this substantiated in other works, I also haven't researched the subject and have no reason to doubt the claims. Anyone who might be able to support or refute Higham's claim is welcomed to interject. Anyhow Ford remembered Hitler's birthday, and sent him 50,000RM annually.

Ford's personal connection with Hitler paid off and Ford initially avoided being absorbed into the Herman Goering Company in the 30's when the consolidation of industry occurred across Germany. Ford's business investment in Germany had begun in 1925, and by 1943 it had amounted to 1.9% of foreign investment with 8,549,000 million US dollars. April 20, 1938 was the last time that an American or British board member sat in on a meeting of Ford Werke until after the war, and starting in 1941 forced labor was used at the Cologne plant. Forced labor reached its peak in Cologne in 1944, and in August of that year 1,932 workers (37.1% of the workforce) were forced laborers, with a much smaller number being slave laborers. The following is taken directly from Ford's own report, "...shortly after concentration camp labor was made available to the automotive industry, 50 men from Buchenwald arrived at Ford Werke. At any given time from August 1944 through February 1945, about 50 or fewer Buchenwald prisoners worked at Ford Werke."

I would encourage you to read Charles Higham's Trading With the Enemy, as well as editors Nicosia and Huener's Business and Industry In Nazi Germany which contains Simon Reich's essay "Corporate Responsibility" that lists Ford's involvement in Nazi Germany and provided the statistics used in the second paragraph. Ford's report is also available online at http://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsourec ... /ford.html.

Hope this answers your question!

[AlifRafikKhan]

On July 30, 1938, on his seventy-fifth birthday, Henry Ford, dressed in an immaculate white suit with a red sash draped across his jacket, was photographed having the Grand Cross of the German Eagle pinned to his label by the Honorary vice-consul of the Third Reich in Detroit, Fritz Hailer.75 A year later, after Hitler's invasion of Poland, Ford confided to a young acquaintance, "There hasn't been a shot fired. The whole thing has just been made up by the Jew bankers."

In this photo, Henry Ford recieved the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, presented by Karl Kapp, German consul-general of Cleveland (left), and Fritz Hailer, German consul of Detroit (right)...

Two of the first recipients of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, right after Hitler created it, were the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and his son-in-law Count Ciano...

Source : http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-rroot540.html

[Dave Bender]

During the same time frame Ford Motor Company was building tank factories in the Soviet Union with the blessing of President FDR. It appears to me that Henry Ford was simply a good businessman.

[AlifRafikKhan]

Agree with you Dave, same thing with Rockefeller who also helped Hitler. The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz! A good article about this can be seen on : http://www.tetrahedron.org/articles/new ... ocide.html

[Cantankerous]

A January 2000 journal article by Simon Reich (whose last name is cognate with the German word reich, like the last name of retired Cuban American diplomat Otto Reich) provides valuable insights into how Hitler's rise to power affected Henry Ford's business interests in Germany:

In contrast, Ford had continual problems in Germany, fueled by growing German nationalism, from the time it established a presence in that country in 1925. (The German subsidiary was renamed Fordwerke in 1939.) For instance, when a new plant was constructed in Cologne in 1931, the business faced immediate criticism because its owners were Ford's American company and British subsidiary, most of its directors were foreigners, and its exports were limited. The advent of a Nazi government in 1933 only exacerbated Ford's problems with nationalist sentiments in Germany. The company became alarmed by slumping sales and responded by trying to placate the Nazi government. But it remained an isolated and marginalized business, despite Hitler's personal admiration for the anti-Semitism of Henry Ford (1863-1947) and the mass production techniques Ford had made famous. Ford's foreign ownership meant that it lacked the "authenticity" and "credibility" of other businesses; furthermore, Ford lacked the size and, thus, the strategic importance of Opel, General Motors' German subsidiary. Ford was treated by the Nazi government as "the producer of last resort" when it came to the allocation of government contracts. Ford's very existence in Nazi Germany was constantly threatened by low sales to a nationalistic general public and by the fear that the government would confiscate its facilities.

[wm]

Hitler's personal admiration for the anti-Semitism of Henry Ford

That's not really possible because of Ford's retraction and apology to the Jews in 1927, "a humiliating kowtow to Jewry," according to the Nazis.
But Hitler admired Ford for other reasons:

The great success of the Americans consists essentially in the fact that they produce quantitatively as much as we do with two-thirds less labor. We’ve always been hypnotized by the slogan: “the craftsmanship of the German worker.” ... That’s merely a bluff of which we ourselves are the victims.
American cars, for example, are made with the least possible use of human labor. ... In this respect, we are far behind the Americans. Moreover, they build far more lightly than we do. A car of ours that weighs eighteen hundred kilos would weigh only a thousand if made by the Americans.
I was reading Ford’s books that opened my eyes to these matters. ...
In America everything is machine-made, so that they can employ the most utter cretins in their factories. Their workers have no need of specialized training, and are therefore interchangeable.
Gerhard L. Weinberg. Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: Secret Conversations (p. 212)

[Carl Schwamberger]

During the same time frame Ford Motor Company was building tank factories in the Soviet Union with the blessing of President FDR. It appears to me that Henry Ford was simply a good businessman.

Some days he was. There was a incident in 1942, where Henry was present at a meeting between his companies management and representatives of the US War Production Board. The agenda was allocation of contracts for assorted war materials, specifically to learn what items Ford Motor Company wanted to contract the production of. At some point its was mentioned the Merlin engine contract on the table was connected to British use. Henry threw a fit & his Anglophbia came to the fore. He flatly refused the contract and anything else connected to Britain. His son and other management had to meet discretely later with the WPB representatives to complete the review of the possible contracts.

Henry was getting a bit of Old Timers syndrome in those years & was increasingly difficult for the management to work with.

[Carl Schwamberger]

American cars, for example, are made with the least possible use of human labor. ... In this respect, we are far behind the Americans. Moreover, they build far more lightly than we do. A car of ours that weighs eighteen hundred kilos would weigh only a thousand if made by the Americans.
I was reading Ford’s books that opened my eyes to these matters. ...

This reminded me of the luxury Duisenberg autos. Each carefully hand crafted at enormous labor cost. Top performing machines. In a era when most passenger cars cruised at 35 tom 45 miles per hour the Duisenberg engine could comfortably maintain a 75 mph cruising speed. That in the heaviest weight passenger car built in those decades.

Trivia note: The auburn-Cord Museum in Auburn Indiana has one of the largest collections of Duisenberg autos in the world.