I’ve read several books on racism lately. One of them, I think The Myth of Race, remarked how American soldiers after D-Day found Nazi vehicles had GM and Ford engines in them.
When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken. It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel—a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary—and flying Opel-built warplanes.
This part of the article was the tip of the iceberg. I’ve known about Henry Ford’s mutual support with Hitler, being awarded very high German honors. Here’s more, about GM too:
The importance of the American automakers went beyond making trucks for the German army. The Schneider report, now available to researchers at the National Archives, states that American Ford agreed to a complicated barter deal that gave the Reich increased access to large quantities of strategic raw materials, notably rubber. Author Snell says that Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer told him in 1977 that Hitler “would never have considered invading Poland” without synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors.
As war approached, it became increasingly difficult for U.S. corporations like GM and Ford to operate in Germany without cooperating closely with the Nazi rearmament effort. Under intense pressure from Berlin, both companies took pains to make their subsidiaries appear as “German” as possible. In April 1939, for example, German Ford made a personal present to Hitler of 35,000 Reichsmarks in honor of his 50th birthday, according to a captured Nazi document.
Documents show that the parent companies followed a conscious strategy of continuing to do business with the Nazi regime, rather than divest themselves of their German assets. Less than three weeks after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, GM Chairman Alfred P. Sloan defended this strategy as sound business practice, given the fact that the company’s German operations were “highly profitable.”
The internal politics of Nazi Germany “should not be considered the business of the management of General Motors,” Sloan explained in a letter to a concerned shareholder dated April 6, 1939. “We must conduct ourselves [in Germany] as a German organization. . . . We have no right to shut down the plant.”
In 1938, the Cologne Ford plant was responsible for producing a full 48% of German 2-3 ton trucks. One estimate at the end of the war suggested that 15-20% of all vehicles used by the German army were built by Ford.
What lesson can we learn?
It’s tempting to assign blame from actions then to the companies today. I’ll leave the question if that blame still applies today for others to figure out. My point is to remember how readily corporations join with government.
I’m not an expert, but I’ve researched the cultures of slaveholders and others at the tops of dominance hierarchies. They seem more than able to rationalize and justify behaviors most of us would consider unconscionable. They seem to know it so they hide it.
People look to business and government to act on sustainability. I see little to nothing effective done by them, not that many people are doing more, if at all.
