Print
E-mail
Comment
Rate
Hitler's Carmaker
Click image to enlarge
   |
The inside story of how General Motors helped jump-start the Third Reich's military machine
BY: Edwin Black
On May 1, 1934, under a brilliant, cloudless sky, James D. Mooney, president of the General Motors Overseas Corporation, climbed into his automobile and drove toward Tempelhof Field at the outskirts of Berlin to attend yet another hypnotic Nazi extravaganza. This one was the annual May Day festival.
Security was more than tense; it was paranoid. All cars entering the area were meticulously inspected for anti-Hitler pamphlets or other contraband. But not Mooney's. The F—hrer's office had sent over a special windshield tag that granted the GM chief carte blanche to any area of Tempelhof. Mooney would be Hitler's special guest.
As Mooney arrived at the airfield about 3:30 in the afternoon, sweeping swastika banners stretching 33 feet wide and soaring 150 feet into the air fluttered from 43-ton steel towers. Each tower was anchored in 13 feet of concrete to resist the winds as steadfastly as the Third Reich resisted all (outside) efforts to moderate its program of rearmament and oppression.
Thousands of other Nazi flags fluttered across the grounds as dense column after column of Nazis, marching shoulder to shoulder in syncopation, flowed into rigid formation. Each of the 13 parade columns boasted between 30,000 and 90,000 storm troopers, army divisions, citizen brigades and blond, blue-eyed Hitler Youth enrollees. After four hours, the tightly packed assemblage totaled about two million marchers and attendees.
Hitler eventually arrived in an open-air automobile that cruised up and down the field amid the sea of devotees. When ready, Hitler launched into one of his enthralling speeches, made all the more mesmerizing by 142 loudspeakers sprinkled throughout the grounds.
General Motors World, the company house organ, covered the May Day event glowingly in a several-page cover story.
EDWIN BLACK
Special to the CJN
The next day, May 2, 1934, after practicing his Sieg Heil in front of a mirror, Mooney and two other senior executives from General Motors and its German division, Adam Opel A.G., went to meet Hitler in his chancellery office. Waiting with Hitler would be Nazi Party stalwart Joachim von Ribbentrop, who would later become foreign minister, and Reich economic adviser Wilhelm Keppler.
As Mooney traversed the long approach to Hitler's desk, he began to pump his arm in a stern-faced Sieg Heil. But the F—hrer surprised him by getting up from his desk and meeting Mooney halfway, not with a salute, but a businesslike handshake.
This was, after all, a meeting about business - one of many contacts between the Nazis and GM officials that are spotlighted in this JTA investigation that scoured and re-examined thousands of pages of little-known and restricted Nazi-era and New Deal-era documents
This documentation and other evidence reveals that GM and Opel were eager, willing and indispensable cogs in the Third Reich's rearmament juggernaut, a rearmament that, as many feared during the 1930s would enable Hitler to conquer Europe and destroy millions of lives.
The documentation also reveals that while General Motors was mobilizing the Third Reich and cooperating within Germany with Hitler's Nazi revolution and economic recovery, GM and its president, Alfred P. Sloan, were undermining the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt; they were undermining America's electric mass transit and, in doing so, were helping addict the United States to oil.
GM has repeatedly declined to comment to this reporter. It has also denied for decades - even in the halls of Congress - that it actively assisted the Nazi war effort or that it simultaneously subverted mass transit in the US. It has also argued that its subsidiary was seized by the Reich during the war.
Fascination with four wheels
Hitler knew that the biggest auto and truck manufacturer in Germany was not Daimler or any other German carmaker. The biggest automotive manufacturer in all of Europe was General Motors, which since 1929 had owned and operated the longtime German firm Opel. GM's Opel, infused with millions in GM cash and assembly-line know-how, produced some 40% of the vehicles in Germany and about 65% of its exports.
Impressive production statistics aside, the F—hrer was fascinated with every aspect of the automobile, its history, its inherent liberating appeal, and, of course, its application as a weapon of war. While German automotive engineers were famous for their engineering innovations, the lack of ready petroleum supplies and gas stations in Germany, coupled with the nation's massive Depression unemployment, kept autos out of reach for the common man.
Even if few Germans could afford cars - GM or otherwise - the company did provide many in the Third Reich with jobs - some 17,000 jobs - in a Germany where Nazi success hinged on re-employment. Moreover, since Opel was responsible for 65% of auto exports, it also earned the foreign currency the Reich desperately needed to purchase raw materials and fund the regime's crash rearmament program. Now, as Hitler embarked on a massive, threatening rearmament program, GM was in a position to make Germany's military a powerful, modern and motorized marvel.
Quest for the ‘people's car'
Mooney told Hitler that GM was willing to mass-produce a cheap car, costing just 1,400 marks, with the mass appeal of Henry Ford's Model T. They would do this if the Nazi regime could guarantee 100,000 car sales annually, issue a decree limiting dealer commissions, and control the price of raw materials.
Hitler showered his GM guests with many questions. Would the cost of garaging a car be prohibitive for the average man? Could vehicles parked outdoors be damaged by the elements?
Hitler had already committed the Reich to expedite completion of the world's first transnational network of auto highways, the Autobahn. Now, to further promote motorcar proliferation, Hitler suggested to Mooney that the German government could also reduce gasoline prices and taxes.
The conference in Hitler's chancellery office, originally scheduled for a quarter hour, stretched to 90 minutes.
The next morning, May 3, 1934, an excited Hitler instructed economic adviser Keppler, “Get in touch with them (the Opel men) before they leave Berlin.” Hitler wanted to know still more. Mooney spent hours later that day ensconced in his hotel suite composing written answers to the F—hrer's many additional questions.
A few weeks after the prolonged chancellery session, the company publication, General Motors World, effusively recounted the meeting, proclaiming, “Hitler is a strong man, well fitted to lead the German people out of their former economic distress ... He is leading them, not by force or fear, but by intelligent planning and execution of fundamentally sound principles of government.”
For Mooney, and for Germany's branch of GM, the relationship with the Third Reich was first and foremost about making money - billions in 21st-century dollars - off the Nazi desire to rearm. Never mind that the world expected that Germany would plunge Europe and America into a devastating war.
However, the commanding, decision-making force at the carmaker was not Mooney, GM's man in Nazi Germany, but rather the company's cold and calculating president Sloan, who operated out of corporate headquarters in Detroit and New York.
Mr. Big
Sloan, slender and natty, lived for bigness. An electrical engineer by training, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate was a strategic thinker driven by a compulsion to grow his company.
For Sloan, motorizing the fascist regime that was expected to wage a bloody war in Europe was the next big thing and a spigot of limitless profits for GM.
But unlike many commercial collaborators with the Nazis who were driven strictly by the icy quest for profits, Sloan also harbored a political motivation. He despised the emerging American way of life being crafted by FDR. Sloan hated Roosevelt's New Deal, and he admired the strength, irrepressible determination and sheer magnitude of Hitler's vision.
For Sloan, the New Deal - with its Social Security program, government regulation and support for labor unions - clanged an unmistakable death knell for an America made great by great corporations guided by great corporate leaders.
Sloan felt that GM could - and should - create its own foreign policy and back the Hitler regime even as America recoiled from it. “Industry must assume the role of enlightened industrial statesmanship,” Sloan declared in an April 1936 quarterly report to GM stockholders.
In ramping up auto production in the Nazi Reich, Sloan understood completely that he was not just manufacturing vehicles. Sloan and Hitler both knew that by creating wealth and shrinking unemployment, GM was helping to prop up the Hitler regime.
Ironically, GM chose the alliance with Hitler even though doing so threatened to imperil GM at home. Just days after Hitler came to power on Jan. 30, 1933, a worldwide anti-Nazi boycott erupted, led by the American Jewish Congress, the Jewish War Veterans, and a coalition of anti-fascist, pro-labor, interfaith and American patriotic groups. Their objective was to fracture the German economy, not resurrect it.
In the beginning, few understood that in boycotting Opel of Germany, they were actually boycotting GM of Detroit. Effectively, they were one and the same.
By the spring of 1933, the world was beginning to learn about the lawlessness and savagery of the Nazi regime and the Reich's determination to crush its Jewish community and threaten its neighbors.
By May 10, 1933, Nazi-banned books were being torched in public bonfires across Germany. The corporate library at General Motors' Opel in Germany was purged as well of Jewish-authored publications and other undesirable literature.
Beginning in the late spring of 1933, concentration camps such as Dachau were generating headlines ,reporting great brutality.
By June 1933, Jews everywhere in Germany were being banned from the professional, economic and cultural life of the country.
Sloan knew what was happening in Germany. He and GM officials knew also that Hitler's regime was expected to wage war from the outset, and America, it was feared, would once again be pulled in.
Nonetheless, GM and Germany began a strategic business relationship.
Unleashing the Blitzkrieg
Opel became an essential element of the German rearmament and modernization Hitler required to subjugate Europe. To accomplish that, Germany needed to motorize, to “blitz,” that is, to attack with lightning speed. Opel built the three-ton truck named Blitz - to support the German military. The Blitz truck became the mainstay of the Blitzkrieg.
Quickly, Sloan and Mooney realized that the Reich military machine was the corporation's best customer in Germany. Sales to the army yielded a greater per-truck profit than civilian sales - a hefty 40% more. So GM preferred supplying the military by building “the people's car.”
The Wehrmacht, the German military, soon became Opel's No. 1 customer by far.
In 1935, GM agreed to locate a new factory at Brandenburg, where it would be geographically less vulnerable to feared aerial bombardment by Allied forces.
Expanding its German workforce from 17,000 in 1934 to 27,000 in 1938 also made GM one of Germany's leading employers.
More than just an efficient manufacturer, Opel openly embraced the bizarre philosophy that powered the Nazi military-industrial complex. The German company participated in culticF—hrer worship as a part of its daily corporate ethic.
During the Hitler years, Sloan and Mooney made efforts to obscure Opel's American ownership and control. As a result, the average storm trooper, Nazi Party member or German motorist accepted the company's cars and trucks as the product of a purely Aryan firm that was working toward Hitler's great destiny: “Deutschland —ber alles.”
The masquerade
Opel became an early patron of the National Socialist Motor Corps, a rabid Nazi Party paramilitary auxiliary.
Opel cars and trucks were loaned without charge to the local storm trooper contingents stationed near company headquarters at R—sselsheim, Germany. As brownshirt thugs went about their business of intimidation and extortion, they often came and went in vehicles bearing prominent Opel advertisements, proud automobile sponsor of the storm troopers.
Hitler's hate speeches and pep rallies were routinely piped into Opel factory premises to inspire the workers. Great swastika-bedecked company events were commonplace, as Nazi gauleiters, or regional party leaders, and other party officials spurred gathered employees to work hard for the F—hrer and his Thousand-Year Reich. Opel contributed large cash donations to all the right Nazi Party activities.
Opel became more than a mere carmaker. It became a stalwart of the Nazi community.
Of course, GM's subsidiary vigorously joined the anti-Jewish movement required of leading businesses serving the Reich. Jewish employees and suppliers became verboten. Established dealers with Jewish blood were terminated. Even long-time executives were discharged if Jewish descent was detected.
To reinforce the masquerade that Opel stood as a purely Aryan enterprise, Sloan and Mooney, beginning in 1934, concocted the concept of a “Directorate,” comprised of prominent German personalities, including several with Nazi Party membership.
But the decisions were made in America. GM, as the sole stockholder, controlled Opel's board and the corporate votes.
Among the decisions made in America beginning in about 1935 was one transferring to Germany the technology to produce the modern gasoline additive tetraethyl lead, commonly called “ethyl,” or leaded gasoline. This allowed the Reich to boost octane that provided better automotive performance. Better performance meant a faster and more mobile fighting force - just what the Reich would ultimately need for its swift and mobile Blitzkrieg.
As early as 1934, however, America's War Department was apprehensive about the transfer of such proprietary chemical processes.
But GM moved quickly - in conjunction with its close ally Standard Oil. Each company took a one-quarter share of the Reich ethyl operation, while I.G. Farben, the giant German chemical conglomerate, controlled the remaining 50%.
The plants were built. Americans supplied the technical know-how.
Years after the war, Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer told a US congressional investigator that Germany could not have attempted its September 1939 blitzkrieg of Poland without the performance-boosting additive lead-tetraethyl.
Dwarfing the competition
Within a few years of partnering with the Hitler regime, Opel began to dwarf all competition.
Reich currency restrictions, however, obstructed the outflow of cash for profits or even the purchase of raw materials to build trucks. GM in America circumvented those regulations through the overseas sales of German pencils, sewing machines, Christmas tree ornaments, and virtually any other exports that would earn foreign currency internationally. Through complicated bank transfers, proceeds from those sales were then exchanged for profits or raw materials.
On the homefront
Ironically, while GM's Opel was a deferential corporate citizen in Nazi Germany, Sloan helped foment unrest at home as part of the company's efforts to undermine the Roosevelt administration.
For example, the GM president was one of the central behind-the-scenes founders of the American Liberty League, a racist, anti-Semitic, pro-big business group bent on rallying Southern votes against Roosevelt to defeat him in the 1936 election.
The American Liberty League also financed the Sentinels of the Republic which, in turn, orchestrated incendiary, anti-Semitic letter-writing campaigns and otherwise provoked a backlash against Roosevelt and what was sometimes derisively labeled his “Jew deal.”
Meanwhile, during the late 1930s, Hitler's persecution of Jews was building to a frenzy even as fears of a war escalated. Nevertheless, Opel remained a loyal corporate citizen of the Third Reich - content to obediently do the Nazi regime's bidding and unstintingly supporting Hitler's program on many fronts. These included economic and employment recovery, anti-Jewish persecution, war preparedness and domestic propaganda. In return, Opel prospered.
Hitler was pleased - very pleased. In 1938, just months after the Nazis' annexation of Austria, James D. Mooney, head of GM's overseas operations, received the German Eagle with Cross, the highest medal Hitler awarded to foreign commercial collaborators and supporters.
On Nov. 9-10, 1938, shortly after Mooney's decoration, nationwide pogroms broke out in Germany against the Jews - Kristallnacht. The American public was finally shocked onto its heels by the night of officially orchestrated burning, looting and mob action against Jews.
President Roosevelt recalled America's ambassador, plunging German-American relations to their lowest point since Hitler assumed power.
By now, the truth about GM's ownership of the Opel car and truck operation was out in the open among Germans. Reich armament officials increasingly directed Opel's output, including mandating that nearly all vehicles be devoted to military use.
In early August 1939, the German military urgently ordered Blitz truck spare parts to be delivered to Reich bases near the Polish border. Days later, nearly 3,000 Opel employees, from factory workers to senior managers, were drafted into the Wehrmacht. Moreover, at about that time, GM's senior executive Cyrus Osborn began evacuating most of Opel's American employees and their families to the Netherlands. Soon, virtually all Opel civilian passenger car sales were eliminated in favor of military orders.
At 6 a.m. on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany launched its Blitzkrieg against Poland, with troops arriving in Blitz trucks manufactured by GM's Opel. The night before, Sloan reportedly told stockholders that GM was “too big” to be impeded by “petty international squabbles,” according to a congressional investigation.
Shortly after war broke out in Europe, however, GM executives in Germany tried to distance the American company from its involvement in the brutal German war machine. The Opel board was restructured to ensure that GM executives maintained a controlling presence on the board of directors but a continued invisibility in daily management. This was accomplished in part by bringing in GM's reliable Danish chief, Albin Madsen, and maintaining two Americans on that board.
Like any nation at war, including the United States itself, the Reich alone determined what weapons would be made by its militarized factories. That said, it was GM's decision to remain operating in Germany, to continue to subject itself to Reich military orders, and to answer the Reich's call for ever more lethal weapons.
As anticipated, Opel's Brandenburg facilities were conscripted and converted to an airplane-engine plant supplying the Luftwaffe's JU-88 bombers. Later, Opel's plants also built land mines and torpedo detonators.
The factories and infrastructure that GM built during the 1930s were finally used for their intended purpose - war. Opel-built trucks on the ground, Opel-powered bombers in the sky, and Opel-detonated torpedoes in the seas brought terror to Europe.
(to be continued)
Editor's note: Edwin Black's research for the JTA four-part investigative series “Hitler's carmaker” involved review of documents at Georgetown University; Georgia State University; Henry Ford Museum; Kettering University; National Archives repositories in Chicago and Washington; New York Public Library Special Manuscript Collections; Yale University Sterling Memorial Library and other repositories in the United States and Germany. In addition, he had access to confidential FBI files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, period media reports from both Germany and America, secondary literature and other materials researched to produce his just-released book Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives. His sources also included the books: General Motors and the Nazis by Henry A. Turner; Sloan Rules by David Farber and Working for the Enemy by Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Kugler and Nicholas Levis.
BY: Edwin Black
On May 1, 1934, under a brilliant, cloudless sky, James D. Mooney, president of the General Motors Overseas Corporation, climbed into his automobile and drove toward Tempelhof Field at the outskirts of Berlin to attend yet another hypnotic Nazi extravaganza. This one was the annual May Day festival.
Security was more than tense; it was paranoid. All cars entering the area were meticulously inspected for anti-Hitler pamphlets or other contraband. But not Mooney's. The F—hrer's office had sent over a special windshield tag that granted the GM chief carte blanche to any area of Tempelhof. Mooney would be Hitler's special guest.
As Mooney arrived at the airfield about 3:30 in the afternoon, sweeping swastika banners stretching 33 feet wide and soaring 150 feet into the air fluttered from 43-ton steel towers. Each tower was anchored in 13 feet of concrete to resist the winds as steadfastly as the Third Reich resisted all (outside) efforts to moderate its program of rearmament and oppression.
Thousands of other Nazi flags fluttered across the grounds as dense column after column of Nazis, marching shoulder to shoulder in syncopation, flowed into rigid formation. Each of the 13 parade columns boasted between 30,000 and 90,000 storm troopers, army divisions, citizen brigades and blond, blue-eyed Hitler Youth enrollees. After four hours, the tightly packed assemblage totaled about two million marchers and attendees.
Hitler eventually arrived in an open-air automobile that cruised up and down the field amid the sea of devotees. When ready, Hitler launched into one of his enthralling speeches, made all the more mesmerizing by 142 loudspeakers sprinkled throughout the grounds.
General Motors World, the company house organ, covered the May Day event glowingly in a several-page cover story.
EDWIN BLACK
Special to the CJN
The next day, May 2, 1934, after practicing his Sieg Heil in front of a mirror, Mooney and two other senior executives from General Motors and its German division, Adam Opel A.G., went to meet Hitler in his chancellery office. Waiting with Hitler would be Nazi Party stalwart Joachim von Ribbentrop, who would later become foreign minister, and Reich economic adviser Wilhelm Keppler.
As Mooney traversed the long approach to Hitler's desk, he began to pump his arm in a stern-faced Sieg Heil. But the F—hrer surprised him by getting up from his desk and meeting Mooney halfway, not with a salute, but a businesslike handshake.
This was, after all, a meeting about business - one of many contacts between the Nazis and GM officials that are spotlighted in this JTA investigation that scoured and re-examined thousands of pages of little-known and restricted Nazi-era and New Deal-era documents
This documentation and other evidence reveals that GM and Opel were eager, willing and indispensable cogs in the Third Reich's rearmament juggernaut, a rearmament that, as many feared during the 1930s would enable Hitler to conquer Europe and destroy millions of lives.
The documentation also reveals that while General Motors was mobilizing the Third Reich and cooperating within Germany with Hitler's Nazi revolution and economic recovery, GM and its president, Alfred P. Sloan, were undermining the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt; they were undermining America's electric mass transit and, in doing so, were helping addict the United States to oil.
GM has repeatedly declined to comment to this reporter. It has also denied for decades - even in the halls of Congress - that it actively assisted the Nazi war effort or that it simultaneously subverted mass transit in the US. It has also argued that its subsidiary was seized by the Reich during the war.
Fascination with four wheels
Hitler knew that the biggest auto and truck manufacturer in Germany was not Daimler or any other German carmaker. The biggest automotive manufacturer in all of Europe was General Motors, which since 1929 had owned and operated the longtime German firm Opel. GM's Opel, infused with millions in GM cash and assembly-line know-how, produced some 40% of the vehicles in Germany and about 65% of its exports.
Impressive production statistics aside, the F—hrer was fascinated with every aspect of the automobile, its history, its inherent liberating appeal, and, of course, its application as a weapon of war. While German automotive engineers were famous for their engineering innovations, the lack of ready petroleum supplies and gas stations in Germany, coupled with the nation's massive Depression unemployment, kept autos out of reach for the common man.
Even if few Germans could afford cars - GM or otherwise - the company did provide many in the Third Reich with jobs - some 17,000 jobs - in a Germany where Nazi success hinged on re-employment. Moreover, since Opel was responsible for 65% of auto exports, it also earned the foreign currency the Reich desperately needed to purchase raw materials and fund the regime's crash rearmament program. Now, as Hitler embarked on a massive, threatening rearmament program, GM was in a position to make Germany's military a powerful, modern and motorized marvel.
Quest for the ‘people's car'
Mooney told Hitler that GM was willing to mass-produce a cheap car, costing just 1,400 marks, with the mass appeal of Henry Ford's Model T. They would do this if the Nazi regime could guarantee 100,000 car sales annually, issue a decree limiting dealer commissions, and control the price of raw materials.
Hitler showered his GM guests with many questions. Would the cost of garaging a car be prohibitive for the average man? Could vehicles parked outdoors be damaged by the elements?
Hitler had already committed the Reich to expedite completion of the world's first transnational network of auto highways, the Autobahn. Now, to further promote motorcar proliferation, Hitler suggested to Mooney that the German government could also reduce gasoline prices and taxes.
The conference in Hitler's chancellery office, originally scheduled for a quarter hour, stretched to 90 minutes.
The next morning, May 3, 1934, an excited Hitler instructed economic adviser Keppler, “Get in touch with them (the Opel men) before they leave Berlin.” Hitler wanted to know still more. Mooney spent hours later that day ensconced in his hotel suite composing written answers to the F—hrer's many additional questions.
A few weeks after the prolonged chancellery session, the company publication, General Motors World, effusively recounted the meeting, proclaiming, “Hitler is a strong man, well fitted to lead the German people out of their former economic distress ... He is leading them, not by force or fear, but by intelligent planning and execution of fundamentally sound principles of government.”
For Mooney, and for Germany's branch of GM, the relationship with the Third Reich was first and foremost about making money - billions in 21st-century dollars - off the Nazi desire to rearm. Never mind that the world expected that Germany would plunge Europe and America into a devastating war.
However, the commanding, decision-making force at the carmaker was not Mooney, GM's man in Nazi Germany, but rather the company's cold and calculating president Sloan, who operated out of corporate headquarters in Detroit and New York.
Mr. Big
Sloan, slender and natty, lived for bigness. An electrical engineer by training, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate was a strategic thinker driven by a compulsion to grow his company.
For Sloan, motorizing the fascist regime that was expected to wage a bloody war in Europe was the next big thing and a spigot of limitless profits for GM.
But unlike many commercial collaborators with the Nazis who were driven strictly by the icy quest for profits, Sloan also harbored a political motivation. He despised the emerging American way of life being crafted by FDR. Sloan hated Roosevelt's New Deal, and he admired the strength, irrepressible determination and sheer magnitude of Hitler's vision.
For Sloan, the New Deal - with its Social Security program, government regulation and support for labor unions - clanged an unmistakable death knell for an America made great by great corporations guided by great corporate leaders.
Sloan felt that GM could - and should - create its own foreign policy and back the Hitler regime even as America recoiled from it. “Industry must assume the role of enlightened industrial statesmanship,” Sloan declared in an April 1936 quarterly report to GM stockholders.
In ramping up auto production in the Nazi Reich, Sloan understood completely that he was not just manufacturing vehicles. Sloan and Hitler both knew that by creating wealth and shrinking unemployment, GM was helping to prop up the Hitler regime.
Ironically, GM chose the alliance with Hitler even though doing so threatened to imperil GM at home. Just days after Hitler came to power on Jan. 30, 1933, a worldwide anti-Nazi boycott erupted, led by the American Jewish Congress, the Jewish War Veterans, and a coalition of anti-fascist, pro-labor, interfaith and American patriotic groups. Their objective was to fracture the German economy, not resurrect it.
In the beginning, few understood that in boycotting Opel of Germany, they were actually boycotting GM of Detroit. Effectively, they were one and the same.
By the spring of 1933, the world was beginning to learn about the lawlessness and savagery of the Nazi regime and the Reich's determination to crush its Jewish community and threaten its neighbors.
By May 10, 1933, Nazi-banned books were being torched in public bonfires across Germany. The corporate library at General Motors' Opel in Germany was purged as well of Jewish-authored publications and other undesirable literature.
Beginning in the late spring of 1933, concentration camps such as Dachau were generating headlines ,reporting great brutality.
By June 1933, Jews everywhere in Germany were being banned from the professional, economic and cultural life of the country.
Sloan knew what was happening in Germany. He and GM officials knew also that Hitler's regime was expected to wage war from the outset, and America, it was feared, would once again be pulled in.
Nonetheless, GM and Germany began a strategic business relationship.
Unleashing the Blitzkrieg
Opel became an essential element of the German rearmament and modernization Hitler required to subjugate Europe. To accomplish that, Germany needed to motorize, to “blitz,” that is, to attack with lightning speed. Opel built the three-ton truck named Blitz - to support the German military. The Blitz truck became the mainstay of the Blitzkrieg.
Quickly, Sloan and Mooney realized that the Reich military machine was the corporation's best customer in Germany. Sales to the army yielded a greater per-truck profit than civilian sales - a hefty 40% more. So GM preferred supplying the military by building “the people's car.”
The Wehrmacht, the German military, soon became Opel's No. 1 customer by far.
In 1935, GM agreed to locate a new factory at Brandenburg, where it would be geographically less vulnerable to feared aerial bombardment by Allied forces.
Expanding its German workforce from 17,000 in 1934 to 27,000 in 1938 also made GM one of Germany's leading employers.
More than just an efficient manufacturer, Opel openly embraced the bizarre philosophy that powered the Nazi military-industrial complex. The German company participated in culticF—hrer worship as a part of its daily corporate ethic.
During the Hitler years, Sloan and Mooney made efforts to obscure Opel's American ownership and control. As a result, the average storm trooper, Nazi Party member or German motorist accepted the company's cars and trucks as the product of a purely Aryan firm that was working toward Hitler's great destiny: “Deutschland —ber alles.”
The masquerade
Opel became an early patron of the National Socialist Motor Corps, a rabid Nazi Party paramilitary auxiliary.
Opel cars and trucks were loaned without charge to the local storm trooper contingents stationed near company headquarters at R—sselsheim, Germany. As brownshirt thugs went about their business of intimidation and extortion, they often came and went in vehicles bearing prominent Opel advertisements, proud automobile sponsor of the storm troopers.
Hitler's hate speeches and pep rallies were routinely piped into Opel factory premises to inspire the workers. Great swastika-bedecked company events were commonplace, as Nazi gauleiters, or regional party leaders, and other party officials spurred gathered employees to work hard for the F—hrer and his Thousand-Year Reich. Opel contributed large cash donations to all the right Nazi Party activities.
Opel became more than a mere carmaker. It became a stalwart of the Nazi community.
Of course, GM's subsidiary vigorously joined the anti-Jewish movement required of leading businesses serving the Reich. Jewish employees and suppliers became verboten. Established dealers with Jewish blood were terminated. Even long-time executives were discharged if Jewish descent was detected.
To reinforce the masquerade that Opel stood as a purely Aryan enterprise, Sloan and Mooney, beginning in 1934, concocted the concept of a “Directorate,” comprised of prominent German personalities, including several with Nazi Party membership.
But the decisions were made in America. GM, as the sole stockholder, controlled Opel's board and the corporate votes.
Among the decisions made in America beginning in about 1935 was one transferring to Germany the technology to produce the modern gasoline additive tetraethyl lead, commonly called “ethyl,” or leaded gasoline. This allowed the Reich to boost octane that provided better automotive performance. Better performance meant a faster and more mobile fighting force - just what the Reich would ultimately need for its swift and mobile Blitzkrieg.
As early as 1934, however, America's War Department was apprehensive about the transfer of such proprietary chemical processes.
But GM moved quickly - in conjunction with its close ally Standard Oil. Each company took a one-quarter share of the Reich ethyl operation, while I.G. Farben, the giant German chemical conglomerate, controlled the remaining 50%.
The plants were built. Americans supplied the technical know-how.
Years after the war, Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer told a US congressional investigator that Germany could not have attempted its September 1939 blitzkrieg of Poland without the performance-boosting additive lead-tetraethyl.
Dwarfing the competition
Within a few years of partnering with the Hitler regime, Opel began to dwarf all competition.
Reich currency restrictions, however, obstructed the outflow of cash for profits or even the purchase of raw materials to build trucks. GM in America circumvented those regulations through the overseas sales of German pencils, sewing machines, Christmas tree ornaments, and virtually any other exports that would earn foreign currency internationally. Through complicated bank transfers, proceeds from those sales were then exchanged for profits or raw materials.
On the homefront
Ironically, while GM's Opel was a deferential corporate citizen in Nazi Germany, Sloan helped foment unrest at home as part of the company's efforts to undermine the Roosevelt administration.
For example, the GM president was one of the central behind-the-scenes founders of the American Liberty League, a racist, anti-Semitic, pro-big business group bent on rallying Southern votes against Roosevelt to defeat him in the 1936 election.
The American Liberty League also financed the Sentinels of the Republic which, in turn, orchestrated incendiary, anti-Semitic letter-writing campaigns and otherwise provoked a backlash against Roosevelt and what was sometimes derisively labeled his “Jew deal.”
Meanwhile, during the late 1930s, Hitler's persecution of Jews was building to a frenzy even as fears of a war escalated. Nevertheless, Opel remained a loyal corporate citizen of the Third Reich - content to obediently do the Nazi regime's bidding and unstintingly supporting Hitler's program on many fronts. These included economic and employment recovery, anti-Jewish persecution, war preparedness and domestic propaganda. In return, Opel prospered.
Hitler was pleased - very pleased. In 1938, just months after the Nazis' annexation of Austria, James D. Mooney, head of GM's overseas operations, received the German Eagle with Cross, the highest medal Hitler awarded to foreign commercial collaborators and supporters.
On Nov. 9-10, 1938, shortly after Mooney's decoration, nationwide pogroms broke out in Germany against the Jews - Kristallnacht. The American public was finally shocked onto its heels by the night of officially orchestrated burning, looting and mob action against Jews.
President Roosevelt recalled America's ambassador, plunging German-American relations to their lowest point since Hitler assumed power.
By now, the truth about GM's ownership of the Opel car and truck operation was out in the open among Germans. Reich armament officials increasingly directed Opel's output, including mandating that nearly all vehicles be devoted to military use.
In early August 1939, the German military urgently ordered Blitz truck spare parts to be delivered to Reich bases near the Polish border. Days later, nearly 3,000 Opel employees, from factory workers to senior managers, were drafted into the Wehrmacht. Moreover, at about that time, GM's senior executive Cyrus Osborn began evacuating most of Opel's American employees and their families to the Netherlands. Soon, virtually all Opel civilian passenger car sales were eliminated in favor of military orders.
At 6 a.m. on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany launched its Blitzkrieg against Poland, with troops arriving in Blitz trucks manufactured by GM's Opel. The night before, Sloan reportedly told stockholders that GM was “too big” to be impeded by “petty international squabbles,” according to a congressional investigation.
Shortly after war broke out in Europe, however, GM executives in Germany tried to distance the American company from its involvement in the brutal German war machine. The Opel board was restructured to ensure that GM executives maintained a controlling presence on the board of directors but a continued invisibility in daily management. This was accomplished in part by bringing in GM's reliable Danish chief, Albin Madsen, and maintaining two Americans on that board.
Like any nation at war, including the United States itself, the Reich alone determined what weapons would be made by its militarized factories. That said, it was GM's decision to remain operating in Germany, to continue to subject itself to Reich military orders, and to answer the Reich's call for ever more lethal weapons.
As anticipated, Opel's Brandenburg facilities were conscripted and converted to an airplane-engine plant supplying the Luftwaffe's JU-88 bombers. Later, Opel's plants also built land mines and torpedo detonators.
The factories and infrastructure that GM built during the 1930s were finally used for their intended purpose - war. Opel-built trucks on the ground, Opel-powered bombers in the sky, and Opel-detonated torpedoes in the seas brought terror to Europe.
(to be continued)
Editor's note: Edwin Black's research for the JTA four-part investigative series “Hitler's carmaker” involved review of documents at Georgetown University; Georgia State University; Henry Ford Museum; Kettering University; National Archives repositories in Chicago and Washington; New York Public Library Special Manuscript Collections; Yale University Sterling Memorial Library and other repositories in the United States and Germany. In addition, he had access to confidential FBI files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, period media reports from both Germany and America, secondary literature and other materials researched to produce his just-released book Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives. His sources also included the books: General Motors and the Nazis by Henry A. Turner; Sloan Rules by David Farber and Working for the Enemy by Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Kugler and Nicholas Levis.
 |
||
| Mandel Foundation gives $13.5 million to JCF's Centennial |
Article Rating
Reader Comments
The following are comments from the readers. In no way do they represent the view of clevelandjewishnews.com.
You must register with a valid email to post comments. Only your Member ID will be posted with the comments. Registration is free.
Registered users sign in here: |
Become a Registered User |
