GM and the Nazis: Part Four
General Motors, now celebrating its
centennial, was involved in mechanizing the Nazi blitzkrieg as well as
demobilizing mass transit in the US. Final installment.
By Edwin Black
July 02, 2008
This the final installment of four investigative articles by Edwin Black based
on his book Internal Combustion. He has
also written five author books, among them "War Against the Weak", which dealt
with the eugenics movement in the US and Germany, and "IBM and the Holocaust",
which recounted the collaboration of the US-based firm with the Nazi regime
before the Second World War. His forthcoming book, "Nazi Nexus" is due in
November 2008.
Numerous libraries were involved in the review of documents. Among them were:
Georgetown University; Georgia State University; Henry Ford Museum; Kettering
University; National Archives repositories in Chicago and Washington, D.C.; New
York Public Library Special Manuscript Collections; Yale University Sterling
Memorial Library and other repositories in the United States and Germany. In
addition, Black 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 book
"Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil
and Derailed the Alternatives". His secondary sources also included the books:
"General Motors and the Nazis" by Henry A. Turner; "Sloan Rules" by David Farber
and "orking for the Enemy" by Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Kugler and
Nicholas Levis.
The epilogue of the tumultuous saga of General Motors during the New Deal and
Nazi era is still being written. That saga is the subject of a four-part
investigative series that concludes with this story. Thousands of pages of
decades’-old documents were scrutinized and re-examined to produce this series,
which sheds new light on GM’s relationship with the Third Reich—and on the
company’s activities in America.
They reveal that even as GM and its president, Alfred P. Sloan, were helping
jump-start the resurgent German military, they were undermining the New Deal of
Franklin D. Roosevelt and undermining America’s electric mass transit, and in
doing so helped addict America to oil.
In 1974, a generation after World War II, GM’s controversial history was
resurrected by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Antitrust
and Monopoly. GM and Opel’s collusion with the Nazis dominated the opening
portion of the subcommittee’s exhaustively documented study, which mainly
focused on the company’s conspiracy to monopolize scores of local mass transit
systems in the United States.
The report’s author, Judiciary Committee staff attorney Bradford Snell, used
GM’s collaboration with the Third Reich as a moral backdrop to help explain the
automakers’ plan in more than 40 cities to subvert popular clean-running
electric public transit and convert it to petroleum-burning motor buses.
The Senate report, titled "American Ground Transport," was released shortly
after the Arab-imposed 1973 oil shock—and it accused GM of significantly
contributing to the nation’s petroleum woes through its mass-transit
machinations.
GM had been convicted in 1949 of leading a secret corporate combine that funded
a front company called National City Lines that systematically replaced electric
trolleys with oil-guzzling motor buses across America. After Snell’s report was
presented, GM immediately went on the counterattack, denying Snell’s charges
about both its domestic conduct and its collusion with the Nazis, and demanding
that the Senate Judiciary Committee cease circulating its own report. That, of
course, did not happen.
But following the release of the Snell report, the automaker then created its
own 88-page rebuttal report titled, “The Truth About American Ground Transport,”
whose entire first section, as it turns out, had nothing to do with American
ground transport. It was headlined: “General Motors Did Not Assist the Nazis in
World War II.”
GM has also consistently denied domestic wrongdoing.
Thus, GM’s involvement with Nazi transportation in Germany juxtaposed with its
conspiracy to convert electric mass transit at home became inextricably linked
by virtue of the Senate’s investigation, the company’s own rebuttal and the
compelling historical parallel between the company’s conduct in the United
States and its conduct in Germany.
GM further demanded that the Senate never permit its own report, American Ground
Transport, to be distributed without GM’s rebuttal attached. The Senate agreed—a
rare move indeed. Snell, however, labeled the GM rebuttal a document calculated
to mislead historians and the public.
Yet another generation later, in the late 1990s, GM’s collaboration with the
Nazis was again resurrected when Nazi-era slave laborers threatened to sue GM
and Ford for reparations. At the time, a GM spokesman told a reporter at The
Washington Post that the company “did not assist the Nazis in any way during
WWII.” The effort to sue GM and Ford was unsuccessful, but both Ford and GM,
concerned about the facts that might come to light, commissioned histories of
their Nazi-related past.
In the case of Ford, the company issued its 2001 report, compiled by historian
Simon Reich, plus the original underlying documentation, all of which was made
available to the public without restriction. Ford immediately circulated CDs
with the data to the media. Researchers and other interested parties may today
view the actual documents and photocopy them.
The Reich report concluded, among other things, that Ford-Werke, the company’s
German subsidiary, used slave labor from the Buchenwald concentration camp in
1944 and 1945 and functioned as an integral part of the German war machine. Ford
officials in Detroit have publicly commented on their Nazi past, remained
available for comment, apologized and have generally helped all those seeking
answers about its involvement with the Hitler regime.
As for GM, it commissioned eminent business historian Henry Ashby Turner Jr. in
1999 to conduct an internal investigation and report his findings. Turner,
author of several favorably reviewed books, including “German Big Business and
the Rise of Hitler,” was well-known, among other things, for his insistence that
big business did not make a pivotal contribution to the rise of Hitlerism.
GM, however, declined to release Turner’s internal report or discuss the
company’s Nazi-era or New Deal-era history or archival holdings when contacted
by this reporter. In February 2006, corporate spokeswoman Geri Lama twice
refused to give this reporter the location of the company archive. In November
2006, Lama was again asked for an on-the-record response. She said she was
referring the question to “staffers,” but after more than a week, no reply had
been received.
GM has maintained a special combative niche in the annals of American corporate
history, achieving a reputation for suppressing books, obstructing access to
archival records, and frustrating critics from Ralph Nader to Bradford Snell. GM
attorneys even fought efforts by Alfred P. Sloan himself to publish his own
memoirs, although the autobiography was finally published in 1964 after a long
court fight.
In July 2005, Turner published the book “General Motors and the Nazis: The
Struggle for Control of Opel, Europe’s Biggest Carmaker” (Yale University
Press). The book features 158 chapter text pages of carefully detailed and
footnoted information, plus notes, an index and a short appendix. Although the
book has been reviewed, BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail book
sales for the publishing industry, reported in late October that only 139 copies
of the Turner book had been sold to the key outlets monitored by the service
since the publication’s release.
In his book, Turner, relying on his work as GM’s historian, disputed many
earlier findings about GM’s complicity with the Nazis, concluding that charges
that GM had collaborated with the Nazis even after the United States and Germany
were at war “have proved groundless.”
Turner rejects “the assumption that the American corporation did business in the
Third Reich by choice,” asserting, “Such was not the case.” Turner also states
that GM had no option but to return wartime profits to its stockholders, since
“the German firm prospered handsomely from Hitler’s promotion of the automobile
and from the remarkable recovery of the German economy.”
However, Turner does state explicitly that “by the end of 1940 more than ten
thousand employees at Opel’s Russelsheim plant were engaged in producing parts
for the Junkers bombers heavily used in raining death and destruction on London
and other British cities during the air attacks of the Battle of Britain.”
Turner also condemns GM for taking the Opel wartime dividends, which included
profits made off of slave labor. He writes, “But regardless of who [in the GM
corporate structure] decided to claim that tainted money, its receipt rendered
GM guilty, after the fact, of deriving profit from war production for the Third
Reich made possible in part from the toil of unfree workers.”
Aware that questions would arise about his relationship with GM, Turner’s book
states in its preface: “This book was not commissioned by General Motors. It was
written after the documentation project was completed and without any financial
support from GM. Its contents were seen by no one at GM prior to publication. It
is therefore an independent undertaking by the author, who bears sole
responsibility for its contents.”
Turner did not respond to voice mail and e-mail messages seeking information
about his sponsored GM history project, his subsequent book, or other relevant
topics.
The GM Opel documents assembled for the company’s probe and Turner’s
commissioned examination were digitized on CD-ROMs and donated to Yale’s
Sterling Memorial Library, where the collection is categorized as being “open to
the public.” In point of fact, the obscure collection can only be viewed on a
computer terminal; print-outs or digital copies are not permitted without the
written consent of GM attorneys.
Sterling reference librarians, who are willing to make the collection available,
complained to this reporter as recently as October 2007 that they do not know
how to access the digitized GM materials because of a complicated and arcane
database never before encountered by them. One Sterling reference librarian
answered a question about the document by declaring, “I have spoken to two
reference librarians. No one knows anything about it [the GM Opel Collection],
no one is in charge of it. No one knows how to access it.”
Yale archivist Richard Szary, who supervised the accession of the collection,
said that for the approximate half-decade that the documents have been on file,
he knows of only “one or two” researchers other than this reporter who have had
access to the papers.
Szary, who was previously said to be the only Yale staffer who understood how to
access the materials, facilitated this reporter’s on-site access. He has since
left Yale. By late November, however, in response to an inquiry by this
reporter, a senior Sterling librarian said her staff would “figure out how to
make it available” by reviewing technical details.
Simon Reich, who compiled Ford’s Hitler-era documents, bristled at the whole
idea. “Ford decided to take a very public, open and transparent route,” he
stated. “Any serious researcher can go into the [Henry Ford] archive, see the
documents in paper form, and have them copied. Compare and contrast this with
the fact that GM conducted a very private study and the original hard-copy
documentation upon which the study was made has never been made available, and
today cannot be copied without the GM legal department’s permission.”
Between the unpublished GM internal investigation, the restricted files at Yale,
and the little-known insights offered in Turner’s book, the details of the
company’s involvement with the Hitler regime have remained below the radar.
Nonetheless, GM’s impact in both the United States and the Third Reich was
monumental.
On Jan. 15, 1953, company president Charlie Wilson was nominated to be Secretary
of Defense, a job that would ultimately see him usher in the era of the
interstate highway system. At Wilson’s confirmation hearings, Sen. Robert
Hendrickson (R-N.J.) pointedly challenged the GM chief, asking whether he had a
conflict of interest, considering his 40,000 shares of company stock and years
of loyalty to the controversial Detroit firm.
Bluntly asked if he could make a decision in the country’s interest that was
contrary to GM’s interest, Wilson shot back with his famous comment, “I cannot
conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was
good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our
company is too big.”
Indeed, what GM accomplished in both America and Nazi Germany could not have
been bigger.
Edwin Black is the bestselling author of IBM
and the Holocaust, and six other books, as well as the forthcoming book, Nazi
Nexus (Nov 2008 Dialog Press). He is also editor of The Cutting Edge News.
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