[kj] Killing Joke and the U.S.

[B. Oliver Sheppard]

jpwhkj at aol.com wrote:

> Hi Oliver,

>  

> "Lawsuits like this"...? That's one lawsuit (2 people in a class 

> action), are there others?

>


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm  
[URL has great pic of Henry Ford receiving Nazi medal of honor in 1938]

*Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration *

/By Michael Dobbs
/ Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 30, 1998; Page A01

Three years after Swiss banks became the target of a worldwide furor 
over their business dealings with Nazi Germany, major American car 
companies find themselves embroiled in a similar debate.

[...]

The Ford Motor Co. has mobilized dozens of historians, lawyers and 
researchers to fight a civil case brought by lawyers in Washington and 
New York who specialize in extracting large cash settlements from banks 
and insurance companies accused of defrauding Holocaust victims. Also, a 
book scheduled for publication next year will accuse General Motors 
Corp. of playing a key role in Hitler's invasions of Poland and the 
Soviet Union.

"General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than 
Switzerland," said Bradford Snell, who has spent two decades researching 
a history of the world's largest automaker. "Switzerland was just a 
repository of looted funds. GM was an integral part of the German war 
effort. The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without 
Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM."

Both General Motors and Ford insist that they bear little or no 
responsibility for the operations of their German subsidiaries, which 
controlled 70 percent of the German car market at the outbreak of war in 
1939 and rapidly retooled themselves to become suppliers of war materiel 
to the German army.

But documents discovered in German and American archives show a much 
more complicated picture. In certain instances, American managers of 
both GM and Ford went along with the conversion of their German plants 
to military production at a time when U.S. government documents show 
they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step 
up military production in their plants at home.

[...]

"When you think of Ford, you think of baseball and apple pie," said 
Miriam Kleinman, a researcher with the Washington law firm of Cohen, 
Millstein and Hausfeld, who spent weeks examining records at the 
National Archives in an attempt to build a slave labor case against the 
Dearborn-based company. "You don't think of Hitler having a portrait of 
Henry Ford on his office wall in Munich."

Both Ford and General Motors declined requests for access to their 
wartime archives.

[...]

For GIs, an Unpleasant Surprise

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. (Chrysler's role in the German 
rearmament effort was much less significant.)

When the U.S. Army liberated the Ford plants in Cologne and Berlin, they 
found destitute foreign workers confined behind barbed wire and company 
documents extolling the "genius of the Fuehrer," according to reports 
filed by soldiers at the scene. A U.S. Army report by investigator Henry 
Schneider dated Sept. 5, 1945, accused the German branch of Ford of 
serving as "an arsenal of Nazism, at least for military vehicles" with 
the "consent" of the parent company in Dearborn.

[...]

More at URL above