Almost anyone in Europe or North America who has ever held a steering
wheel or a television remote control can name two U.S. carmakers, market
leaders on both continents, and their German subsidiaries. General Motors,
the largest corporation on earth, has been the owner since 1929 of Adam
Opel AG, Russelsheim, the maker of Opel cars. Ford Motor Company, founded
by Henry Ford in 1903, is currently the world's third largest corporation
by revenues. In 1931, Ford Motor built the Ford-Werke AG factory in Cologne.
Ford Werke still thrives today as the headquarters of European
Ford.
In "Working for the Enemy," historians tell the astonishing story of
what happened at Opel and Ford Werke under the Third Reich, and of the
aftermath to the present day. The book also serves as a general introduction to the
topic of forced labor in Germany during the Second World War and covers the more recent legal controversies concerning restitutions to the victims
of Nazi-era forced labor. The longest section consists of interwoven interviews with people who were kept as forced laborers at Ford
Werke's company-owned labor camp in Cologne during the Second World War.
Three
historians who have published previous German-language works on these subjects
- Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings and Anita Kugler - collaborated with
American writer Nicholas Levis in creating complete and updated versions of
their findings for an English-speaking audience. The team engaged in new
research and collected dozens of photos and other materials that appear the
book.
"Working for the Enemy"
will be of interest to everyone concerned with the history of the war,
or with the continuing power and influence of large multinational corporations
in international politics. For the general reader, the Introduction and Prologue
provide complete and vivid introductions to the context of Nazi Germany, its
prewar motorization policy, and its forced labor programs during the Second
World War.
With three 10-page photo essays, a complete glossary, an annotated list of
abbreviations, biographical inserts and an index, "Working for the
Enemy" stands alone and is accessible as a work of both German and American
history.
Topics covered include:
Ford, General Motors and the Nazi Regime
Long before the Second World War, key American executives at Ford and General
Motors were eager to do business with Nazi Germany. Ford Werke and Opel
became indispensable suppliers to the German armed forces, together providing
most of the trucks that later motorized the Nazi attempt to conquer Europe.After 1933 Ford Werke's and Opel's German factory personnel were organized
in the same repressive social system imposed by law at German workplaces
in general. In the early years of the Nazi regime, the two companies profited enormously
from the German motorization program and invested heavily in accommodating
the Third Reich's rearmament strategy. They assisted in transfers of technology
and especially production expertise that proved invaluable to the burgeoning
war machine. Both companies entered into barter
arrangements to import precious rubber to Germany. GM built a military
truck factory in Brandenburg, after an explicit request from the German armed
forces. All this occurred under the aegis of American managers in Dearborn and
Detroit.
At the outbreak of war in 1939, Opel converted its largest factory
to warplane engine production. Both companies set up extensive maintenance
and repair networks to help keep the war machine on wheels. The two companies
played leading roles in repairing and maintaining the far-flung vehicle
fleets of the Deutsche Wehrmacht.
During the first two years of the war, General Motors and Ford executives
from the United States negotiated with the Nazi leadership the terms under
which their German factories were converted to wartime functions. Their highest
priority at all times was to maintain and achieve growth in production and
revenues.
James
Mooney, the leading GM executive in Europe, met with Hitler, Göring,
Roosevelt and British diplomats in the months from October 1939 to March
1940, in the hope of mediating a peace that would have been favorable to
Nazi Germany. The book exposes the course of these negotiations using Mooney's
own unpublished memoirs and.
Mooney was a recipient of the Order of the Golden Eagle,
the highest Nazi honor for foreigners. He shared that distinction with
Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company. Ford's anti-Semitic writings,
compiled in The International Jew (1921), had been translated into many languages at
his own expense, and served as an inspiration to Hitler's Mein Kampf (1924).
Contemporary
rumor held that prior to 1933, Ford bestowed a large cash sum to Hitler every
year as a present for the future Führer's birthday. Alongside a number of
major German corporations, Ford was accused of helping to finance the rise of
the Nazis. When Germany needed immediate supplies of trucks prior to the 1938
invasion of Czechoslovakia, Ford obliged by shipping trucks from the United
States and assembling them in a crash program.
Opel's Brandenburg
factory made the aptly named Opel Blitz, which was considered the best
of the German army's 3-ton trucks. Along with the similar Ford trucks, it proved
indispensable to the Blitzkrieg that conquered most
of Europe, from the Atlantic Ocean to the gates of Moscow, in the years from
1939-42. Even as German Ford produced for the Wehrmacht's offensives and took
over the reins at Ford subsidiaries in German-occupied countries, Henry Ford
cited his avowed pacifism in refusing overtures to produce for Britain's
military effort.
To cover the wartime labor shortage, hundreds of prisoners of war were held at private labor
camps built by Ford Werke and Opel starting in the late summer
and fall of 1940. During the next five years, both companies
made use of several thousand foreign civilian detainees and prisoners of
war as forced laborers in and around their plants.
Production became the highest homefront priority.
German Ford Werke and Opel executives were integrated into the top levels
of the Third Reich's wartime production planning. They and their fellow
corporate managers took on an increasingly important role at the Reich
Armaments Ministry under the aegis of Albert Speer. In the end, their priorities
as technical masters prevailed over those of the ideological Nazi leadership
as the Reich exhausted every last resource in total war.
Communications
and supply lines between the German subsidiaries and the U.S. mother corporations
were kept up until the outbreak of war between the United States and Germany
in December 1941. The book presents ample evidence of subsequent communications.
Even after the United States entered the war, the priority at both mother
companies was to preserve their highly productive and profitable German
subsidiaries. The same Americans who had run Opel during the war advised the
targeted bombing of the Opel factory, for which General Motors was amply
compensated by U.S. taxpayers. Although Cologne was flattened, Ford Werke was
never hit. German-made Ford and GM vehicles met American-made Ford and GM
vehicles in battle, and the companies earned handsomely on both sides.
Within a few years after the war, during the period of Allied occupation, the
same German managers who oversaw the wartime feats of production - and managed
the forced-laborer corps at the factories - returned to the upper echelons of
the top German corporations, including Ford Werke and Opel.
Forced Labor in Germany during the War
The book introduces the reader to the history of "Reichseinsatz"
(RYKES-AYN-SATZ, meaning "Deployment in the Reich." This was the
program under which the Nazi regime used millions of POWs, civilians from many
countries under German occupation, and concentration camp prisoners as forced laborers in the German
homefront economy.
In the absence of millions of German men 
who
had been sent to the front, forced labor became a necessity for German
war production and agriculture.
As of August 1944, the high point of Nazi forced-labor programs, 8 million
foreigners were in use as forced laborers within the borders of the
Reich. The largest groups consisted of civilians rounded up from the occupied
territories of the Soviet Union (mostly young women) and Poland as well
as in the West, POWs from France, Poland, the Soviet Union and Italy,
and Jewish and other laborers provided by the SS concentration camps in "work-to-death"
programs.
In
the longest section of the book, nine people who were forced to work at
Ford Werke - five women and four men from Russia, Poland, Belgium and Italy - recall their wartime experiences in oral testimonies.
A tenth interviews is with a man from Cologne who started out as a young apprentice at
the Ford factory, just as the foreign forced laborers began to arrive, and who
took up resistance against the regime. The interviews are interwoven in
chronological order. We follow each person from childhood to the beginning of
the war and occupation, and learn of their effective abduction by the Nazis,
endless rides in overcrowded cattle cars, sale as laborers to the highest
bidder, 12-hour factory days and repressions of camp life, escape attempts and
punishments, contacts to the German people, hunger and endless bombings, and,
finally, liberation and the return to their shattered homes - in the case of
the Eastern Europeans, to the Stalinist regime and sometimes further
repressions.
What emerges is an encapsulated history of the European
war itself, viewed from the ground by those caught in its cruelty and
insanity.
The interviews were conducted by the NS-Dokumentationszentrum
der Stadt Köln, the city of Cologne's research center
and museum of Nazi-era history. The center organizes an annual program
of return visits for former forced laborers, concentration camp prisoners,
and prisoners of war, which is also described in the book.
The Forced Labor Compensations Controversy
The benefit of forced labor to companies like Ford and Opel who maximized
their use of it was great, especially in preserving and growing operations
that bestowed a great competitive advantage after the war. In exchange, the
former laborers got nothing but misery. For more than fifty years, legal and political obstacles frustrated efforts
to gain compensation for Nazi-era forced labor. The final section of the book reviews that
history, from 1945 to 2000.
The situation changed in recent years as former forced laborers and
their lawyers began to take action against German corporations in U.S.
courts. The first U.S. lawsuit seeking compensation for Nazi-era forced
labor in Germany was 
filed against Ford Motor Company and Ford Werke AG
in March 1998. General Motors and its subsidiary Adam Opel AG were also
sued in a wave of litigation that hit nearly every major German corporation,
from Volkswagen and Daimler-Benz (now DaimlerChrysler) to Siemens and Bosch.
At the same time, hundreds of related suits swept through the German labor
courts.
The book's conclusion reviews the subsequent, immensely complex
negotiations towards a settlement - which involved Germany, the United
States, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Czech Republic, Israel and other
countries, as well as representatives of forced labor associations and
the German corporations themselves. In December 1999 the United States
and Germany reached an agreement under which 10 billion marks were
paid in compensations to individual victims of Nazi-era forced labor -
five billion from the German government, five billion from German corporations
including Adam Opel and Ford Werke. Individual payments ranged from
DM5,000 for victims of forced labor to DM15,000 for the victims of "extermination
through labor." Since the compensation payments were written off as expenses,
about three-quarters of the total sum was covered not by the companies who had
benefited from the use of forced labor by the German taxpayers
The Authors
Reinhold Billstein is a historian of industry and urban life and heads
the International Office at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg.
Karola Fings is a historian and has participated in organizing the City
of Cologne's visitors program for former forced laborers since its inception
in 1989. Anita Kugler is a well-known journalist with die tageszeitung
in Berlin and a historian of the automotive industry. Nicholas Levis is
a writer specializing in international political issues.
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Reichseinsatz
Extermination through Labor
Oral Sources on Forced Labor in Cologne
Unavoidable Questions
To the Reader
Part One
Prologue: The Pre-War Years.
By Nicholas Levis
1 Airplanes for the Führer.
Adam Opel AG as Enemy Property, Model War Operation
and General Motors Subsidiary, 1939-1945.
By Anita Kugler
2 1945. How the Americans Took Over Cologne —
And Discovered Ford Werke's Role in the War.
By Reinhold Billstein
3 Walter Rietig and the Effort of Remembrance.
By Bernd Heyl
Part Two
4 Forced Labor at Ford Werke in Cologne.
By Karola Fings
5 "And they took the 38 of us to Ford"
Interviews with the former forced laborers Kamila Felinska,
Inna Kulagina, Elsa Iwanowa-de Meyer, Anna Nesteruk &
Nadia Schubrawa, Stepan Saika, Kazimierz Tarnawski,
Yvon Thibaut, Mareno Mannucci, and the retired German
Ford employee Fritz Theilen.
As told to researchers at the NS Documents Center of the City of
Cologne.
6 Memory and Liability
By Nicholas Levis
Acknowledgments
Notes
Appendix
"Organization of the Forced Labor System at War Operations" (Organizational
Map)
Glossary
Select Bibliography
Illustration Sources
The Authors
Index
List of Illustrations
Photo Set A. "Homefront Opel" (Photos A1-A17)
Photo Set B. "Discoveries" (Photos B1-B16)
Photo Set C. "Returning to Cologne"(Photos C1-C16)
Tables
Table 1. Foreign Laborers from Selected Countries, August 1944
Table 2. Foreign Labor in Selected Sectors, August 1944
Table 3. Ford-Werke AG in Facts and Figures, 1932-1945
Table 4. German Restitution and Reparation Payments after 1952
Table 5. Company Restitution and Other Payments, 1945-1998
Excerpt from Introduction
[...]
For readers who lack specialized knowledge of Nazi Germany, the Prologue introduces the pre-war
history of the regime, including matters not directly related to Ford or General Motors,
providing an adequate context for the rest of the book.
In Chapter 1, Anita Kugler explores the paradox of Opel and General
Motors in the war years 1939 to 1945, within the larger context of the
rise and fall of the Reich War Economy and its forced labor programs. To
loyal Nazis, Opel was "enemy property" under an alleged "Jewish influence,"
a threat requiring containment. To the Reich's military production planners,
it was a "Model War Operation," the designation Hitler bestowed officially
in 1943. Among its German executives and their state and party contacts,
Opel was a labyrinth of petty power struggles. To its German workers, whether
they liked it or not, and to its foreign forced laborers, it was a "company
community" under the "Führer principle," a miniature regime of terror
and force. To General Motors, it was an investment in need of protection.
Perhaps the most surprising revelations in Chapter 1 concern the actions
of the American GM managers in Germany during the early months of the war,
and up to the spring of 1941, when the last of them cleared out of Russelsheim.
This was well in advance of the German declaration of war on the United
States, on 11 December 1941, but there is strong evidence of subsequent
contact between General Motors in the U.S. and Opel in Russelsheim.
In Chapter 2, Reinhold Billstein uses recently revealed U.S. government
documents and other sources to reconstruct in detail Ford Motor Company's
dealings with Nazi Germany, and Ford Werke's web of operations across Nazi-occupied
Europe during the war. That story is viewed through the lens of the American
capture of Cologne in March 1945. Billstein evokes the U.S. 1st Army's
march to the Rhine and the hundred days of American rule in Cologne, before
the city was passed to British control. He describes the Allied efforts
to rescue and return millions of liberated forced laborers to their home
countries.
During this period, a group of U.S. investigators confiscated hundreds
of Ford Werke documents and compelled Ford's German executives to write
statements on their wartime activities. These served as exhibits in a secret
September 1945 U.S. government "Report on Ford Werke Aktiengesellschaft."
The men who evaluated that report were split in the larger, fateful debate
over the future of Germany itself, and over the postwar international economic
order. Passions ran high. There was universal revulsion at the revelation
of Nazi crimes. But in 1945 the American policy makers were also distressed
by the immediate problem, with winter coming, of how to handle the ruined
German society. Some of the key economic decision makers in the U.S. military
government at that time were General Motors executives who had, until 1941,
served as directors at Opel. In the end, many conflicting interests were
at work in the decision not to publicize the U.S. government's "Report on
Ford Werke Aktiengesllschaft," let alone to act upon its critical findings on Ford Motor Company and Ford Werke.
Taken together, the first two chapters present the wartime histories
of Opel and Ford Werke in the tradition of classical historical scholarship.
Although the events on the ground are described in detail, they are viewed
largely through the perspectives and choices of leading political and economic
decision makers.
We then turn to the same story viewed from the perspective of the forced
laborers and other individuals trapped within the Nazi machinery of terror.
The second part of this book is an in-depth scholarly and oral history
of forced labor at Ford Werke in Cologne. As a transition, Chapter 3 presents
a tribute, by the writer and Russelsheim town historian Bernd Heyl, to
Walter Rietig, an Opel worker who was executed as a resistance organizer
by the Nazis in 1942. Rietig kept up contacts between the German resistance
and the French prisoners of war at Opel in Russelsheim.
In Chapter 4, Karola Fings uses interviews and documents to piece together
a vivid portrait of life at Ford Werke's wartime labor camps for foreign
civilian forced laborers, prisoners of war, and concentration camp prisoners.
She examines the company's decisions with regard to forced labor, and the
consequences faced (or avoided) after the war by some of the executives
responsible for those decisions.
In Chapter 5, ten people who worked as forced laborers or apprentices
at Ford Werke in the years 1942 to 1945 relate, in their own words, their
memories of the war and its aftermath. Their stories are a monument to
perseverance under conditions that many present-day readers of this book may
find hard to imagine.
One of the interviews was held in Cologne in 1995 with Elsa Iwanowa,
formerly a Soviet citizen. Today she lives in Belgium. She was the first
plaintiff in the March 1998 lawsuit Iwanowa vs. Ford, still in appeal as
of March 2000. Filed with the U.S. federal court in Newark, New Jersey,
this was the first U.S. class action by a former Nazi-era forced laborer
against a company accused of profiting from the practice. As a result,
the 1945 U.S. "Report on Ford-Werke Aktiengesellschaft" and its 221 exhibits
were finally declassified in November 1998, after fifty-three years.
Iwanowa vs. Ford became the first of many U.S. court cases against dozens
of large German industrial corporations. Claims were also raised against
Opel and General Motors. At the same time, a renewed wave of labor compensation
cases swept through the German courts. In the chain of events that followed,
restitutions for Nazi-era forced labor turned into the subject of immensely
complex international negotiations between Germany, the United States,
Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Czech Republic, various other European
countries and Israel, a group of large German corporations and their lawyers,
the lawyers of the plaintiffs, victims' associations in the various countries,
and Jewish victims' claims groups...
For those among our readers who are not historians, I shall
now outline, in general facts and statistics, the current consensus among
historians concerning the Nazi-era forced labor programs known as "Reichseinsatz."
The subject raises inevitable questions about what made such a regime possible
in the first place, and about the present-day ramifications of the Second
World War...
Hardcover, 350 pages, 59 illustrations, select bibliography, index.
Published by Berghahn Books,
New York and Oxford.
English versions (c) 2000 by Nicholas Levis.
Mail your comments to newyorkcity@snafu.de
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