All the rhinos and hippos and elephants in the world, if gathered in one city, could not begin to create the menace and explosive intensity of the hourly and daily experience of the internal combustion engine. Are people really expected to internalize - live with - all this power and explosive violence, without processing and siphoning it off into some form of fantasy for compensation and balance?
In the silent pictures of the 1920's a great many of the sequences involved the motorcar and policeman. Since the film was then accepted as an optical illusion, the cop was the principal reminder of the existence of ground rules in the game of fantasy. As such, he took an endless beating.
The motorcars of the 1920's look to our eyes like ingenious contraptions hastily assembled in a tool shop. Their link with the buggy was still strong and clear. then came the balloon tires, the massive interior, and the bulging fenders. Some see the big car as a sort of bloated middle age, following the gawky period of the first love-affair between America and the car. But funny as the Viennese analysts have been able to get about the car as a sex object, they have at last, in so doing, drawn attention to the fact that, like the bees in the plant world, men (and women) have always been the sex organs of the technological world. the car is no more and no less a sex object than the wheel or the hammer. What the motivation researchers have missed entirely is the fact that the American sense of spatial form has changed much since radio, and dramatically since TV.From Chapter Twenty-Two MOTORCAR - The Mechanical Bride pp. 234-5 of McLuhan's Understanding Media
Only a few years back (Understanding Media - The Extensions of Man, was published in 1964) Cadillac announced its "El Dorado Brougham" as having anti-dive control, outriggers, pillarless styling, projectile-shaped gull-wing bumpers, outboard exhaust ports, and varios other exotic features to associate it with Hawaiian surf riders, with gulls soaring like sixteen-inch shells, and with the boudoir of Madam de Pompadour. Could MAD magazine do any better.
In the TV age , any of these tales from the Vienna woods dreamed up by motivational researchers, could be relied upon to be an ideal comic script for MAD. The script was always there, in fact, but not until TV was the audience conditioned to enjoy it.
To mistake the car for a status symbol, just because it is asked to be taken as anything but a car, is to mistake the whole meaning of this very late product of the mechanical age that is now yielding its form to electric technology. The car is a superb piece of uniform, standardized mechanism that is a piece with the Gutenberg technology and literacy which created the first classless society in the world.
The car gave to the democratic cavalier his horse and armour and haughty insolence in one package, transmogrifying the knight into a misguided missile.
In fact, the American car did not level downward, but upward, toward the aristocratic idea. Enormous increase and distribution of power had also been the equalizing force of literacy and various other forms of mechanization.
The willingness to accept the car as a status symbol, restricting its more expansive form to the use of higher executives , is not a mark of the car and mechanical age , but of the electric forces that are now ending this mechanical age of uniformity and standardization, and recreating the norms of status and role.
When the motorcar was new, it exercised the typical mechanical pressure of explosion and separation of functions. It broke up family life, or so it seemed, in the 1920's. It separated work and domicile, as never before. It exploded each city into a dozen suburbs, and then extended many of the forms of urban life along the highways until the open road seemed to become non-stop cities. It created the asphalt jungles, and caused 40,000 square miles of green and pleasant land to be cemented over. With the arrival of plane travel, the motorcar and truck teamed up together to wreck the railways.From Chapter Twenty-Two MOTORCAR - The Mechanical Bride pp. 238-9 of McLuhan's Understanding Media
The Torch Lake steam locomotive on the Weiser Railroad at The Henry Ford (also known as the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and Greenfield Village, and as the Edison Institute) is a large indoor and outdoor history museum complex and a National Historic Landmark in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan, United States. The museum collection contains the presidential limousine of John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln's chair from Ford's Theatre, Thomas Edison's laboratory, the Wright Brothers' bicycle shop, the Rosa Parks bus, and many other historical exhibits. It is the largest indoor-outdoor museum complex in the United States and is visited by over 1.7 million people each year. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1969 as Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1981 as "Edison Institute".
The motorcar ended the countryside and substituted a new landscape in which the car was a sort of steeplechaser. At the same time, the motor destroyed the city as a casual environment in which families could be reared. Streets, and even sidewalks, became too intense a scene for the casual interplay of growing up. As the city filled with mobile strangers, even next-door neighbors became strangers.
The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell of urban and suburban man (and woman).
Even before the Volkswagen, observers above street level have often noticed the near resemblance of cars to shiny-backed insects.
It is for motorized man (and woman) that the shopping plazas have emerged. They are strange islands that make the pedestrian feel friendless and disembodied. The car bugs him (her).
The car, in a word, has quite refashioned all of the spaces that untie and separate men (and women), and it will continue to do so for a decade more, by which time the electronic successors to the car will be manifest.From Chapter Twenty-Two MOTORCAR - The Mechanical Bride pp. 239-40 of McLuhan's Understanding Media
The assembly line . . .
In the middle of the nineteenth century great success was achieved with steam-engined cars on the open road. Only the heavy toll-taxes levied by local road authorities discouraged steam engines on the highways. Pneumatic tyres were fitted to a steam car in France in 1887. The American Stanley Steamer began to flourish in 1899. Ford had already built his first car in 1896, and the Ford Motor Company was founded in 1903. It was the electric spark that enabled the gasoline engine to take over from the steam engine. the crossing of electricity, the biological form, with the mechanical form was never to release a greater force.
The car and the assembly line had become the ultimate expression of Gutenberg technology; that is, of uniform and repeatable processes applied to all aspects of work and living.
From Chapter Twenty-Two MOTORCAR - The Mechanical Bride pp. 235-6 of McLuhan's Understanding Media
McLuhan's referencing of Johannes Gutenberg and his invention of movable type and the printing press is fundamental to his understanding of media and the technological extension of human functions and human communication.
In The Medium is the Massage McLuhan and Fiore present a sequence of pages following on from a double page image of a production line underlined by this text;
. . . "as we begin, so shall we go"
Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.These paragraphs are set opposite a page with a line of text repeated from top to bottom:
The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilisation began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. the hand that filled the parchment page built a city.
Printing, a ditto device
Printing, a ditto device confirmed and extended the new visual stress. It provided the first uniformly repeatable "commodity," the first assembly line-mass production.Q. What happened at Henry Ford's factory?
A. Mass production of the Model "T"!
Q. What happened at Auschwitz?
A. Mass murder!
Henry Ford is famous for having introduced the assembly line in the production of automobiles, especially the Model "T" Tin Lizzie. He was also, in his own time, an infamous anti-Semite.
In 1918, Ford's closest aide and private secretary, Ernest G. Liebold, purchased an obscure weekly newspaper for Ford, The Dearborn Independent. The Independent ran for eight years, from 1920 until 1927, with Liebold as editor. Every Ford franchise nationwide had to carry the paper and distribute it to its customers.
During this period, Ford emerged as "a respected spokesman for right-wing extremism and religious prejudice", reaching around 700,000 readers through his newspaper. The 2010 documentary film Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story (written by Pulitzer Prize winner Ira Berkow) states that Ford wrote on May 22, 1920: "If fans wish to know the trouble with American baseball they have it in three words—too much Jew."
In Germany, Ford's antisemitic articles from The Dearborn Independent were issued in four volumes, cumulatively titled The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem published by Theodor Fritsch, founder of several antisemitic parties and a member of the Reichstag.
In a letter written in 1924, Heinrich Himmler described Ford as "one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters". Ford is the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf, although he is only mentioned twice: Adolf Hitler wrote, "only a single great man, Ford, [who], to [the Jews'] fury, still maintains full independence ... [from] the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions."
Speaking in 1931 to a Detroit News reporter, Hitler said he regarded Ford as his "inspiration", explaining his reason for keeping Ford's life-size portrait next to his desk. Steven Watts wrote that Hitler "revered" Ford, proclaiming that "I shall do my best to put his theories into practice in Germany", and modeling the Volkswagen, the people's car, on the Model T. Under Ford, the newspaper also reprinted the antisemitic fabricated text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
On February 1, 1924, Ford received Kurt Ludecke, a representative of Hitler, at home. Ludecke was introduced to Ford by Siegfried Wagner (son of the composer Richard Wagner) and his wife Winifred, both Nazi sympathizers and antisemites. Ludecke asked Ford for a contribution to the Nazi cause, but was apparently refused.
While Ford's articles were denounced by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the articles explicitly condemned pogroms and violence against Jews, but blamed the Jews for provoking incidents of mass violence. None of this work was written by Ford, but he allowed his name to be used as author. According to trial testimony, he wrote almost nothing. Friends and business associates have said they warned Ford about the contents of the Independent and that he probably never read the articles (he claimed he only read the headlines). Court testimony in a libel suit, brought by one of the targets of the newspaper, alleged that Ford did know about the contents of the Independent in advance of publication.
A libel lawsuit was brought by San Francisco lawyer and Jewish farm cooperative organizer Aaron Sapiro in response to the antisemitic remarks, and led Ford to close the Independent in December 1927. News reports at the time quoted him as saying he was shocked by the content and unaware of its nature. During the trial, the editor of Ford's "Own Page", William Cameron, testified that Ford had nothing to do with the editorials even though they were under his byline. Cameron testified at the libel trial that he never discussed the content of the pages or sent them to Ford for his approval (Lewis, David L. (1984). "Henry Ford's Anti-semitism and its Repercussions". Michigan Jewish History. 24 (1): 3–10).
Investigative journalist Max Wallace (Wallace, Max. (2003). The American axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the rise of the Third Reich. New York: St. Martin's Press) noted that "whatever credibility this absurd claim may have had was soon undermined when James M. Miller, a former Dearborn Independent employee, swore under oath that Ford had told him he intended to expose Sapiro."
Michael Barkun (Barkun, Michael (1996). Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. UNC Press) observed:
That Cameron would have continued to publish such anti-Semitic material without Ford's explicit instructions seemed unthinkable to those who knew both men. Mrs. Stanley Ruddiman, a Ford family intimate, remarked that "I don't think Mr. Cameron ever wrote anything for publication without Mr. Ford's approval."According to Spencer Blakeslee (Blakeslee, Spencer (2000). The Death of American Antisemitism. Praeger/Greenwood):
The ADL mobilized prominent Jews and non-Jews to publicly oppose Ford's message. They formed a coalition of Jewish groups for the same purpose and raised constant objections in the Detroit press. Before leaving his presidency early in 1921, Woodrow Wilson joined other leading Americans in a statement that rebuked Ford and others for their antisemitic campaign. A boycott against Ford products by Jews and liberal Christians also had an impact, and Ford shut down the paper in 1927, recanting his views in a public letter to Sigmund Livingston, president of the ADL.Wallace also found that Ford's apology was likely, or at least partly, motivated by a business that was slumping as a result of his antisemitism, repelling potential buyers of Ford cars. Up until the apology, a considerable number of dealers, who had been required to make sure that buyers of Ford cars received the Independent, bought up and destroyed copies of the newspaper rather than alienate customers.
Ford's 1927 apology was well received. "Four-Fifths of the hundreds of letters addressed to Ford in July 1927 were from Jews, and almost without exception they praised the industrialist." In January 1937, a Ford statement to the Detroit Jewish Chronicle disavowed "any connection whatsoever with the publication in Germany of a book known as the International Jew."
According to Pool and Pool (Pool, James; Pool, Suzanne (1978), ""Chapter: Ford and Hitler"", Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler's Rise to Power, 1919–1933, Dial Press), Ford's retraction and apology (which were written by others) were not even truly signed by him (rather, his signature was forged by Harry Bennett), and Ford never privately recanted his antisemitic views, stating in 1940:
"I hope to republish The International Jew again some time."In July 1938, before the outbreak of war, the German consul at Cleveland gave Ford, on his 75th birthday, the award of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreigner. James D. Mooney, vice president of overseas operations for General Motors, received a similar medal, the Merit Cross of the German Eagle, First Class.
On January 7, 1942, Ford wrote a letter to Sigmund Livingston as the Founder and National Chairman of the Anti-Defamation League. The purpose of the letter was to clarify some general misconceptions that he subscribed or supported directly or indirectly, "any agitation which would promote antagonism toward my Jewish fellow citizens." He concluded the letter with "My sincere hope that now in this country and throughout the world when the war is finished, hatred of the Jews and hatred against any other racial or religious groups shall cease for all time." (Arnstein & Lehr, "The First 120 Years" (Louis A. Lehr, Jr.)(Amazon), p. 32)
Distribution of The International Jew was halted in 1942 through legal action by Ford, despite complications from a lack of copyright. It is still banned in Germany.
Extremist groups often recycle the material contained within The International Jew; it still appears on antisemitic and neo-Nazi websites.
Testifying at Nuremberg, convicted Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach who, in his role as military governor of Vienna, deported 65,000 Jews to camps in Poland, stated:
The decisive anti-Semitic book I was reading and the book that influenced my comrades was ... that book by Henry Ford, The International Jew. I read it and became anti-Semitic. The book made a great influence on myself and my friends because we saw in Henry Ford the representative of success and also the representative of a progressive social policy.Robert Lacey (Lacey, Robert. Ford: The Men and the Machine Little, Brown, 1986) wrote that a close Willow Run associate of Ford reported that when he was shown newsreel footage of the Nazi concentration camps, he;
"was confronted with the atrocities which finally and unanswerably laid bare the bestiality of the prejudice to which he contributed, he collapsed with a stroke – his last and most serious."Ford had suffered previous strokes and his final cerebral hemorrhage occurred in 1947 at age 83.
The Model "T" Tin Lizzie
The entire engine and transmission were enclosed; the four cylinders were cast in a solid block; the suspension used two semi-elliptic springs. The car was very simple to drive, and easy and cheap to repair.
It was so cheap at $825 in 1908 ($23,010 today) (the price fell every year) that by the 1920s, a majority of American drivers had learned to drive on the Model T.
Ford created a huge publicity machine in Detroit to ensure every newspaper carried stories and ads about the new product. Ford's network of local dealers made the car ubiquitous in almost every city in North America. As independent dealers, the franchises grew rich and publicized not just the Ford but the concept of automobiling; local motor clubs sprang up to help new drivers and to encourage exploring the countryside. Ford was always eager to sell to farmers, who looked on the vehicle as a commercial device to help their business. Sales skyrocketed—several years posted 100% gains on the previous year.
Always on the hunt for more efficiency and lower costs, in 1913 Ford introduced the moving assembly belts into his plants, which enabled an enormous increase in production. Although Ford is often credited with the idea, contemporary sources indicate that the concept and its development came from employees Clarence Avery, Peter E. Martin, Charles E. Sorensen, and C. Harold Wills.
Sales passed 250,000 in 1914. By 1916, as the price dropped to $360 for the basic touring car, sales reached 472,000. (Using the consumer price index, this price was equivalent to $7,828 in 2015 dollars.)
Until the development of the assembly line, which mandated black because of its quicker drying time, Model Ts were available in other colors, including red.
The design was fervently promoted and defended by Ford, and production continued as late as 1927; the final total production was 15,007,034. This record stood for the next 45 years. This record was achieved in 19 years from the introduction of the first Model T in 1908.
Working conditions at the Highland Park Ford Plant were a combination of enlightened and oppressive dictatorial industrial rule.
Ford astonished the world in 1914 by offering a $5 per day wage ($130 today), which more than doubled the rate of most of his workers. A Cleveland, Ohio, newspaper editorialized that the announcement "shot like a blinding rocket through the dark clouds of the present industrial depression." The move proved extremely profitable; instead of constant turnover of employees, the best mechanics in Detroit flocked to Ford, bringing their human capital and expertise, raising productivity, and lowering training costs. Ford announced his $5-per-day program on January 5, 1914, raising the minimum daily pay from $2.34 to $5 for qualifying male workers.
Detroit was already a high-wage city, but competitors were forced to raise wages or lose their best workers. Ford's policy proved, however, that paying people more would enable Ford workers to afford the cars they were producing and be good for the local economy. He viewed the increased wages as profit-sharing linked with rewarding those who were most productive and of good character.
Real profit-sharing was offered to employees who had worked at the company for six months or more, and, importantly, conducted their lives in a manner of which Ford's "Social Department" approved. They frowned on heavy drinking, gambling, and deadbeat dads. The Social Department used 50 investigators, plus support staff, to maintain employee standards; a large percentage of workers were able to qualify for this "profit-sharing." Ford's incursion into his employees' private lives was highly controversial, and he soon backed off from the most intrusive aspects.
In addition to raising the wages of his workers, Ford also introduced a new, reduced workweek in 1926. The decision was made in 1922, when Ford and Crowther described it as six 8-hour days, giving a 48-hour week, but in 1926 it was announced as five 8-hour days, giving a 40-hour week. (Apparently the program started with Saturday being a workday and sometime later it was changed to a day off.) On May 1, 1926, the Ford Motor Company's factory workers switched to a five-day 40-hour workweek, with the company's office workers making the transition the following August.
Ford had made the decision to boost productivity, as workers were expected to put more effort into their work in exchange for more leisure time, and because he believed decent leisure time was good for business, since workers would actually have more time to purchase and consume more goods. However, altruistic concerns also played a role, with Ford explaining "It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either 'lost time' or a class privilege."
Ford was adamantly against labour unions. He explained his views on unions in Chapter 18 of My Life and Work. He thought they were too heavily influenced by some leaders who, despite their ostensible good motives, would end up doing more harm than good for workers. Most wanted to restrict productivity as a means to foster employment, but Ford saw this as self-defeating because, in his view, productivity was necessary for economic prosperity to exist.
To forestall union activity, Ford promoted Harry Bennett, a former Navy boxer, to head the Service Department. Bennett employed various intimidation tactics to squash union organizing. The most famous incident, on May 26, 1937, involved Bennett's security men beating with clubs members of the United Automobile Workers, including Walter Reuther. While Bennett's men were beating the UAW representatives, the supervising police chief on the scene was Carl Brooks, an alumnus of Bennett's Service Department, and [Brooks] "did not give orders to intervene." The following day photographs of the injured UAW members appeared in newspapers, later becoming known as The Battle of the Overpass.
The Ford Motor Company was the last Detroit automaker to recognize the UAW. A sit-down strike by the UAW union in April 1941 closed the River Rouge Plant. Sorensen recounted that a distraught Henry Ford was very close to following through with a threat to break up the company rather than cooperate, but his wife Clara told him she would leave him if he destroyed the family business. In her view, it would not be worth the chaos it would create. Ford complied with his wife's ultimatum, and even agreed with her in retrospect. Overnight, the Ford Motor Company went from the most stubborn holdout among automakers to the one with the most favorable UAW contract terms. The contract was signed in June 1941.
A year later, in 1942, German soldiers swept into the city of Rostov in the Soviet Union, moving among the homes of Rostov families, forcing them to register at a labor registration center. Elsa Iwanowa, who was 16 years old at the time, and many other Russians were transported in cattle cars to Wuppertal in the western part of Germany, where they were exhibited to visiting businessmen. From there Elsa Iwanowa and others were forced to become slave laborers for Ford-Werke.
Ford-Werke had its origins in the earliest presence of the Ford Motor Company in Germany, a parts operation set up in Hamburg in 1912. At the end of 1924 the US Ford Motor Company established a sales office in Berlin which at the start of 1925 received a permit to import 1,000 tractors. In 1920 the government had imposed a tariff so high that it amounted to a prohibition against importing foreign automobiles, but this was reversed in October 1925. The move had evidently been anticipated by Ford, since on 18 August 1925 the Ford Motor Company Aktiengesellschaft had been entered in the Berlin Companies Register.
During 1925 an assembly plant was constructed in a rented warehouse in the Westhafen (western port) district of Berlin, which was well located for receiving deliveries of kits and components via the country's canal network. On 1 April 1926 the first German assembled Model T was produced, using imported parts.
In March 1929 General Motors purchased a controlling 80% holding in Opel.
Henry Ford's reaction was a prompt decision to build a complete Ford auto-factory in Germany, and before the end of 1929 a site at Cologne (Niehl) made available by the mayor of the city, Konrad Adenauer was acquired by Ford.
On 2 October 1930 Henry Ford, then age 67, together with Adenauer, age 55, laid the foundation stone for the Cologne Ford Plant: construction, which cost 12 Million Marks, progressed rapidly. The assembly operation in Berlin came to an end on 15 April 1931, and on 4 May 1931 the first Cologne produced Ford rolled off the production line.
The company was re-organised in 1939 and changed its name to Ford-Werke. With the outbreak of the War, car production continued at first with the Taunus being made until 1942 but increasingly military production took over. Ford-Werke built both conventional trucks and Maultier half-tracks for the German armed forces. Most notably, Ford-Werke manufactured the turbines used in the V-2 rockets. In spite of the heavy bombing of Cologne, the factory got off relatively lightly and after the war production was able to restart in May 1945 with truck manufacture, the US government having paid $1.1 million in consideration of bombing damage.
There have been some who hold conspiracy theories regarding the relatively light bomb damage to the Ford-Werke factory compared to the devastation of nearby Cologne. An image of the Ford factory is compared with an image of Cologne in 1945 showing the consequence of repeated allied bombing raids in the wordpress blog - Jason Weixelbaum Publications and Research - A blog about history, politics, economics, culture, and technology:
Debunking Conspiracy: Ford-Werke and the Allied bombing Campaign of Cologne.
In the conclusion of his paper he writes:
There is little doubt that Ford Motor Company’s subsidiary in Cologne assisted the war aims of the Nazis. As argued by Snell, Billstein, Wallace, and Yeadon & Hawkins, the factory built thousands of trucks that were used to maintain supply lines wherever Hitler’s blitzkrieg was utilized; however, this should not be extrapolated as a conspiracy that kept the Ford-Werke plant from being destroyed during the final phase of World War II. Instead, it should be acknowledged that the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey was well aware of what Ford-Werke was producing and its significance to the German military. It should also be acknowledged that U.S. military authorities did try to destroy it, but were unsuccessful. When individuals who want to find fault or nefarious conspiracy in the actions of U.S. authorities, they only need look at the two pictures below:
Here is a photo of the city of Cologne in April, 1945, after repeated bombardments by Allied Air Forces.
Here is an aerial photograph from the same time period of the intact Ford-Werke factory. Note the destroyed barracks in the foreground.
To the conspiracy crowd, “seeing is believing.” Nevertheless, this face-value interpretation has been stripped of its historical context and relevant documentary evidence. There are grave instances of U.S. corporations’ involvement with Nazi Germany that should not be overlooked, but poorly-conceived attempts to locate conspiracy where it does not exist undermines serious efforts to examine the relationship between transnational corporations and one of the most reviled regimes of the twentieth century. Without rigorous interrogation of all available sources, the tension between conspiracy theory and transparent, intellectually honest scholarship is likely to cast its own cloud cover into the foreseeable future.The destroyed barracks mentioned in the picture caption were the barracks of Ford-Werke's slave labour.
Probably the most disturbing part of this episode is not that there was some conspiracy to avoid bombing Ford-Werke, but rather, that B-17 bombs did manage to hit part of it. The problem was that they hit the barracks of the forced laborers, and not the plant itself. In yet another “Interpretation Report,” numbered K. 3362, the document presents a fairly detailed picture of the damage to varied targets in Cologne during October of 1944. In a section labeled “Barracks at Niehl,” the report says this: “Barracks at Niehl and at Ossendorf have sustained minor damage, and of a total of 53 hits seen in three hutted camps, 32 have been destroyed.”During the Second World War, Ford Werke employed slave labourers although not required by the Nazi regime. The deployment of slave labour began before the Ford-Werke was separated from the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, while America had not yet entered the War.
From the ground, these attacks were terrifying to the forced laborers who occupied those barracks. There were air raid shelters, as there were at many large industrial plants in Germany, but not everyone was spared. Here is an account from one such laborer, Mareno Mannucci:
“On 14 October, a Saturday, around midday, a flying fortress dropped several hundred bombs on the zone, but nearly all missed their target. They were perhaps meant for the Bayer plant, on the other side of the Rhine. Four of them fell outside our camp. We were already in the shelter, and everyone was okay. But the barracks were damaged by the shockwave. There were no more windows and everywhere the wind came through, and everywhere the rain leaked in. There were dead among the French and two barracks were in flames. There was chaos for a few days. No power, no water, nothing to eat.”38
As this testimony demonstrates, bombs were dropped near Ford-Werke, but narrowly missed, hitting the worker barracks. Eyewitnesses, reports from bomber crews, and intelligence reports confirm that rather than conspiracy, or fabricated attacks, such attempts to bomb Ford-Werke were quite real and deadly.
Robert Hans Schmidt presided over Ford-Werke during the Second World War, and engaged slave labor and the illegal manufacture of munitions, including such manufacturing during the period before the U.S. entry into the War. Once the War was over, "notwithstanding all his carefully publicized efforts to erase the stain of the company's past, no evidence emerged that either Henry Ford II or any other top-level Ford Motor Company executive ever raised any moral objects to rehiring Schmidt, who had presided over one of the company's darkest chapters.
"On March 4, 1998, fifty-three years after she was liberated from the German Ford plant, Elsa Iwanowa demanded justice, filing a class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the Ford Motor Company." In court, Ford acknowledged that Elsa Iwanowa and many others like her were "forced to endure a sad and terrible experience" at Ford-Werke; Ford, however, maintained that cases like that of Elsa Iwanowa are best redressed on "a nation-to-nation, government-to-government" basis. In 1999, the court dismissed Elsa Iwanowa's suit; however, a number of German companies, including GM subsidiary Opel, agreed to contribute $5.1 billion to a fund that would compensate the surviving slave labourers. After being the subject of much adverse publicity, Ford, in March 2000, reversed direction, and agreed to contribute $13 million to the compensation fund.
One of the former slave labourers suing Ford is Elsa Iwanowa, 74, who has testified that she was abducted as a teenager along with 2,000 other children from a Russian village and forced to build military vehicles at the Nazi-run Ford plant.
The lawsuit, the first of its kind against a US company, was inspired by the success of Nazi victims in securing reparations from Swiss banks which had profited from Nazi wartime deposits.
It claims Ford's German plant "became an eager, aggressive and successful bidder for forced labourers", and alleges that senior Ford executives knew that thousands of workers were being abused.
The US district judge in the case, Joseph Greenaway, is due to rule next month on Ford's motion to dismiss the case.
The firm has called the former US secretary of state Warren Christopher as a witness to testify that former US administrations have upheld the principle that governments should decide war reparations rather than the courts.
However, if the newly unearthed documents show that Ford Werke AG was deeply involved in the operations of the death camp, a dismissal is less likely.
Ms Jarosz said archivists were still reviewing the Auschwitz documents to establish the names of slave labourers used by some of the companies involved.
Victims' organisations say there are detailed files with the names of 100,000 workers still in the Moscow archives, which have yet to be released.ture
