General Motors and the Nazis

General Motors and the Nazis PDF Author: Henry Ashby Turner
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300106343
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This book, the first ever based on unrestricted access to General Motors’ internal records, documents the giant American corporation’s dealings with the Third Reich. GM purchased Opel, Europe’s largest automaker, in the 1920s and continued to hold it through the Second World War. Historian Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., uncovers the fascinating story of how the American carmaker conducted business in Germany under the Nazi regime and explores larger issues concerning the relations between international corporations and the Third Reich. The book presents new and detailed information about General Motors’ interactions with Hitler and other Nazi officials, including the carmaker’s attempt to capture the Volkswagen project. It also reveals how American GM executives thwarted a sustained Nazi effort to gain control of Opel. The author concludes with an assessment of the extent of the company’s implication, through Opel, in the Nazi war effort and in the exploitation of forced labor.

General Motors and the Nazis

General Motors and the Nazis PDF Author: Henry Ashby Turner
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300106343
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book, the first ever based on unrestricted access to General Motors’ internal records, documents the giant American corporation’s dealings with the Third Reich. GM purchased Opel, Europe’s largest automaker, in the 1920s and continued to hold it through the Second World War. Historian Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., uncovers the fascinating story of how the American carmaker conducted business in Germany under the Nazi regime and explores larger issues concerning the relations between international corporations and the Third Reich. The book presents new and detailed information about General Motors’ interactions with Hitler and other Nazi officials, including the carmaker’s attempt to capture the Volkswagen project. It also reveals how American GM executives thwarted a sustained Nazi effort to gain control of Opel. The author concludes with an assessment of the extent of the company’s implication, through Opel, in the Nazi war effort and in the exploitation of forced labor.

Ford, General Motors, and the Nazis

Ford, General Motors, and the Nazis PDF Author: Scott Nehmer
Publisher: Author House
ISBN: 1491810157
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
The threat of concentration camps, untimely strikes, and propaganda influenced Ford and GM's war efforts in the U.S. and Europe. Dealing with both the brutal Nazi regime and Communist attempts to influence American opinion, leaders at Ford and GM attempt to balance loyalty to their corporations and homeland.

Working for the Enemy

Working for the Enemy PDF Author: Reinhold Billstein
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782387854
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
General Motors, the largest corporation on earth today, has been the owner since 1929 of Adam Opel AG, Russelsheim, the maker of Opel cars. Ford Motor Company in 1931 built the Ford Werke factory in Cologne, now the headquarters of European Ford. In this book, historians tell the astonishing story of what happened at Opel and Ford Werke under the Third Reich, and of the aftermath today. 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 the outbreak of war in 1939, Opel converted its largest factory to warplane parts production, and both companies set up extensive maintenance and repair networks to help keep the war machine on wheels. During the war, the Nazi Reich used millions of POWs, civilians from German-occupied countries, and concentration camp prisoners as forced laborers in the German homefront economy. Starting in 1940, Ford Werke and Opel also made use of thousands of forced laborers. POWs and civilian detainees, deported to Germany by the Nazi authorities, were kept at private camps owned and managed by the companies. In the longest section of the book, ten people who were forced to work at Ford Werke recall their experiences in oral testimonies. For more than fifty years, legal and political obstacles frustrated efforts to gain compensation for Nazi-era forced labor; in the most recent case, a $12 billion lawsuit was filed against the computer giant I.B.M. by a group of Gypsy organizations. In 1998, former forced laborers filed dozens of class action lawsuits against German corporations in U.S. courts. The concluding chapter reviews the subsequent, immensely complex negotiations towards a settlement - which involved Germany, the United States, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Czech Republic, Israel and several other countries, as well as dozens of well-known German corporations.

At the Crossroads of Fascism

At the Crossroads of Fascism PDF Author: Jason Weixelbaum
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780355801729
Category : Business ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
The purpose of this dissertation is to reassess and provide clarity to the contentious field of U.S. business in Nazi Germany. This is a qualitative study focused on a limited group of businesses: Ford Motor Company (FMC), General Motors (GM), and International Business Machines (IBM). The primary historical question involves corporate agency: How much freedom did American companies have to operate under the Nazis? These companies created corporate archives relatively recently to provide more transparency about their past. This study utilizes these internal documents. The analysis of those documents presented here demonstrates that FMC, GM, and IBM made deliberate choices to continue building war materiel for the Nazis despite the fact that they were unable to extract profits from their German subsidiaries. Internal documentation shows that American managers knew divestment was an option. In each case, American managers were aware that their company contributed significantly to German war aims. Although the companies have released documents, this study also found that all three companies continue efforts to obfuscate the history of their activities.

Nazi Nexus

Nazi Nexus PDF Author: Edwin Black
Publisher: Dialog Press
ISBN: 091415317X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
Nazi Nexus is the long-awaited wrap-up in a single explosive volume that details the pivotal corporate American connection to the Holocaust. The biggest names and crimes are all there. IBM and its facilitation of the identification and accelerated destruction of the Jews; General Motors and its rapid motorization of the German military enabling the conquest of Europe and the capture of Jews everywhere; Ford Motor Company for its political inspiration; the Rockefeller Foundation for its financing of deadly eugenic science and the program that sent Mengele into Auschwitz; the Carnegie Institution for its proliferation of the concept of race science, racial laws, and the very mathematical formula used to brand the Jews for systematic destruction; and others.

Hitler's American Friends

Hitler's American Friends PDF Author: Bradley W. Hart
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
ISBN: 1250148960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
A book examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided. Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and promote Hitler, leave Europeans (and especially European Jews) to fend for themselves, and elevate the Nazi regime. Some of these friends were Americans of German heritage who joined the Bund, whose leadership dreamed of installing a stateside Führer. Some were as bizarre and hair-raising as the Silver Shirt Legion, run by an eccentric who claimed that Hitler fulfilled a religious prophesy. Some were Midwestern Catholics like Father Charles Coughlin, an early right-wing radio star who broadcast anti-Semitic tirades. They were even members of Congress who used their franking privilege—sending mail at cost to American taxpayers—to distribute German propaganda. And celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh ended up speaking for them all at the America First Committee. We try to tell ourselves it couldn't happen here, but Americans are not immune to the lure of fascism. Hitler's American Friends is a powerful look at how the forces of evil manipulate ordinary people, how we stepped back from the ledge, and the disturbing ease with which we could return to it.

The American Axis

The American Axis PDF Author: Max Wallace
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312335311
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
Examines how Charles Lindbergh's support for Nazi militarism and U.S. isolationism and Henry Ford's business dealings with Germany tarnished their idealized images. Drawing on original lsources, Wallace brings out some pertinent connections between the two men's anti-Semitism and their ties with the rising Nazi regime. Their influence culminated in an abuse of power that helped strengthen Hitler's regime and undermined the Allied war effort.

Forging Global Fordism

Forging Global Fordism PDF Author: Stefan J. Link
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691207976
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
A new global history of Fordism from the Great Depression to the postwar era As the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning automobile industry. In the 1930s, in a bid to emulate and challenge America, engineers from across the world flocked to Detroit. Chief among them were Nazi and Soviet specialists who sought to study, copy, and sometimes steal the techniques of American automotive mass production, or Fordism. Forging Global Fordism traces how Germany and the Soviet Union embraced Fordism amid widespread economic crisis and ideological turmoil. This incisive book recovers the crucial role of activist states in global industrial transformations and reconceives the global thirties as an era of intense competitive development, providing a new genealogy of the postwar industrial order. Stefan Link uncovers the forgotten origins of Fordism in Midwestern populism, and shows how Henry Ford's antiliberal vision of society appealed to both the Soviet and Nazi regimes. He explores how they positioned themselves as America's antagonists in reaction to growing American hegemony and seismic shifts in the global economy during the interwar years, and shows how Detroit visitors like William Werner, Ferdinand Porsche, and Stepan Dybets helped spread versions of Fordism abroad and mobilize them in total war. Forging Global Fordism challenges the notion that global mass production was a product of post–World War II liberal internationalism, demonstrating how it first began in the global thirties, and how the spread of Fordism had a distinctly illiberal trajectory.

Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler

Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler PDF Author: Antony Cyril Sutton
Publisher: CLAIRVIEW BOOKS
ISBN: 1905570627
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
‘The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations can only be described as phenomenal. It was certainly crucial to German military capabilities... Not only was an influential sector of American business aware of the nature of Naziism, but for its own purposes aided Naziism wherever possible (and profitable) - with full knowledge that the probable outcome would be war involving Europe and the United States.’ Penetrating a cloak of falsehood, deception and duplicity, Professor Antony C. Sutton reveals one of the most remarkable but unreported facts of the Second World War: that key Wall Street banks and American businesses supported Hitler’s rise to power by financing and trading with Nazi Germany. Carefully tracing this closely guarded secret through original documents and eyewitness accounts, Sutton comes to the unsavoury conclusion that the catastrophic Second World War was extremely profitable for a select group of financial insiders. He presents a thoroughly documented account of the role played by J.P. Morgan, T.W. Lamont, the Rockefeller interests, General Electric Company, Standard Oil, National City Bank, Chase and Manhattan banks, Kuhn, Loeb and Company, General Motors, the Ford Motor Company, and scores of others in helping to prepare the bloodiest, most destructive war in history. This classic study, first published in 1976 - the third volume of a trilogy - is reproduced here in its original form. (The other volumes in the series study the 1917 Lenin-Trotsky Revolution in Russia and the 1933 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States.)

Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich

Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich PDF Author: Neil Gregor
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300072433
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This is a study of the experience of one of Germany's most important armaments manufacturers - and automotive companies - during the period of the Third Reich. The book examines how the opportunities offered by the Nazi rearmament in the 1930s led to rapid expansion and a surge in profits.