Corporate America and Post-War Germany
When the war in Europe ended, corporate America was well positioned to help determine what would happen to defeated Germany in general, and to their German assets in particular. Long before the guns fell silent, Allan Dulles from his observation post in Berne, Switzerland, established contact with the German associates of the American corporations he had earlier served as a lawyer in Sullivan & Cromwell, and as Patton's tanks pushed deep into the Reich in the spring of 1945, ITT boss Sosthenes Behn donned the uniform of an American officer and rode into defeated Germany to personally inspect his subsidiaries there. More importantly the administration in the US occupation zone of Germany teemed with representatives of firms such as GM and ITT. 62 They were there, of course, to ensure that Corporate America would continue to enjoy the full usufruct of its profitable investments in defeated and occupied Germany. 54
One of their first concerns was to prevent the implementation of the Morgenthau Plan. Henry Morgenthau was Roosevelt's secretary of the Treasury, who had proposed to dismantle German industry, thereby transforming Germany into a backward, poor, and therefore harmless agrarian state. The owners and managers of corporations with German assets were keenly aware that implementation of the Morgenthau Plan meant the financial death knell for their German subsidiaries; so they fought it tooth and nail. A particularly outspoken opponent of the plan was Alfred P. Sloan, the influential chairman of the board of GM. Sloan, other captains of industry, and their representatives and contacts in Washington and within the American occupation authorities in Germany, favoured an alternative option: the economic reconstruction of Germany, so that they would be able to do business and make money in Germany, and eventually they got what they wanted. After the death of Roosevelt, the Morgenthau Plan was quietly shelved, and Morgenthau himself would be dismissed from his high-ranking government position on 5 July 1945 by President Harry Truman. Germany — or at least the western part of Germany — would be economically reconstructed, and US subsidiaries would turn out to be major beneficiaries of this development. 63 55
The American occupation authorities in Germany in general, and the agents of American parent companies of German subsidiaries within this administration in particular, faced another problem. After the demise of Nazism and of European fascism in general, the general mood in Europe was — and would remain for a few short years — decidedly anti-fascist and simultaneously more or less anti-capitalist, because it was widely understood at that time that fascism had been a manifestation of capitalism. Almost everywhere in Europe, and particularly in Germany, radical grassroots associations, such as the German anti-fascist groups or Antifas, sprang up spontaneously and became influential. Labour unions and left-wing political parties also experienced successful comebacks; they enjoyed wide popular support when they denounced Germany's bankers and industrialists for bringing Hitler to power and for collaborating closely with his regime, and when they proposed more or less radical anti-capitalist reforms such as the socialization of certain firms and industry sectors. Such reform plans, however, violated American dogmas regarding the inviolability of private property and free enterprise, and were obviously a major source of concern to American industrialists with assets in Germany. 64 56
The latter were also aghast at the emergence in Germany of democratically elected "works' councils" that demanded input into the affairs of firms. To make matters worse, the workers frequently elected Communists to these councils. This happened in the most important American branch plants, Ford-Werke and Opel. The Communists played an important role in Opel's work's council until 1948, when GM officially resumed Opel's management and promptly put an end to the experiment. 57
The American authorities systematically opposed the anti-fascists and sabotaged their schemes for social and economic reform at all levels of public administration as well as in private business. In the Opel plant in Rüsselsheim, for example, the American authorities collaborated only reluctantly with the anti-fascists, while doing everything in their power to prevent the establishment of new labour unions and to deny the works' councils any say in the firm's management. Instead of allowing the planned democratic "bottom-up" reforms to blossom, the Americans proceeded to restore authoritarian "top-down" structures wherever possible. They pushed the anti-fascists aside in favour of conservative, authoritarian, right-wing personalities, including many former Nazis. At the Ford-Werke in Cologne, anti-fascist pressure forced the Americans to dismiss the Nazi general manager Robert Schmidt, but thanks to Dearborn and the American occupation authorities he and many other Nazi managers were soon firmly back in the saddle. 65 58
Capitalism, Democracy, Fascism, and War
"About the things one cannot speak about, one ought to remain silent," declared the famous philosopher Wittgenstein, and a colleague, Max Horkheimer, paraphrased him with regard to the phenomenon of fascism and its German variety, Nazism, by emphasizing that if one wants to talk about fascism, one cannot remain silent about capitalism. Hitler's Third Reich was a monstrous system made possible by Germany's top business leaders, and while it proved a catastophe for millions of people, it functioned as a Nirvana for corporate Germany. Foreign-owned enterprises were also allowed to enjoy the wonderful services Hitler's regime rendered to das Kapital, such as the elimination of all workers' parties and labour unions, a rearmament program that brought them immense profits, and a war of conquest that eliminated foreign competition and provided new markets, cheap raw materials, and an unlimited supply of even cheaper labour from POWs, foreign slave labourers, and concentration camp inmates. 59
The owners and managers of America's leading corporations admired Hitler because in his Third Reich they could make money like nowhere else, and because he stomped on German labour and swore to destroy the Soviet Union, homeland of international communism. Edwin Black wrongly believes that IBM was atypical of American corporations in flourishing from capitalism's great fascist feast on the banks of the Rhine. Many, if not all of these corporations, took full advantage of the elimination of labour unions and left-wing parties and the orgy of orders and profits made possible by rearmament and war. They betrayed their country by producing all sorts of equipment for Hitler's war machine even after Pearl Harbor, and they objectively helped the Nazis to commit horrible crimes. These technicalities, however, did not seem to perturb the owners and managers in Germany and even in the US, who were aware of what was going on overseas. All that mattered to them, clearly, was that unconditional collaboration with Hitler allowed them to make profits like never before; their motto might well have been: "profits über Alles." 60
After the war, the capitalist masters and associates of the fascist monster distanced themselves à la Dr. Frankenstein from their creature, and loudly proclaimed their preference for democratic forms of government. Today, most of our political leaders and our media want us to believe that "free markets" — a euphemistic code word for capitalism — and democracy are Siamese twins. Even after World War II, however, capitalism, and especially American capitalism, continued to collaborate cozily with fascist regimes in countries such as Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Chile, while supporting extreme-right movements, including death squads and terrorists, in Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere. One might say that in the headquarters of the corporations, whose collective interest is clearly reflected in American government policies, nostalgia has lingered on for the good old days of Hitler's Third Reich, which was a paradise for German as well as American and other foreign firms: no left-wing parties, no unions, unlimited numbers of slave labourers, and an authoritarian state that provided the necessary discipline and arranged for an "armament boom" and eventually a war that brought "horizonless profits," as Black writes, alluding to the case of IBM. These benefits could more readily be expected from a fascist dictatorship than from a genuine democracy, hence the support for the Francos, Suhartos, and other Pinochets of the post-war world. But even within democratic societies, capitalism actively seeks the cheap and meek labour that Hitler's regime served up on a silver platter, and recently it has been by means of stealthy instruments such as downsizing and globalization, rather than the medium of fascism, that American and international capital have sought to achieve the corporate Nirvana of which Hitler's Germany had provided a tantalizing foretaste. 61
Notes
1 Michael Dobbs, "US Automakers Fight Claims of Aiding Nazis," The International Herald Tribune, 3 December 1998.
2 David F. Schmitz, "'A Fine Young Revolution': The United States and the Fascist Revolution in Italy, 1919–1925," Radical History Review, 33 (September 1985), 117–38; and John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton 1972).
3 Gabriel Kolko, "American Business and Germany, 1930–1941," The Western Political Quarterly, 25 (December 1962), 714, refers to the "'skepticism' displayed by the American business press with respect to Hitler because he was 'a political and economic nonconformist.'"
4 Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (New York 2001), especially 172–91.
5 Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy: An Exposé of The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933–1949 (New York 1983), 162.
6 Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, "The Hitler Project," chapter 2 in George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (Washington 1991). Available online at <
http://www.tarpley.net/bush2.htm>.
7 Mark Pendergrast, For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Unauthorized History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company that Makes It (New York 1993), 221.
8 Cited in Manfred Overesch, Machtergreifung von links: Thüringen 1945/46 (Hildesheim Germany 1993), 64.
9 Knudsen described Nazi Germany after a visit there in 1933 as "the miracle of the twentieth century." Higham, Trading With the Enemy, 163.
10 Stephan H. Lindner, Das Reichskommissariat für die Behandlung feindliches Vermögens im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Eine Studie zur Verwaltungs-, Rechts- and Wirtschaftsgeschichte des nationalsozialistischen Deutschlands (Stuttgart 1991), 121; Simon Reich, The Fruits of Fascism: Postwar Prosperity in Historical Perspective (Ithaca, NY and London 1990), 109, 117, 247; and Ken Silverstein, "Ford and the Führer," The Nation, 24 January 2000, 11–6.
11 Cited in Michael Dobbs, "Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration," The Washington Post, 12 December 1998.
12 Tobias Jersak, "Öl für den Führer," Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 February 1999.
13 Higham, Trading With the Enemy, xvi.
14 The authors of a recent book on the Holocaust even emphasize that "in 1930 anti-Semitism was much more visible and blatant in the United States than in Germany." See Suzy Hansen's interview with Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt, authors of Holocaust: a History,< http:/salon.com/books/int/2002/10/02/dwork/index.html.>
15 Henry Ford, The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem (Dearborn, MI n.d.); and Higham, Trading With the Enemy, 162.
16 Aino J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens not Darken? The Final Solution in History (New York 1988).
17 Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate, 279; and Higham, Trading With the Enemy, 161.
18 Upton Sinclair, The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America (Pasadena, CA 1937), 236.
19 Higham, Trading With the Enemy, 162–4.
20 See Bernd Martin, Friedensinitiativen und Machtpolitik im Zweiten Weltkrieg 1939–1942 (Düsseldorf 1974); and Richard Overy, Russia's War (London 1998), 34–5.
21 See Clement Leibovitz and Alvin Finkel, In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion (New York 1998).
22 John H. Backer, "From Morgenthau Plan to Marshall Plan," in Robert Wolfe, ed., Americans as Proconsuls: United States Military Governments in Germany and Japan, 1944–1952 (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL 1984), 162.
23 Mooney is cited in Andreas Hillgruber, ed., Staatsmänner und Diplomaten bei Hitler. Vertrauliche Aufzeichnungen über Unterredungen mit Vertretern des Auslandes 1939–1941 (Frankfurt am Main 1967), 85.
24 Anita Kugler, "Das Opel-Management während des Zweiten Weltkrieges. Die Behandlung 'feindlichen Vermögens' und die 'Selbstverantwortung' der Rüstungsindustrie," in Bernd Heyl and Andrea Neugebauer, ed., "... ohne Rücksicht auf die Verhältnisse": Opel zwischen Weltwirtschaftskrise and Wiederaufbau, (Frankfurt am Main 1997), 35–68, and 40–1; "Flugzeuge für den Führer. Deutsche 'Gefolgschaftsmitglieder' und ausländische Zwangsarbeiter im Opel-Werk in Rüsselsheim 1940 bis 1945," in Heyl and Neugebauer, "... ohne Rücksicht auf die Verhältnisse," 69–92; and Hans G. Helms, "Ford und die Nazis," in Komila Felinska, ed., Zwangsarbeit bei Ford (Cologne 1996), 113.
25 Higham, Trading With the Enemy, 93, and 95.
26 Jersak, "Öl für den Fühier"; Bernd Martin, "Friedens-Planungen der multinationalen Grossindustrie (1932–1940) als politische Krisenstrategie," Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 2 (1976), 82.
27 Cited in Dobbs, "U.S. Automakers."
28 Jamie Lincoln Kitman, "The Secret History of Lead," The Nation, 20 March 2002.
29 Higham, Trading With the Enemy, 97; Ed Cray, Chrome Colossus: General Motors and its Times (New York 1980), 315; and Anthony Sampson, The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Made (New York 1975), 82.
30 David Lanier Lewis, The Public Image of Henry Ford: an American Folk Hero and His Company (Detroit 1976), 222, and 270.
31 Ralph B. Levering, American Opinion and the Russian Alliance, 1939–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC 1976), 46; and Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–45 (Lincoln, NE 1983), 433–34.
32 The hope for a long, drawn-out conflict between Berlin and Moscow was reflected in many newspaper articles and in the much-publicized remark uttered by Senator Harry S. Truman on 24 June 1941, only two days after the start of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union: "If we see that Germany is winning, we should help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we should help Germany, so that as many as possible perish on both sides ...." Levering, American Opinion, 46–7.
33 Even as late as 5 December 1941, just two days before the Japanese strike against Pearl Harbor, a caricature in Hearst's Chicago Tribune suggested that it would be ideal for "civilization" if these "dangerous beasts," the Nazis and the Soviets, "destroyed each other." The Chicago Tribune caricature is reproduced in Roy Douglas, The World War 1939–1943: The Cartoonists' Vision (London and New York 1990), 86.
34 Clive Ponting, Armageddon: The Second World War (London 1995), 106; and Stephen E. Ambrose, Americans at War (New York 1998), 76–77.
35 Jersak, "Öl fürden Führer." Jersak used a "top secret" document produced by the Wehrmacht Reichsstelle für Mineralöl, now in the military section of the Bundesarchiv (Federal Archives), File RW 19/2694. See also Higham, Trading With the Enemy, 59–61.
36 James V. Compton, "The Swastika and the Eagle," in Arnold A. Offner, ed., America and the Origins of World War II, 1933–1941 (New York 1971), 179–83; Melvin Small, "The 'Lessons' of the Past: Second Thoughts about World War II," in Norman K. Risjord , ed., Insights on American History. Volume II (San Diego 1988), 20; and Andreas Hillgruber, ed., Der Zweite Weltkrieg 1939–1945: Kriegsziele und Strategie der Grossen Mächte, 5th ed., (Stuttgart 1989), 83–4.
37 Helms, "Ford und die Nazis," 114.
38 Helms, "Ford und die Nazis," 14–5; and Higham, Trading With the Enemy, 104–5.
39 Silverstein, "Ford and the Führer," 15–6; and Lindner, Das Reichskommüsariet, 121.
40 Kugler, "Das Opel-Management," 52, 61 ff., and 67; and Kugler, "Flugzeuge," 85.
41 Snell, "GM and the Nazis," Ramparts, 12 (June 1974), 14–15; Kugler, "Das Opel-Management," 53, and 67; and Kugler, "Flugzeuge," 89.
42 Higham, Trading With the Enemy, 112.
43 Higham, Trading With the Enemy, 99.
44 Lindner, Das Reichskommissariet, 104.
45 Silverstein, "Ford and the Führer," 12, and 14; Helms, "Ford und die Nazis," 115; and Reich, The Fruits of Fascism, 121, and 123.
46 Silverstein, "Ford and the Führer," 15–16.
47 Kugler, "Das Opel-Management," 55, and 67; and Kugler, "Flugzeuge," 85.
48 Communication of A. Neugebauer of the city archives in Rüsselsheim to the author, 4 February 2000; and Lindner, Das Reichskommissariat, 126–27.
49 Helms, "Ford und die Nazis," 115.
50 Gian Trepp, "Kapital über alles: Zentralbankenkooperation bei der Bank für Internationalen Zahlungsausgleich im Zweiten Weltkrieg," in Philipp Sarasin und Regina Wecker, eds., Raubgold, Reduit, Flüchtlinge: Zur Geschichte der Schweiz im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Zürich 1998), 71–80; Higham, Trading With the Enemy, 1–19 and 175; Anthony Sampson, The Sovereign State of ITT (New York 1973), 47; "VS-Banken collaboreerden met nazi's," Het Nieuwsblad, Brussels, 26 December 1998; and William Clarke, "Nazi Gold: The Role of the Central Banks — Where Does the Blame Lie?," Central Banking, 8, (Summer 1997),<
http://www.centralbanking.co.uk/cbv8n11.html.
51 Bernt Engelmann, Einig and gegen Recht und Freiheit: Ein deutsches Anti-Geschichtsbuch (München 1975), 263–4; Marie-Luise Recker, "Zwischen sozialer Befriedung und materieller Ausbeutung: Lohn- und Arbeitsbedingungen im Zweiten Weltkrieg," in Wolfgang Michalka, ed., Der Zweite Weltkrieg. Analysen, Grundzüge, Forschungsbilanz (Munich and Zürich 1989), 430–44, especially 436.
52 Lindner, Das Reichkommissariat, 118.
53 Pendergrast, For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, 228.
54 "Ford-Konzern wegen Zwangsarbeit verklagt," Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 6 March 1998 as cited in Antifaschistisck Nochrichten, 6 (1998),<
http://www.antifaschistischenachricten. ... 06/010.htm.
55 Karola Fings, "Zwangsarbeit bei den Kölner Ford-Werken," in Felinska, Zwangsarbeit bei Ford, (Cologne 1996), 108. See also Silverstein, "Ford and the Führer," 14; and Billstein et al., 53–5, 135–56.
56 Kugler, "Das Opel-Management," 57; Kugler, "Flugzeuge," 72–6, quotation from 76; and Billstein et al., 53–5.
57 GM-financed patriotic posters may be found in the Still Pictures Branch of the National Archives in Washington, DC.
58 Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War:The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven and London 1995), 172.
59 Higham, Trading With the Enemy, xv, and xxi.
60 Higham, Trading With the Enemy, 44–6.
61 Helms, "Ford und die Nazis," 115–6; Reich, The Fruits of Fascism, 124–5; and Mira Wilkins and Frank Ernest Hill, American Business Abroad: Ford on Six Continents (Detroit 1964), 344–6.
62 Higham, Trading With the Enemy, 212–23; Carolyn Woods Eisenberg, "U.S. Policy in Post-war Germany: The Conservative Restoration," Science and Society, 46 (Spring 1982), 29; Carolyn Woods Eisenberg, "The Limits of Democracy: US Policy and the Rights of German Labor, 1945–1949," in Michael Ermarth, ed., America and the Shaping of German Society, 1945–1955 (Providence, RI and Oxford 1993), 63–4; Billstein et al., 96–97; and Werner Link, Deutsche und amerikanische Gewerkschaften und Geschäftsleute 1945–1975: Eine Studie über transnationale Beziehungen (Düsseldorf 1978), 100–06, and 88.
63 Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York 1968), 331, and 348–9; Wilfried Loth, Stalins ungeliebtes Kind: Warum Moskau die DDR nicht wollte (Berlin 1994), 18; Wolfgang Krieger, "Die American Deutschlandplanung, Hypotheken und Chancen für einen Neuanfang," in Hans-Erich Volkmann, ed., Ende des Dritten Reiches — Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs: Eine perspektivische Rückschau (Munich and Zürich 1995), 36, and 40–1; and Lloyd C. Gardner, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy 1941–1949 (Chicago 1970), 250–1.
64 Kolko, The Politics of War, 507–11; Rolf Steininger, Deutsche Geschichte 1945–1961: Darstellung und Dokumente in zwei Bänden. Band 1 (Frankfurt am Main 1983), 117–8; Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (New York 1972), 125–6; Reinhard Kühnl, Formen bürgerlicher Herrschaft: Liberalismus — Faschismus (Reinbek bei Hamburg 1971), 71; Reinhard Kühnl, ed., Geschichte und Ideologie: Kritische Analyse bundesdeutscher Geschichtsbücher, second edition (Reinbek bei Hamburg 1973), 138–9; Peter Altmann, ed., Hauptsache Frieden. Kriegsende-Befreiung-Neubeginn 1945–1949: Vom antifaschistischen Konsens zum Grundgesetz (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1985), 58 ff.; and Gerhard Stuby, "Die Verhinderung der antifascistisch-demokratischen Umwälzung und die Restauration in der BRD von 1945–1961," in Reinhard Kühnl, ed., Der bürgerliche Staat der Gegenwart: Formen bürgerlicher Herrschaft II (Reinbek bei Hamburg 1972), 91–101.
65 Silverstein, "Ford and the Führer," 15–6; and Lindner, Das Reichskommissariat, 121.