Business as Usual,

Redemption

excerpted from the book

The American Axis

Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich

by Max Wallace

St. Martin's Griffin, 2003, paper

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In the beginning of October 1942, a convoy of German occupation troops suddenly swept through the Russian city of Rostov without warning, abducting children as young as fourteen and placing them into cattle wagons bound for Germany. The city's Jewish population had already been massacred by Nazi death squads three months earlier. Armed soldiers traveled from house to house, forcing the remaining residents to register at a German labor depot and wait until their number was called. Among the group of detainees was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl named Elsa Iwanowa. On October 8, Elsa and two thousand other young Russians were herded like livestock, driven by blows from the butts of German rifles, onto a transport heading west. After a grueling three-week journey, she arrived in the city of 'Wuppertal, Germany, where she and thirty-eight other Russian teenagers were put in line and displayed before a group of waiting businessmen shopping for human cargo.'

Seven months earlier, the Nazis had appointed Fritz Sauckel as the Plenipotentiary General for the allocation of labor, responsible for supervising a massive slave labor operation designed to alleviate the Reich's severe manpower shortages. The Nuremberg war crimes trial would later reveal that, following Sauckel's appointment, "manhunts took place in streets, at motion picture houses, even at churches and at night in private houses." More than seven and a half million people were forcibly deported from Nazi-occupied territories to Germany to support the war effort. A significant number of these civilian forced laborers were the nearly three million young adults and minors, most of them female, who were captured by the Nazis in the Soviet Union beginning in March 1942.

Pursuant to Sauckel's directive, German industries were encouraged, but not required, to bid for forced laborers in order to meet production quotas. 4 When Elsa arrived in 'Wuppertal, she was purchased like a common beast of burden by a representative of Ford- Werke.

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Elsa Iwanowa was just one of thousands of forced laborers who toiled under brutal conditions at Ford- Werke during the Second World War. According to a postwar U.S. military investigation, as much as 40 percent of the total workforce during 1943 and 1944 were "foreigners." Approximately one-third of those were Russian POWs, while another third consisted of Russian civilians such as Iwanowa. The balance of the foreign workers came from other countries the Nazis had conquered. French, Dutch, Belgian, Polish, and Yugoslav prisoners were separated by nationality in different compounds. A prisoners ethnic origin appeared to be the determining factor in how he or she was treated. According to former FordWerke toolmaker Fritz Theilen, who was German, "The French weren't treated so badly, but Poles, and Russians and Yugoslavs, those were the so-called sub-humans."' In the "New Order" he described in Mein Kampf, Hitler had long ago envisioned the Slavic peoples as a service caste, eternally subordinate to their Aryan masters .

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With a significant portion of the German male work force called in-to armed service, the plant was in desperate need of labor in order to keep up its extraordinary output and maintain rapidly rising profits. As the war progressed, the company lost a significant portion of its workers to the military draft and, with the government demanding a rise in production quotas, the labor shortage was becoming more acute." The minutes of Ford- Werke's custodial advisory council in January 1943 illustrate the company's growing concern: "The labor question has gotten extraordinarily difficult. Military recruitment is no longer sparing our key people.

The Nazis were all too willing to provide a solution.

In August 1944, Nazi armaments minister Albert Speer ruled that the automotive industry was essential to the German war effort and decided to make 12,000 concentration camp inmates available to ensure that the industry produced up to its maximal capacity. Following a meeting between Robert Schmidt and the head of the German Automotive Industry Economic Group in August, the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp drew up a list of prisoners to be sent to work at Ford- Werke. Buchenwald was one of the most notorious of the Nazi prison camps and had become one of the largest labor-exploitation centers in Europe, supplying slave laborers to a number of German industries, including IG Farben, which maintained a factory there. After Schmidt paid the SS an undisclosed sum to purchase the inmates, fifty were delivered to the Ford plant, although it is impossible to determine how many of these inmates were Jews. Right through to the end of the war, Buchenwald prisoners would continue to be dispatched to the Cologne plant.

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If Edsel Ford violated federal laws by continuing to do business with the Nazis after Pearl Harbor, he was not alone. In a small box housed among the U.S. National Archives Trading With the Enemy files sits an explosive series of documents implicating another prominent American family in this serious crime. On October 20, 1942, ten months after the United States entered the Second World War, the U.S. Alien Property Custodian, Leo T Crowley, issued Vesting Order 248 under the Trading With the Enemy Act, seizing all assets of the Union Banking Corporation of New York, which was being operated as a front for "enemy nationals." According to a federal government investigation, Union Banking was not a bank at all, but a cloak operation, laundering money for Germany's powerful Thyssen family. The Thyssens were instrumental in financing Hitler's rise to power and had supplied the Nazi regime with much of the steel it needed to prosecute the war.

One of the partners of the Union Banking Corporation, the man who oversaw all investments on behalf of the Nazi-affiliated owners, happened to be Prescott Bush, grandfather of the American president George W Bush. Through the connections of his father-in-law, Bert Walker (George W's maternal great-grandfather), who has been described by a U.S. Justice Department investigator as "one of Hitler's most powerful financial supporters in the United States. Prescott Bush specialized in managing the investments for a number of German companies, many with extensive Nazi ties. These included the North American operations of another Nazi front, the Hamburg-Amerika Line, which was directly linked to a network set up by IG Farben to smuggle agents, money and propaganda for Germany.'° According to a 1934 Congressional investigation, the Hamburg-Amerika line "subsidized a wide range of pro-Nazi propaganda efforts both in Germany and the United States." Both Walker and Bush were directors of a holding company, the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, that directly financed the line.

Shortly before the government seized the assets of the Union Banking Corporation, in fact, it had also seized American-held assets of the Hamburg-Amerika Line under the Trading With the Enemy Act. A few weeks after the government seized Bush's shares in Union Banking, it seized the assets of three other Nazi front companies whose investments were handled by Bush-the Holland-American Trading Corporation, the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation, and the Silesian-American Corporation. The paper trail indicated that the bulk of Prescott Bush's financial empire was being operated on behalf of Nazi Germany.

According to former United States Justice Department Nazi war crimes investigator John Loftus, who has investigated the Bush family's considerable ties to the Third Reich, Prescott Bush's investment prowess helped make millions of dollars for various Nazi-front holding companies, and he was well paid for his efforts. "The Bush family fortune that helped put two members of the family in the White House can be traced directly to the Third Reich," says Loftus, who is currently president of the Florida Holocaust museum.

In his own investigation, Loftus discovered a disturbing trail connecting the Bush family's money laundering efforts to the Thyssens and their role in building up the Nazi war machine. He believes these connections deserve more scrutiny: "There are six million skeletons in the Thyssen family closet, and a myriad of criminal and historical questions to be answered about the Bush family's complicity."

Fortunately for Bush, who was later elected a United States senator, his name never surfaced in the news when his Union Banking shares were seized by the U.S. government. The only media reference related to the seizure was a brief 1944 item in the New York Times announcing that "The Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway." The article neglected to point out that the company's assets had been seized under the Trading With the Enemy act or that 120 Broadway was the address of the U.S. Alien Property Custodian. If the news had been publicized, it might well have derailed Bush's political career as well as the future presidential aspirations of both his son and grandson. According to Loftus, however, the potential scandal did affect the short-term career plans of Prescotts eldest son, George Herbert Walker Bush.

As the government investigation into Prescott's Nazi dealings heated up, Loftus reveals, the eighteen-year-old Bush abandoned his plans to enter Yale and enlisted instead in the U.S. Army in an attempt to "save the family honor." Meanwhile, Prescott Bush, in an effort to avoid potential government prosecution, volunteered to spy for the OSS, precursor of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. These efforts at cleansing his Nazi ties appear to have been successful. He was never indicted. In 1951, Union Banking assets valued at $1.5 million were released back to the Bush family.

While the Ford Motor Company and the Union Banking Corporation were being investigated for trading with the enemy, hundreds of other American companies continued to carry on business in Nazi Germany and other Axis-controlled territories after Pearl Harbor. However; most of these companies came under immediate seizure by the Nazi Enemy Property Commission. In his commentary accompanying the Ford-Werke report, Simon Reich goes out of his way to stress that Ford was not the only American car company operating in the Third Reich. General Motors, he argues, played a much larger role in Germany, "dwarfing Ford's production there.""' Indeed, GM Opel subsidiary was involved in Nazi war preparations as far back as 1935, manufacturing heavy trucks for the Wehrmacht.

In succeeding years, Opel became an integral part of the German military machine, eventually building engines for the Luftwaffe air fleet as well as military vehicles for the German army. Like Ford, GM'S shares in Opel were never seized after Pearl Harbor, although an enemy property custodian was appointed to oversee the plant in November 1942. Opel, likewise, employed thousands of forced laborers in its own wartime operations. However, General Motors did not appear to enjoy the same cozy relationship with the Reich as did Ford after the United States entered the war. Beginning in August 1942, Opel was forced to fight numerous attempts by the Reich War Ministry to expropriate and even "liquidate" its German operations."' Up to the present day, GM, like Ford, appears to have escaped the moral consequences of its own extensive business dealings with Nazi Germany. According to company spokesperson Dee Allen, "We lost complete control of the company after Pearl Harbor so we can't be held responsible for anything that happened at Opel during the war."

Perhaps the most notorious example of U.S. corporate collaboration with the Reich was exposed by historian Edwin Black in his explosive 2001 book, IBM and the Holocaust. Black reveals for the first time how IBM's German subsidiary developed the information technology that helped Hitler efficiently implement the Final Solution by identifying Jews so they could be rapidly rounded up, deported, imprisoned and ultimately exterminated. With the American parent company's full knowledge and guidance, the automation of persecution was enthusiastically perfected and sold to the Nazis for massive profits.

It may be significant to note that Ford-Werke's attorney and Board Chairman Heinrich Albert also served as the German attorney for IBM. It was in fact Albert who advised the company before Pearl Harbor on how to maintain its independence and protect its profits should America enter the war. IBM has remained largely silent on its wartime role since Black's book made headlines in 2001.

Objectionable though the Nazi business dealings of Prescott Bush, General Motors and IBM may be, however, they differed from Ford in one significant respect. As Edwin Black writes about IBM's Nazi collaboration, "It was never about the anti-Semitism, never about the Nazism. It was always about the money. As far as IBM was concerned, 'business' was its middle name."

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company." Each person had their own unique reaction to the stories coming out of / Germany immediately after the war ended but none perhaps as ironic-some would say fitting-as Henry Ford's. In the spring of 1946, the American government released a public information film called "Death Stations" documenting the liberation of Nazi concentration camps by U.S. troops a year earlier. In May, Henry Ford and a number of his colleagues attended a private showing of the film at the auditorium of the Ford Rouge River plant, a few days before the documentary was to be released to the American public.

Most of the assembled Ford executives sat rapt as the first gruesome images of the Majdanek concentration camp flickered on the screen. They reeled in horror at the graphic footage, which included stark images of a crematorium, Gestapo torture chambers and a warehouse filled with the victims' belongings. When the lights went on an hour later, the company executives rose, shaken, only to find Henry Ford slumped over in his seat, barely conscious. Sitting there witnessing the full scale of Nazi atrocities for the first time, the old man had suffered a massive stroke, from which he would never fully recover.

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If his newly acquired firsthand knowledge of Nazi atrocities convinced Lindbergh that his pre-war position had been mistaken, it was nowhere evident as he returned to America and plunged head-long into another political controversy. A new international body, the United Nations, was being proposed to forge a lasting peace. Lindbergh was not necessarily opposed to this idea, but he firmly rejected one of the new body's guiding principles-human equality. In a speech before Washington's Aero Club on December 17, 1945, he proposed his own alternative to the UN, envisioning a world organization that would possess overwhelming military might and be guided by "Christian ethical principles. 1120 Human beings were obviously not equal in ability, he argued. An equal governing power must not be given to the Russians, the Chinese, and the Indians, who constituted the majority of the world's population. Instead, the organization must be governed by peoples of "ability"-Westerners who had developed modern science, aviation and the atomic bomb .2' He pointed to the Nazi excesses as an example of what happens when power is not tempered with Christian morality and argued that only "Christian virtues" could save Western civilization. He also condemned the recently commenced war crimes trials at Nuremberg for their spirit of "vengeance" against the Nazis who had perpetrated the Final Solution. The media took up where they left off before Pearl Harbor, excoriating Lindbergh for these views. Wrote the New Republic:

He is saddened by the lack of Christian qualities in the postwar world as shown by our "complacency" at the hanging of Mussolini, at the "court trials of our conquered enemies," and in "our attitude toward the famine-stricken peoples we have defeated." There is no similar concern for the victims of Nazism.

In a statement to the Chicago Tribune, Lindbergh implied that the destruction of Nazi Germany had been a disastrous error and that the "seeds of a Third World War were already being sown." He later wrote, "A civilization had collapsed, one which was basically our own, stemming [tom the same Christian beliefs, rooted in similar history and culture."

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Lindbergh was being recast from a Nazi sympathizer to an outspoken Cold Warrior. By the time the Republicans took control of the White House in 1953 after 20 long years in the political wilderness, Nazi ties were no longer necessarily a political liability. Expunging their records of war crimes, the U.S. government had allowed thousands of former Nazi scientists and their family members into the United States after the war to assist in developing an American missile and rocket program. Without this program, dubbed "Operation Paperclip," the United States would never have beaten the Soviet Union to the moon or developed some of the sophisticated missile technology that gave it a military edge during the Cold War. The most notorious of these German scientists was Dr. Werner von Braun, who would have almost certainly been convicted of Nazi war crimes for his part in developing the V-2 missile if he had not been recruited by the Americans.

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After the war, the Lindberghs moved to Darien, Connecticut-a suburban WASP enclave that legally barred Jews and blacks from owning homes by employing restrictive real estate covenants. The town was so notoriously anti-Jewish that it was used as the setting for the Oscar-winning 1947 Gregory Peck film, Gentleman Agreement, about anti-Semitism in America.

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... so successfully has the company repaired its image over the years that few Americans are aware of its founder's sordid past or its own complicity in the events portrayed in Schindler's List. As Ron Rosenbaum writes in his acclaimed book Explaining Hitler "It's remarkable how easily-or conveniently-Ford's contribution to Hitler's success has been lost memory in America."

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The year 2002 marked both the centenary of Henry Ford's first automobile contract and Charles Lindbergh's birth, as well as the seventy-fifth anniversary of Lindbergh's transatlantic flight. As the media reported on these milestones, the focus was mostly on the achievements of the two men rather than their controversial pasts. The fanfare marking the anniversary of Lindbergh's flight indicates that he stands to serve as a role model for a new generation of young Americans. Schools and libraries mounted Lindbergh expositions extolling his historic feat and pioneering spirit.

Society tends to have a short memory. In a 1999 end-of-the-century Gallup Poll, an overwhelming 85 percent of Americans said they admired Henry Ford. Soon after, the Ford Motor Company advertising department commissioned a series of national TV ads featuring company CEO Bill Ford reflecting nostalgically on the legacy of his great-grandfather. Meanwhile, The International Jew continues to circulate on hundreds of Internet hate sites worldwide, and at least one edition is still in print, its influence perhaps increasing in proportion to the rehabilitation of Ford's own reputation.

The revived, rose-colored view of these deeply flawed men requires us to confront some important issues about American society. In his book The Hero in America, historian Dixon Wecter argues that hero worship in the United States fills an urgent need: The country elevates exceptional men to heroes in order to validate America's sense of destiny as a great nation.

Perhaps, then, the popular crusades of Ford and Lindbergh are an indictment of our society's tendency toward idolatry. After all, in both cases, the public adulation that placed these two men on a pedestal offered them the undeserved credibility outside of their recognized areas of expertise to spearhead their campaigns. Moreover, both men were clearly manipulated by others, who understood the nature of hero worship and chose to channel it toward their own destructive ends. Yet naiveté alone cannot explain or excuse the actions of Ford and Lindbergh.

At the start of a new millennium, the men who were once revered as two of America's greatest heroes, then reviled as traitors, are once again widely admired. In the recent celebrations of their lives, there appears to be a deliberate effort to define their importance by their historic achievements rather than the detrimental sociopolitical consequences of their actions, which have been largely downplayed, rationalized, or ignored. Many argue that it is unfair to judge historical figures by today's standards-that they must be judged in the context of their times. An oversimplification at best, this argument must never be used as an excuse to blind ourselves to certain troubling facts.

Modern defenders argue that Ford and Lindbergh were vilified by their enemies for propaganda purposes, that they were unfairly cast as traitors, despite a proven record of patriotism. Many insist that while their isolationist activities were misguided, they stemmed from sincere conviction rather than from sinister motives. Today, the two men are often portrayed as undeniably great, albeit flawed, figures whose racial views simply reflected the society they lived in. The Ford Motor Company insists that it bears no moral responsibility for the actions of its founder or for its own use of slave labor during World War II. They argue that their contributions to Jewish causes demonstrate their commitment to combating antiSemitism.

Conspicuously absent from these arguments, however, is the notion of accountability. In any honest assessment of these men's lives, we are obliged to evaluate the whole of their legacies in an effort to understand the enduring impact of two deeply contradictory figures.

At a time when the western world stood on the brink of catastrophe, both men allowed their prejudices to blind them to egregious horror. With Hitler's armies on the march, Ford and Lindbergh actively chose to impair the Allied war effort, jeopardizing the survival of democratic Europe. During a period when Jews were struggling to establish equality for themselves in American society, both men fanned the flames of anti-Semitism. Ford's company put profit over principles when it became an arsenal of Nazism. After the war, it chose to rehire the men who had perpetrated unspeakable human rights abuses.

In recent years, there appears to be a conscious attempt to portray these actions as mere character flaws. At worst, we are told, each man's conduct was a blemish on his otherwise exemplary career. Yet, their prewar crusades had a devastating impact that cannot be ignored.

Unless biographers and historians factor in the moral responsibility Ford and Lindbergh bear for the consequences of their actions, they do a disservice to the past, and to the future.

The specters of racial genocide in Kosovo and Rwanda, and a renewed wave of anti-Semitism in Europe, have once again cast a pall over world affairs. On the eve of the 2003 Iraqi war, U.S. Congressman James Moran told his constituents that "American Jews are responsible for pushing the country to war with Iraq," in a speech eerily reminiscent of Lindbergh's Des Moines address sixty-two years earlier. Unless we honestly examine the phenomena that fueled the destructive social forces championed by Ford and Lindbergh, we ignore-at our peril-a cautionary tale of intolerance, abuse of power, and reckless hero worship just as applicable to our own times.

The American Axis

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