Product Description

Working for the Enemy

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, today 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. Both companies set up extensive maintenance and repair networks to help keep the war machine on wheels.

During the first two years of the war, General Motors and Ford executives from the United States negotiated with the Nazi leadership the terms under which their German factories were converted to their wartime functions.

James Mooney, the leading GM executive in Europe, met with Hitler, Roosevelt and British diplomats in the months from October 1939 to March 1940 in the hope of mediating a peace that would have been favorable to Germany. Mooney was a recipient of the Order of the Golden Eagle, the highest Nazi honor for foreigners. Mooney shared that last distinction with Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, whose anti-Semitic writings in The International Jew (1921) were translated into many languages at his own expense and served as an inspiration to Hitler's Mein Kampf (1924).

German Ford Werke and Opel executives were integrated into the highest levels of the Third Reich's wartime production planning. As the war wore on and production became the highest homefront priority, they and their fellow corporate managers took an increasingly important role at the Reich Armaments Ministry. Contact between the German subsidiaries and the U.S. mother corporations continued up until the outbreak of war between the United States and Germany in December 1941, and there is ample evidence of subsequent communications.

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. In the absence of millions of German men who had been sent to the front, forced labor became indispensible to German war production and agriculture.

As of August 1944, the high point of Nazi forced-labor programs, 8 million foreigners were being used as forced laborers within the borders of the Reich. The largest groups consisted of civilians rounded up from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union (mostly young women) and Poland as well as in the West, POWs from France, Poland, the Soviet Union and other countries, and Jewish and other laborers provided by the concentration camps in "work-to-death" programs.

Starting already 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 wartime experiences in oral testimonies. Their story is vivid and moving.

For more than fifty years, legal and political obstacles frustrated efforts to gain compensation for Nazi-era forced labor. The book briefly reviews that history.

In 1998, former forced laborers filed dozens of class action lawsuits against German corporations in U.S. courts. The first lawsuit was filed against Ford Motor Company and Ford Werke AG, and General Motors was also sued in a wave of litigation that hit nearly every major German corporation, from Volkswagen and Daimler-Benz to Siemens and Bosch.

This was accompanied by a wave of German labor court cases demanding compensation for Nazi-era forced labor, and served to revive controversy over the still-unpaid compensations.

The book's 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2238979 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 350 pages

Review
"This well-selected anthology... ranges from analytical articles to interviews with people conscripted into the forced labor pool... This is a vital supplement for students of the era or anyone wrestling with the legal and moral debates regarding restitution and repayment for involuntary work." Choice "By carefully examining the automotive companies' collaboration with the Reich and placing it in an international context, the book is indispensable reading for all who are interested in the moral implications of capitalist economies under totalitarian conditions." Hans Mommsen in The International History Review "... comprehensive... a plethora of information and moving first-person testimonies... underscores the myriad human rights implications of today's corporate policies in a global economy." The Nation "... a revealing and meticulously presented series of essays... this compelling and informative contribution... is a significant, scholarly and welcome addition." Midwest Book Review

From the Author
Nicholas Levis, Editor of Working for the Enemy

This book presents in a vivid and readable fashion the current state of scholarly research on Ford, General Motors and Nazi Germany.

Three historians who have published previous German-language works on these subjects - Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings and Anita Kugler - worked with me in creating a complete version of their findings for an English-speaking audience. They engaged in new research and we collected dozens of photos and other materials that appear in the book.

The longest chapter adapts the testimonies of nine former forced laborers at Ford Werke, and of a German man who at the time was an apprentice at the Ford factory in Cologne, into a single, chronological narrative.

I wrote an Introduction and Prologue designed to introduce non-specialist readers to the context of Nazi Germany, its prewar motorization policy, and its forced labor programs during the Second World War.

With three full-size photo essays, a complete glossary, a list of abbreviations, biographical insets, and an index, and with the Notes grouped at the back of the book, it stands alone and is accessible to the general reader as a work of German and American history.

The final chapter reviews the recent controversies over compensations for forced labor and the complicated negotiations between Germany, German corporations, the United States and claimant groups based in various countries.

About the Author
Reinhold Billstein is a historian of industry and urban life and heads the International Office at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. Karola Fings is a historian and has participated in organizing the City of Cologne's visitors program for former forced laborers since its inception in 1989. Anita Kugler is a well-known journalist with die tageszeitung in Berlin and a historian of the automotive industry. Nicholas Levis is a writer specializing in international political issues.

Customer Reviews

Profit knows no allegiance
War, any war, is a sad and brutal indictment of failed politics and blundered diplomacy, but it always finds its willing supporters: militarists, super patriots, blind loyalists and cynical businessmen whose pursuit of profit knows no moral or ethical barrier. Could any war exist without them? This excellent book revealed many pages of World War II's history that I, and I suspect, many other people did not know existed - or existed on such a vast scope. It is both scholarly AND readable. It documents facts, not speculation. There can be little argument as to what went on during those years. Only someone suffering a massive bout of denial could argue with the facts. Still the book, with all that it reveals, and it reveals much, would not have guts or emotion without the perspective of the little guy. If anyone can read Mareno Mannucci's ordeal of his first night at Ford Werke and not see the pathos, feel his complete and total fear when he awakened alone and lost in the blackness of that night, with the sound of air raid alarms filling the tense night air and the shriek of his panicked voice joining the blaring alarms in a surreal duet of terror and helplessness, then that reader is not human. THAT memory of Mareno Mannucci probably is shared in one form or another by countless millions who experienced the war first hand. I wonder how many times he re-lived that night in the ensuing decades. The world should forever remember all the Mareno Mannuccis, whether they were frontline GIs, or Brits, or Russians, concentration camp prisoners, POWs, or slave laborers, but it won't. There's no profit in it. This is a real history book. Buy it, read it and remember it.

Revealing and meticulously presented essays
In Working For The Enemy: Ford, General Motors, And Forced Labor In Germany During The Second World War, Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Kugler, and Nicholas Levis effectively collaborate to present the reader with a revealing and meticulously presented series of essays on the history of German industry within the context of World War II. From airplane manufacture at a General Motors Subsidiary (1939-1945), to forced labor at Ford Werke in Cologne, this compelling and informative contribution to twentieth-century German history is a significant, scholarly, and welcome addition to academic collections and reading lists.