 |
 |
|
|
||
Newsletter : 8fax1202.txt
Directory | Previous file | Next file
>PD
>Israel Faxx
>JN Dec. 2, 1998, Vol. 6, No. 217
Arafat: Jerusalem is Top Issue
Israel Faxx Staff Report
Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat has reignited a hot dispute with
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu by publicly laying claim to the
"occupied" eastern part of the city. At the end of a donors
conference Monday that netted the Palestinians pledges of more than
$3 billion from 43 nations, Arafat registered his satisfaction with
the outpouring, said he was confident the pledges would be
fulfilled and then opened up on Jerusalem.
Referring apparently to East Jerusalem, Arafat said it was "occupied territory" that Israel was bound to relinquish under U.N. Security Council resolutions on an overall settlement with the Arabs.
Ford & GM Suspected of Collaboration with Nazis
By IsraelWire
Historians and lawyers researching class-action suits on behalf of former prisoners of war are busy amassing evidence of collaboration by US automakers with the Nazi regime. The issues at stake for the US automobile corporations go far beyond the relatively modest sums involved in settling any lawsuit.
During the war, the car companies established a reputation for
themselves as "the arsenal of democracy" by transforming their
production lines to make airplanes, tanks and trucks for the armies
that defeated Adolf Hitler. They deny that their huge business
interests in Nazi Germany led them, wittingly or unwittingly, to
also become "the arsenal of fascism."
According to the Washington Post, the Ford Motor Company mobilized dozens of historians, lawyers and researchers to fight a civil case by lawyers specializing in extracting large cash settlements from banks and insurance companies accused of defrauding Holocaust victims. Also, a book scheduled for publication next year will accuse General Motors Corp. of playing a key role in Hitler's invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union.
"General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than
Switzerland," said Bradford Snell. "Switzerland was just a
repository of looted funds. GM was an integral part of the German
war effort. The Nazis could have invaded Poland and Russia without
Switzerland. They could not have done so without GM."
Both General Motors and Ford insist that they bear little or no responsibility for the operations of their German subsidiaries, which controlled 70 percent of the German car market at the outbreak of war in 1939 and rapidly retooled themselves to become suppliers of war material to the German army.
But documents discovered in German and American archives show a
much more complicated picture. In certain instances, American
managers of both GM and Ford went along with the conversion of
their German plants to military production at a time when US
government documents show they were still resisting calls by the
Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their
plants at home.
Although some of the allegations against GM and Ford surfaced
during 1974 congressional hearings into monopolistic practices in
the automobile industry, American corporations have largely
succeeded in playing down their connections to Nazi Germany. As
with Switzerland, however, their very success in projecting a
wholesome, patriotic image of themselves is now being turned
against them by their critics.
"When you think of Ford, you think of baseball and apple pie," said
Miriam Kleinman, a researcher with the Washington law firm of
Cohen, Millstein and Hausfeld, who spent weeks examining records at
the National Archives in an attempt to build a slave labor case
against the Dearborn-based company. "You don't think of Hitler
having a portrait of Henry Ford on his office wall in Munich."
Ford spokesman John Spellich defended the company's decision to
maintain business ties with Nazi Germany on the grounds that the US
government continued to have diplomatic relations with Berlin up
until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. GM
spokesman John Mueller said that General Motors lost day-to-day
control over its German plants in September 1939 and "did not
assist the Nazis in any way during World War II."
The relationship of Ford and GM to the Nazi regime goes back to the
1920s and 1930s, when the American car companies competed against
each other for access to the lucrative German market. Hitler was an
admirer of American mass production techniques and an avid reader
of the anti-Semitic tracts penned by Henry Ford. "I regard Henry
Ford as my inspiration," Hitler told a Detroit News reporter two
years before becoming the German chancellor in 1933, explaining why
he kept a life-size portrait of the American automaker next to his
desk.
Although Ford allegedly later renounced his anti-Semitic writings,
he remained an admirer of Nazi Germany and sought to keep America
out of the coming war. Snell says that Nazi armaments chief Albert
Speer told him in 1977 that Hitler "would never have considered
invading Poland" without synthetic fuel technology provided by
General Motors.
As war approached, it became increasingly difficult for US
corporations like GM and Ford to operate in Germany without
cooperating closely with the Nazi rearmament effort. Documents show
that the parent companies followed a conscious strategy of
continuing to do business with the Nazi regime, rather than divest
themselves of their German assets. Less than three weeks after the
Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, GM Chairman Alfred
P. Sloan defended this strategy as sound business practice, given
the fact that the company's German operations were "highly
profitable."
The internal politics of Nazi Germany "should not be considered the
business of the management of General Motors," Sloan explained in
a letter to a concerned shareholder dated April 6, 1939. "We must
conduct ourselves [in Germany] as a German organization...We have
no right to shut down the plant."
While there was no direct contact between American Ford and its
German subsidiary after December 1941, there appear to have been
some indirect contacts. In June 1943, the Nazi custodian of the
Cologne plant, Robert Schmidt, traveled to Portugal for talks with
Ford managers there. In addition, the Treasury Department
investigated Ford after Pearl Harbor for possible illegal contacts
with its subsidiary in occupied France, which produced Germany army
trucks. The investigation ended without charges being filed.
Even though American Ford now condemns what happened at its Cologne
plant during the war, it continued to employ the managers in charge
at the time. After the war, Schmidt was briefly arrested by Allied
military authorities and barred from working for Ford. But he was
reinstated as the company's technical director in 1950 after he
wrote to Henry Ford II claiming that he had always "detested" the
Nazis and had never been a member of the party. A letter signed by
a leading Cologne Nazi in February 1942 describes Schmidt as a
trusted party member. Ford maintains that Schmidt's name does not
show up on Nazi membership lists.
Similar arguments apply to General Motors, which was paid $32
million by the US government for damages sustained to its German
plants. Washington attorney Michael Hausfeld, who is involved in
the Ford lawsuit, confirms GM also is "on our list" as a possible
target.
| Home My Account Search Contact Us |
by Electronic World Communications, Inc.)
