Features Forum GHI Research Conference Reports GHI News RETHINKING THE FORD-NAZI CONNECTION Stefan Link GHI DOCTORAL FELLOW IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS HISTORY / HARVARD UNIVERSITY The peculiar admiration that National Socialists had for Henry Ford and the supposed sympathies that the Detroit industrialist harbored for Nazism keep attracting the curious, both academic historians and Internet dilettantes. There is something irresistible about the connection between the man taken to symbolize American industrial modernity and the quintessential villains of the twentieth century. Intriguing anecdotes abound. To name a few: The New York Times reported that a portrait of Henry Ford graced Hitler’s Munich offi ce in 1922.1 Hitler acknowledged Ford in Mein Kampf and Baldur von Schirach testifi ed in court in Nuremberg that “the decisive anti- Semitic book” he had read was Ford’s International Jew.2 According to Prince Louis Ferdinand, Hitler told him over lunch in 1933 that he was “a great admirer of Ford’s” and would do his “best to put his >> the Rise of the Third Reich theories into practice in Germany.”3 German diplomats awarded Ford (New York, 2003), 42, 54. a prestigious decoration in 1938. Robert Ley, head of the Nazi labor 3 Prinz Louis Ferdinand von organization German Labor Front, wrote a letter to Henry Ford from Preussen, Als Kaiseren- 4 kel durch die Welt (Berlin, his Nuremberg prison cell, days before his suicide. 1952), 261. We also know that Nazi engineers and industrial managers adapted 4 The original penciled letter is in the National Archives technological and functional aspects of Fordism. Flow production and Records Administration (assembly lines and vertical integration) had considerable appeal aft er College Park (NARA), RG 238, Entry 51, Box 3. 1936, when the Four-Year Plan sparked renewed interest in industrial rationalization. The Volkswagen plant invoked Ford’s Rouge factory 5 See the essays by Manfred Grieger and Lutz Budraß in as a model, and the German Labor Front hired Ford engineers to Zukunft aus Amerika. Fordis- staff it. Finally, the Nazi-appointed manager of the airplane builder mus in der Zwischenkriegs- zeit, ed. Stift ung Bauhaus Junkers, Heinrich Koppenberg, was a vocal disciple of Ford produc- Dessau and RWTH Aachen 5 (Dessau, 1995). tion techniques. 6 Max Wallace, The American Historians have proposed diff erent understandings of the Ford-Nazi Axis; Neil Baldwin, Henry connection. Some have off ered muckraking indictments of the Ameri- Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (New can industrialist as a Nazi sympathizer and war profi teer.6 For others, York, 2001). the connection exhibited Nazi “reactionary modernism,” that para- 7 Jeff rey Herf, Reactionary doxical fusion of technological zeal and anti-modern romanticism Modernism: Technology, Cul- 7 ture, and Politics in Weimar supposedly characteristic of Nazism. Others again have suggested and the Third Reich (Cam- bridge, 1984); Philipp Gassert, Amerika im Dritten 1 “Berlin Hears Ford Is Back- can’s Portrait and Book in 2 Quoted in Max Wallace, The Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda ing Hitler—Bavarian Anti- His Offi ce,” New York Times, American Axis: Henry Ford, und Volksmeinung, 1933- Semitic Chief Has Ameri- December 20, 1922. Charles Lindbergh, and >> 1945 (Stuttgart, 1995). LINK | RETHINKING THE FORD-NAZI CONNECTION 135 a structural nexus between Fordism and fascism. In this vein, Ford- ism is essentially understood as a device of capitalist control over the industrial workforce. In Germany, it is asserted, Fordism only became dominant under Nazism.8 But despite these interpretations, the Ford-Nazi connection still leaves us with considerable uneasiness. It fi ts only awkwardly into the master narratives of a historiography still dominated by national conceptual frameworks. In the American case, the status of Henry Ford as a herald of the roaring 1920s makes it diffi cult to integrate his anti-Semitism and indelicate political leanings into a unifi ed appreciation of his historical role, which, in turn, creates the cliché of the man as an “enigma.” Meanwhile, in German historiography, the juxtaposition of “Ford” and “Nazis” is still more likely to elicit ruminations about the relationship between National Socialism and modernity rather than empirical investigation. The quality of speculation and insinuation that pervades much of the writing on Ford and the Nazis, I believe, is owed to the weak development of transnational interpretive frameworks for the 1920s and 1930s. To be sure, there are ambitious attempts to embed the specifi c Nazi reception of Ford and Fordism within the longitudinal context of the German “Fordist century.”9 Yet the Ford-Nazi connec- tion looks diff erent once we withdraw this national lens and observe the remarkable global career that Ford’s ideas and practices enjoyed during the 1920s and 1930s. Nazis were hardly the only ones excited about Henry Ford during the interwar years—Ford had fans among 8 Karl Heinz Roth, “Fordismus illiberal modernizers across the globe. This was partly due to his und Faschismus. Schlaglich- notoriety as a major organ of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. But it ter auf die Geschichte des Reemtsma-Konzerns 1910- also stemmed from the fact that Ford’s industrial philosophy seemed 1945,” Bulletin für Faschis- to off er a productivist strategy for transcending liberal capitalism mus- und Weltkriegsforschung 30 (2007): 1-30; Rüdiger from the Right. Hachtmann, “Fordismus und Sklavenarbeit. Thesen zur be- The purpose of this essay, then, is to provide some contextualizing trieblichen Rationalisierungs- bewegung 1941 bis 1944,” evidence for the familiar stories of the Ford-Nazi connection and to Potsdamer Bulletin für Zeithi- embed them in contemporaneous, transnational contexts. To do so, storische Studien 43/44 (2008): 21-34. it is fi rst necessary to clear up some misunderstandings of Henry Ford’s place within the American corporate arena in the interwar 9 Adelheid von Saldern and Rüdiger Hachtmann, “Das for- years. Far from typifying American capitalist modernity, Ford and his distische Jahrhundert: Eine company represented a producerist critique of liberal American capi- Einleitung,” Zeithistorische Forschungen Online 6 (2009), talism. Next, I want to situate the Weimar Nazi reception of Ford’s http://www.zeithistorische- antisemitica within a broader global reshaping of the anti-Semitic forschungen.de/site/ 40208942/default.aspx. discourse aft er World War I. I then off er some context for the 1938 136 BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 49 | FALL 2011 Features Forum GHI Research Conference Reports GHI News episode of Hitler awarding Ford a medal. Aft er briefl y touching on the Nazi Volkswagen project, the essay ends by pointing out that the affi nity between “fascism and Fordism” does not look quite as com- pelling once we acknowledge the simultaneous Soviet adaptation of Fordism. In sum, these transnational contexts suggest that we may understand the Ford-Nazi connection as having sprung from a shared background ideology characteristic of the global interwar years: the search for illiberal alternatives to liberal capitalism. Ford Myths To understand the appeal that Ford exerted on the global Right in the interwar years—Nazis included—we must fi rst dispel a few preva- lent myths about Henry Ford and his company. Following Antonio Gramsci’s classic equation of “Americanism and Fordism,”10 historians too oft en have taken Ford as the archetype of American industrial capitalism for this period. But, in truth, Ford Motor Company serves poorly as an emblem of the “New Era” of the 1920s and was entirely sidelined during the New Deal. Between 1919 and 1921, Ford Motor Company (FMC) underwent a major restructuring. Aft er this, the company occupied a unique position in the American corporate arena, which it retained until 1941, when Edsel Ford agreed to war contracts against the wishes of his father Henry. It was only dur- ing this period that FMC became the autarchic production giant so admired by thousands of visitors from across the globe. During the same period, however, the American corporate mainstream moved in a rather diff erent direction. The 1920s completed the penetration of corporations into the stock market, increasing access to capital and boosting the growth of “New Era” capitalism. Meanwhile, Henry Ford had bought up all minority shares of FMC over the course of 1919, aft er which it remained the only American company of comparable size whose shares were not traded on the New York Stock Exchange. (In fact, FMC only went pub- lic in 1957.) While its competitor General Motors pioneered a model of corporate governance that relied entirely on professional manag- ers, FMC fortifi ed the charismatic leadership of its founder. Hence, the separation of ownership and management, which increasingly dominated American corporations in the 1920s, did not aff ect FMC until aft er WWII. FMC’s River Rouge complex, which took up full 10 Antonio Gramsci, “Ameri- canism and Fordism,” production in 1920, vertically integrated the supply of raw materials in Selections from the to an unprecedented degree, producing steel, glass, and lumber in Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Quintin Hoare its own branch factories. But as the market for fi rst cars dried up, a et al. (New York 1971). LINK | RETHINKING THE FORD-NAZI CONNECTION 137 strategy of relying on suppliers for parts and raw materials, as fol- lowed by GM, proved more fl exible and helped competitors avoid the massive losses FMC incurred during the