ON

COVER

Hitler's Carmaker

The inside story of how General Motors
helped mobilize the Third Reich.

Edwin Black

Jewish Telegraphic Agehcy

Washington

0

Above: Pierre du Pont, former GM chair-

man, with GM president Alfred P. Sloan Jr.

Top left: German soldiers rest on their

Blitz transport truck, made by GM's

Opel division.

Top right: The Opel Blitz truck was used

for many purposes by the Third Reich.

Here it serves as an ambulance.

n May 20934, after practicing
his Sieg Heil! salute in front
of a mirror, James D: Mooney,
president of the General Motors Overseas
Corp., and two other senior -executives
from General Motors and its German divi-
sion, Adam Opel A2G., went to meet Adolf
Hitler in his Chancellery office in Berlin.
As Mooney traversed the long approach
to Hitler's desk, he began to pump his arm
in a stern-faced Sieg Heil. But the Fuhrer
surprised him by getting up from his desk
and meeting Mooney halfway, not with a
salute but a businesslike handshake.
This was, after all, a meeting about
business — strategic business that would
endure throughout Hitler's regime, reaping
huge profits for the Detroit-based auto-
maker and providing major employment
to German citizens who would eventually
manufacture the trucks that would drive
Nazi troops into Europe.
The automaker's dealings with the Third
Reich were well documented in thousands
of pages of little-known and restricted
Nazi-era and New Deal-era documents
uncovered in this JTA investigation.

GM has repeatedly declined to com-
ment for this story and has steadfastly
denied for decades — even in'the halls of
Congress — that it actively assisted-the
Nazi war effort.
However, documentation and other evi-
dence reveals that GM and its subsidiary
Opel became willing and indispensable
cogs in the Third Reich's rearmament
juggernaut, providing trucks that would
enable Hitler to conquer Europe and
destroy millions of lives.
The documentation also reveals that
while General Motors'
German operation
was complying with
Hitler's anti-Semitic
dictates, GM's presi-
dent, Alfred R Sloan
Jr., was undermin-
ing the New Deal of
President Franklin
D. Roosevelt, which
Sloan viewed as socialistic and pro-union.

of the vehicles in Germany and about.
65 percent of its exports, dominating
Germany's auto industry.
Impressive production statistics aside,
the Fuhrer was fascinated with every
aspect of the automobile, its history, its
inherent liberating appeal and its applica-
tion as a weapon of war.
To conquer Europe, Hitler knew
Germany needed to rise above the horse-
drawn divisions it deployed in World War
I. It needed to motorize, to blitz, that is, to
attack with lightning speed. Germany later

To the car company, its longtime
relationship with Hitler was always
billions in
about making money
21 st-century dollars.

Why GM?
Hitler turned to GM because he knew it
was the biggest auto and truck manufac-
turer in Germany — indeed all of Europe.
Since 1929, GM had owned and operated
the German firm Opel. GM's Opel, infused
with millions in GM cash and assembly
line know-how, produced some 40 percent

would unleash a blitzkrieg, a lightning
war. Opel built the 3-ton truck named
"Blitz" to support the German military.
The Blitz truck became the mainstay of
the blitzkrieg.
A few weeks after Mooney's long meet-
ing with Hitler, the company publication,
General Motors World, recounted the

Hitler's Carmaker on page 16

December 7 • 2006

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