nvestigation
ON THE COVER
.
Hitler's Carmaker on page 17
Far left: New Opel
Blitz 3-ton trucks
await mobilization.
Left: Opel trucks are
delivered by rail to
German troops as the
Nazi invasion expands.
facilities were conscripted and converted
to an airplane-engine plant supplying the
Luftwaffe's JU-88 bombers. Later, Opel's
plants also built land mines and torpedo
detonators.
GM And Sloan At Home
Back in the United States, Sloan tried to
obstruct FDR's war preparedness planning
by dissuading GM executives with needed
manufacturing and production experience
from helping Washington's early mobiliza-
tion plans.
In 1940, Sloan asked Danish-born
William Knudson, who had ascended
to become president of GM, not to leave
the company and help Washington's war
efforts. Sloan, who had become chairman
of the company in 1937, warned his friend
that the Roosevelt administration would
make a "monkey out of you."
Knudson replied,"That isn't important,
Mr. Sloan. I came to this country [from
Denmark] with nothing. It has been good
to me. Rightly or wrongly, I feel I must go."
Sloan retorted, "That's a quixotic way of
looking at it."
By mid-1940, GM had been drafted by
Washington to become a major war sup-
plier for the Allies. GM and its employees
would ultimately make enormously valu-
able contributions to the Allied war effort.
In June 1940, Sloan brought Mooney
back to America to head up GM's key par-
ticipation in America's crash program to
prepare for war. Mooney's mere appoint-
ment sent shivers through the anti-Nazi
boycott and protest committee, which well
remembered his 1938 medal for what the
Nazis had termed "service to the Reich."
The Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League
railed in a letter to Roosevelt: "How should
we interpret the placing of a Hitler sym-
pathizer and a Hitler servant (one must
render service to the Reich to deserve such
a medal) at the throttle of our defense
program? Doesn't that appear suspiciously
similar to the planting of Nazi sympathiz-
ers in key positions?"
When, at the end of 1940, the White
18
December 7 •2006
House began to insist that GM break
off relations with Latin American car
dealers suspected of being pro-Nazi,
Sloan defiantly refused. He lashed out
at Washington, accusing it of protecting
Communists at home while focusing on
GM dealers in South America. "I have
flatly declined to cancel dealers:' Sloan
wrote in April 1941 to Walter Carpenter, a
GM board member and vice president of
du Pont.
Days later, on April 18, 1941, Carpenter
retorted, "I think that General Motors has
to consider this problem from three stand-
points; first, from the commercial, second,
the patriotic and, third, the public rela-
tions standpoint ... We are definitely a part
of the nation here and our future is very
definitely mingled with the future of this
country. The country today seems to be
pretty well committed to a policy opposite
to Germany and Italy."
Carpenter continued with a blunt warn-
ing. "If we don't listen to the urgings of
the State Department in this connection:'
he said, "it seems to me just a question of
time ... The effect of this will be to associ-
ate General Motors with Nazi or Fascist
propaganda against the interests of the
United States ...The effect on the General
Motors Corporation might be a very seri-
ous matter, and the feeling might last for
years."
A few weeks later, in May 1941, a year-
and-a-half after World War II broke out,
with newspapers and newsreels constantly
transmitting the grim news that millions
had been displaced, murdered or enslaved
by Nazi aggression and that London was
decimated by the blitz bombing campaign,
Sloan, then in his mid-60s, told his closest
executives during a Detroit briefing: "I am
sure we all realize that this struggle that is
going on though the world is really noth-
ing more or less than a conflict between
two opposing technocracies manifesting
itself to the capitalization of economic
resources and products and all that sort
of thing."
By now, Assistant Secretary of State
Adolf Berle, whose portfolio included the
investigation of Nazi fronts and sympa-
thizers in Latin America, had had enough
of Sloan and GM executives. Berle circu-
lated a memo asserting "that certain offi-
cials of General Motors were sympathetic
to or aligned with some pro-Axis groups
... That this is [a] 'real Fifth Column' and
is much more sinister than many other
things which are going on at the present
time." Berle called for an FBI investigation.
The FBI's probe of GM senior execu-
tives with links to Hitler found collusion
with Germany by Mooney, but no evidence
of any disloyalty to America. The Aug. 2,
1941, summary of the investigation clearly
listed Sloan in the title of the report, but
Mooney's was the only name mentioned
in the investigative results. However, in a
separate report to FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover, the agent stated,"No derogatory
information of any kind was developed
with respect to Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr."
Profit On Both Sides
After Germany declared war on America
on Dec. 11, 1941, all American corporate
interests in Germany or under German
control were systematically placed under
the jurisdiction of a Reich-appointed
"custodian" for enemy-owned property.
In practice, the "custodian" was akin to
a court-appointed receiver. This gener-
ally meant re-appointing members of the
pre-existing management team, although
these managers no longer reported direct-
ly to their American masters in the United
States.
In the case of Opel, Carl Luer, long-
time member of the Opel Supervisory
Board, company president and Nazi Party
stalwart, was appointed by the Reich to
run Opel as custodian, but only some 11
months after America entered the war. In
anticipation of the outbreak of hostilities,
GM had appointed Luer to be president
of Opel in late 1941, just before war broke
out. In other words, the existing GM-
approved president of Opel continued to
run Opel during America's war years.
Meanwhile, in the wartime months and
years that ensued, 1941-1945, GM built
and operated some $900 million worth
(about $120 billion in today's dollars)
of defense manufacturing facilities for
the Allies. Almost all of the company's
undertakings were propped up by federal
programs that guaranteed profit and "cost-
plus" contracts, various subsidies, tax ben-
efits and other incentives then available to
defense contractors to produce goods for
the war effort.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson later
explained that when a capitalist country
wages war, "you have got to let business
Hitler's Carmaker on page 20
Investigative Sources
Edwin Black's research for this JTA four-part investigative series involved
the review of documents at Georgetown University; Georgia State University;
Henry Ford Museum; Kettering University; National Archives repositories
in Chicago and Washington; New York Public Library Special. Manuscript
Collections; Yale University Sterling Memorial Library and other repositories in
the United States and Germany.
In addition, he had access to confidential FBI files obtained under the
Freedom of Information Act, period media reports from both Germany and
America, secondary literature and other materials researched to produce his
book Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the
World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives.
His sources also included the books: General Motors and the Nazis by Henry
A. Turner; Sloan Rules by David Farber and Working for the Enemy by Reinhold
Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Kugler and Nicholas Levis.