•k,
No Extra Charge
Carpet Cleaning
ON THE COVER
lOwii.CUrge,fo,r heavily soiled
or *Iiiiiiffic areas. Many
taniri:charge more for "dirty"
fl
carpet!
Hitler's Carmaker from page 18
Charge for stain .
1;ival! Well send our chemist
t ttlr home at No Extra Charge!
l~l o Ettrit:Charge for weekend
make money out of the process, or
business won't work!'
Gen. Lucius Clay, who oversaw war
materiel contracts, confessed, "I had to
put into production schedule the larg-
est procurement program the world
had ever seen. Where would I find
somebody to do that? I went to General
Motors:'
GM also reaped the financial ben-
efits of its relationship with the Third
Reich. During the pre-war Hitler years,
GM entered its Opel proceeds under
reserves" instead of listing the prof-
its as ordinary income. Then during
America's war years, GM declared it
had abandoned its Nazi subsidiary and
took a complete tax write-off under
special legislation signed by Roosevelt
in October 1942. The write-off of
nearly $35 million created a tax reduc-
tion of "approximately $22.7 million"
or about $285 million in 21st-century
money, according to an internal Opel
document.
And Opel's Carl Luer kept on mak-
ing profits for the company during
those war years. Opel produced trucks,
bomber engines, land mines, torpedo
detonators and other war materiel, a
significant amount of it by prisoner
laborers or other coerced workers.
Those profits — and GM's 100 percent
stock ownership — were preserved by
Luer, even though GM and Opel osten-
sibly severed ties with each other after
America entered the war.
During the Hitler years, many of
those excess profits were used to
acquire other companies and proper-
ties, only increasing Opel's assets in
Germany. After the war, starting in
1948, GM began regaining control over
Opel operations and eventually its
monumental assets as well as blocked
dividends. GM also collected some $33
million in "war reparations" because
the Allies had bombed its German
facilities.
cleanings. We clean 7 days a
week for No Extra Charge!
Stairs & Halls priced separately. Rooms over 250 sq. ft. & loose
cushions slightly higher. Some other restrictions apply.
Excludes Furniture, Oriental & Area rugs, discoloration & carbon stains.
Call within 3 days of carpet cleaning to schedule a chemist
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,
20
December 7 2006
iN
Examining The Past
In 1974, a generation after World War
II, the company's controversial history.
was resurrected by the U.S. Senate
Judiciary Committee's subcommittee
on Antitrust and Monopoly.
GM and Opel's collusion with the
Nazis dominated the opening portion
of the subcommittee's exhaustively
documented study.
The report's author, Judiciary
Committee staff attorney Bradford
Snell, used GM's collaboration with
the Third Reich as a moral backdrop
to help explain the automakers' plan in
more than 40 cities, to subvert popular,
clean-running electric public transit
and convert it to petroleum-burning
motor buses, which would be made by
GM. (See related story on our Web site,
JNonline.us.)
After Snell's report was presented,
GM immediately went on the counter-
attack, denying Snell's charges about
both its domestic conduct and its col-
lusion with the Nazis.
Following the release of the Snell
report, the automaker then created
its own 88-page rebuttal report titled,
"The Truth About American Ground
Transport:' whose entire first section
was headlined: "General Motors Did
Not Assist the Nazis in World War IL"
Another generation later, in the late
1990s, GM's collaboration with the
Nazis was again resurrected when
Nazi-era slave laborers threatened
to sue GM and Ford for reparations.
At the time, a GM spokesman told a
reporter at the Washington Post that
the company "did not assist the Nazis
in any way during WWII." The effort
to sue GM and Ford was unsuccess-
ful, but both Ford and GM, concerned
about the facts that might come to
light, commissioned histories of their
Nazi-related past.
Ford issued its 2001 report, com-
piled by historian Simon Reich, plus
the original underlying documenta-
tion, all of which was made available
to the public without restriction. Ford
immediately circulated CDs with the
data to the media. Researchers and
other interested parties may today
view the actual documents and
photocopy them. The Reich report
concluded, among other things, that
Ford-Werke, the company's German
subsidiary, used slave labor from the
Buchenwald concentration camp in
1944 and 1945, and functioned as -
an integral part of the German war
machine. Ford officials in Detroit have
publicly commented on their Nazi
past, remained available for comment,
apologized and have generally helped
all those seeking answers about its
involvement with the Hitler regime.
As for GM, it commissioned busi-
ness historian Henry Ashby Turner Jr.
in 1999 to conduct an internal investi-
gation. Turner, author of German Big
Business and the Rise of Hitler, was
known for his insistence that big busi-
ness did not make a pivotal contribu-
tion to the rise of Hitlerism.
GM, however, declined to release