General Motors, the largest corporation on earth today, has been
the owner since 1929 of Adam Opel AG, Russelsheim, the maker of
Opel cars. Ford Motor Company in 1931 built the Ford Werke factory
in Cologne, now the headquarters of European Ford. In this book,
historians tell the astonishing story of what happened at Opel and
Ford Werke under the Third Reich, and of the aftermath today. Long
before the Second World War, key American executives at Ford and
General Motors were eager to do business with Nazi Germany. Ford
Werke and Opel became indispensable suppliers to the German armed
forces, together providing most of the trucks that later motorized
the Nazi attempt to conquer Europe. After the outbreak of war in
1939, Opel converted its largest factory to warplane parts
production, and both companies set up extensive maintenance and
repair networks to help keep the war machine on wheels. During the
war, the Nazi Reich used millions of POWs, civilians from
German-occupied countries, and concentration camp prisoners as
forced laborers in the German homefront economy. Starting in 1940,
Ford Werke and Opel also made use of thousands of forced laborers.
POWs and civilian detainees, deported to Germany by the Nazi
authorities, were kept at private camps owned and managed by the
companies. In the longest section of the book, ten people who were
forced to work at Ford Werke recall their experiences in oral
testimonies. For more than fifty years, legal and political
obstacles frustrated efforts to gain compensation for Nazi-era
forced labor; in the most recent case, a $12 billion lawsuit was
filed against the computer giant I.B.M. by a group of Gypsy
organizations. In 1998, former forced laborers filed dozens of
class action lawsuits against German corporations in U.S. courts.
The concluding chapter reviews the subsequent, immensely complex
negotiations towards a settlement - which involved Germany, the
United States, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Czech Republic,
Israel and several other countries, as well as dozens of well-known
German corporations.
General
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