The story about Ford & GM involvement with Nazi war effort appeared in
The Washington Post Nov. 30, 1998.  Interest in the topic has been
revived by a 30-billion dollar law suit filed against German companies
by Holocaust survivors who were forced to work as slaves by the Nazis.  
I think there is also litigation in US against US companies with plants
in Germany during WWII.   
 
The following story from last month has some additional facts about the
topic.   
 
August 19, 1999  
  Dow Jones Newswires
 
  Ford Listed Among Companies  Linked To Auschwitz Death Camp
 
  WARSAW, Poland (AP)--Ford Motor Co. (F) is listed  among nearly 500
companies that had links to the  Auschwitz death camp, which supplied
Nazi Germany  with slave laborers during World War II, officials said  
today.
 
  The list, based on newly released Nazi documents from  Russia, doesn't
give information on the exact link each  company had to the notorious
death camp, where some  1.1 million people died.
 
  The list includes both companies that used slave labor and others that
inquired about using workers from Auschwitz, said Auschwitz museum
historians compiling the list.
 
  Apart from Ford's German subsidiary, German industrial  giants such as
Krupp, Siemens, IG Farben and M.A.N.  also are named.
 
  Ford has acknowledged that slave labor was used at its  Cologne,
Germany plant during the war, but says it had lost control of its German
operations during World War II.
 
  "There's no question that the Nazi's assigned forced  labor to the
Cologne plant," said Ford spokesman Jim Vella. "It was out of our
control. ... (But) we don't have anything in our research that pertains
to workers from  Auschwitz."
 
  Barbara Jarosz, the head of Auschwitz museum archives,  said she had
no details about Ford's link to Auschwitz.  Jarosz said archivists are
still reviewing the documents  to establish names of slave laborers,
which will provide  evidence for compensation claims.
 
  Auschwitz museum historians are compiling the list  based on newly
released Nazi documents received from Russia, where part of the camp
archive has been kept since 1945.
 
  The newly available documents include construction  plans, orders for
raw materials or services, invoices and reports from work on the death
camp that the Nazis started building in 1940. They also include lists
of  workers, including camp inmates, used by some  companies, Jarosz
said.
 
  Victims' organizations say detailed files of more than  100,000
workers would be most helpful in their claims.  But those papers remain
in Moscow, where they were taken along with all the other camp documents
shortly after Red Army freed Auschwitz in 1945.
 
  In December, General Motors Corp. (GM) said it hired a Yale University
professor to look into the company's  activities in Nazi Germany.  GM
has said that GM's Adam Opel plants in Germany   were taken over by the
Nazis during the war and denied  that it aided the Nazis.
 
 
 
 
Daniel Pearlman wrote:
>  
> This is very interesting info about Ford Motor Co., Bill!
> ==Dan
>  
> At 10:58 AM 9/9/99 +0000, you wrote:
> >anti-Semitism was more widespread before the Second World War... or at 
> least was more open.  Henry
> >Ford published his anti-Semitic ideas in periodicals that were distributed
> at Ford dealerships.  What
> >I've heard about his ideas sounds a lot like EP's, but I don't have
> documentation to back up the
> >recollection.  Hitler is supposed to have been an admirer of Henry Ford,
> and quoted him to justify
> >his own anti-Semitic policies.
> >
> >Ford Motor Company was also heavily invested in German factories, and
> recently published information
> >indicated contacts between Ford officials & German managers even after the
> Nazi war machine rolled
> >into action. If my recollection is correct the meetings were held in
> neutral countries -- Portugal
> >perhaps. Ford manufacturing expertise helped build the trucks that carried
> Nazi troops across
> >Europe.  Of course, when the story came out a year or so ago, Ford rolled
> out the PR machine to
> >diminish it and get it out of the news.  But Ford could not deny its
> investments in Nazi Germany, and
> >even collected money for damage to those factories from the US Government
> after the war.
> >
> >To me this helps explain why EP was given radio time in Italy during the
> war, and why his support of
> >the Italian Fascist government was important.  In the war of ideas, the
> endorsement of anyone with
> >name recognition is a valuable asset.
> >
> >Bill Wagner
> >
> >
> >Jonathan Morse wrote:
> >
> >> Richard Edwards asks Jonathan Gill:
> >>
> >> >As to anti-semitism, it is a mystery to me where he got it from
> (Dorothy?).
> >> >The prejudices of his Philadelphia suburb, as documented in the local
> press
> >> >at the time (Carpenter again), seem to have been directed mostly against
> >> >Italians; obviously Pound didn't pick up much of that. I wonder
> whether, in
> >> >the course of your research, you formed an opinion as to whether or not
> the
> >> >meanness of Pound's hatreds was in any way associated with his mental
> >> >illness, if any.
> >>
> >> It certainly seems true that by the mid-1940s, at the latest, Pound was out
> >> of touch with what ordinary people think of as reality. A sad instance, one
> >> of many, is the letter written in English and Chinese to the commander of
> >> the DTC and beginning, "In view of the situation in China and Japan, it
> >> seems to me that the bottling of my knowledge now amounts to suppression of
> >> military information" (Spoo and Pound letter 42, 3 Nov. 1945). It's true,
> >> too, that the antisemitism of the letters to Olivia Agresti lacks anything
> >> like a sense of proportion -- as when Pound attributes the catastrophe of
> >> the war to Jewish influence over Hitler (Tryphonopoulos and Surette letter
> >> 70, 5 Nov. 1953). But I should think the general historical situation is
> >> that prejudice and mental illness are independently distributed. Some
> >> bigots are crazy; others aren't. If you think Pound's antisemitic texts are
> >> evidence of insanity, how will you think about the respectably dressed
> >> civil servants who wrote the Third Reich's statute against Jewish-owned
> pets?
> >>
> >> The question probably can't be answered if it's posed that way. But if we
> >> narrow it down and refer it specifically to language, as (for instance)
> >> Robert Casillo does, we may at least be able to learn something about
> >> Pound's language. For what it's worth, here's an example of my own, from a
> >> chapter in progress. If it has a moral, I suppose it's only the modest
> >> thought that we ought to read history as if it were poetry.
> >>
> >> -------
> >>
> >>         On July 11, 1954, 8½ years into his incarceration in St. Elizabeths
> >> Federal Hospital for the Insane, Ezra Pound received a visit from his
> >> Jewish imitator Louis Zukofsky. It was a family affair; Zukofsky brought
> >> along his wife Celia and his son Paul. Paul was three months short of his
> >> eleventh birthday but already embarked on his career as a violinist, and at
> >> St. Elizabeths he gave a recital for Pound and some of his fellow inmates.
> >> The next day, Pound responded with a letter.
> >>         That composition displays Pound as he saw himself in relation to
> the arts:
> >> a stern but affectionate preceptor-at-large. The Zukofskys' performances
> >> are accordingly subjected, one at a time, to scrutiny and analysis. About
> >> Celia's music Pound asks, "Question of whether C/ jams one LINERARR
> >> statement against another, or merely puts in chords?" About Louis' poetry
> >> he opines, "damn if I see what yu wd/ lose by a rewrite making EVERY line
> >> comprehensible." And about Paul he speaks as one artist and father to
> another:
> >>
> >>      AND my prophetik soul / foreseeing: every time that brat gits a 
> >> thousand $ bukks fer playing Weiniawski, Zuk will be beatin' his breast and
> >> crying: why did I beget this cocatrice.
> >>                                 Only practical suggestion is that yu 
> begin distinguishing between
> >> infantilism and MUSIC FER ADULTS.  (Ahearn 209-10. "Weiniawski" is
> >> presumably Henryk Wieniawski, composer of showy virtuoso pieces for the
> >> violin.)
> >>
> >>         Pound was one of the twentieth century's great critics, and in
> this letter
> >> we see him at his best: passionate, wide-ranging in his sympathies and
> >> eagerly receptive to the new, yet possessed of a profound sense of value.
> >> Imagine F. R. Leavis with a sense of proportion, a sense of humor, and a
> >> prose style. But before Pound was a critic he was a poet, and he was never
> >> satisfied with his own critical language until he had economized it. Within
> >> two weeks of writing this letter, for instance, he had reduced its contents
> >> to their essentials. "Mr. Zukofsky brot his ten year old son to play Mozart
> >> on the lawn a fortnight ago," Pound wrote to his confidante Olivia Rossetti
> >> Agresti. "ETC. INDIVIDUALS/ BUT......" (Tryphonopoulos and Surette 163).
> >>         In the next sentence, Pound makes his point general and
> explicit: "I shd/
> >> like to arouse ORA's interest in history/ in biology/ in Luther Burbank, in
> >> eugenics/" But that expository prose is only a redundant gloss on the
> >> ellipsis following Pound's "INDIVIDUALS/ BUT." It is hard to make a
> >> conjunction serve as an allusion, but that is what Pound has done here. A
> >> more prosaic speaker of English — for instance, Faulkner's garrulous
> >> character Jason Compson IV — would have filled in the ellipsis and finished
> >> the sentence. "I have nothing against jews as an individual," Jason
> >> explains when his turn comes to pick up the tale of _The Sound and the
> >> Fury_. "It's just the race." But when Ezra Pound hit his period key six
> >> times rather than write out such words, he was communicating a profound
> >> intuition. That six-dot suspension of utterance tells us that some meanings
> >> are so deeply embedded in the social structure of language that they can go
> >> without saying. Pound's sense of Mozart on the lawn was something actually
> >> experienced, as compared with his fantasy of the word "Jew." But the word
> >> "Jew" was a preemptive significance. It silenced the echo of the violin.
> >>
> >> Jonathan Morse
> >> Department of English, University of Hawaii at Manoa
> >
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