Ford Not to Blame for Forced Labor in WWII
“Lawsuit Alleges Ford Profited From Forced Labor in WWII” [March 5] brings with it a wave of nausea. The essence of the suit is that the Ford Motor operation in Germany benefited from forced labor during World War II and therefore is liable for economic and punitive damages.
The article notes that Hitler awarded Henry Ford the Great Cross of the German Order of the Eagle in 1938. Perhaps we should note that in 1937, the unionization efforts to an unwilling Henry Ford led to the “battle of the overpass” between union and security personnel. One result was the recognition that Henry Ford was not in control even of his own Rouge operations, leading to John Bugas, an ex-FBI agent, being called in to head up industrial relations. By 1942, Henry Ford was so impotent as a leader of the company that Henry Ford II, a grandson, was released from military service to come in and take on that task. How anyone could expect Henry Ford to oppose the Third Reich in the operation of the Cologne plant is mystifying.
The article includes all of those trigger words: laboring “under utterly barbarous conditions,” a woman “abducted by Nazi troops” and “literally purchased” by a Ford representative; “we worked nonstop and were starving all the time”; “Ukrainian deportees were housed in a wooden hut without heat, running water or sewage facilities”; and fed “two inadequate meals a day.” This is the push to vie for unreasoning sympathy, making a company in the U.S. liable for the unspeakable abuses of others 55 years ago.
With all this nonsense, the article closes with a paragraph that notes Ford never received any dividends from Ford Werke that had been “earmarked” for it. The lawsuit notes that the plant expanded and, subsequent to the war, produced trucks that Ford sold at a profit. Those trucks were not produced by forced labor. Should Ford have torn down the plant expansion because it might have been built by forced labor? Or should it have gone ahead with new production of vehicles for civilian use? Only a greedy, litigious lawyer could find something wrong with this decision.
DAVID M. STEVENS
Mission Viejo
