“I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.”
— Adolf Hitler
BY JOEL THURTELL
Did Bill McGraw think for one minute that the city of Dearborn would publish his story about Henry Ford’s hatred of Jews?
I was not surprised that Dearborn Mayor John B. O’Reilly Jr. quashed the story McGraw wrote for the Dearborn Historian, or that he was fired as editor of the city’s historical magazine.
McGraw found a publisher outside Dearborn. The online newspaper, Deadline Detroit, posted his article, “100 Years Later, Dearborn Confronts the Hate of Hometown Hero Henry Ford.”
I don’t feel sorry for a mayor who would censor a historical journal. But I imagine O’Reilly was only doing what someone told him to do — squelch any suggestion that Henry Ford supported Hitler and promoted Nazi death camps.
Did O’Reilly maybe get a scathing phone call from someone in the Ford family? It’s happened before. Former Dearborn Historian editor David Good told me that roughly a year ago, two people from the city’s museum received blistering phone calls from Edsel Ford demanding that a Henry Ford-related story by Good be killed.
Good said that on Friday, January 25, the mayor okayed McGraw’s story about Henry Ford’s attacks on Jews, although he ordered that a cover quotation from Ford be cut: “The Jew is a race that has no civilization to point to, no aspiring religion, no great achievement in any realm.”
Good said he and McGraw objected to the change. On Monday, January 26, they learned that the mayor had banned the city from mailing 200 copies of the magazine and had the city library’s lone copy of the Dearborn Historian seized.
Who knows what moved the mayor? Personally, I doubt O’Reilly made the decision alone. I suspect Dearborn’s higher-ups couldn’t stomach the truth about Henry Ford’s virulent anti-Semitism. Ford Motor Company has spent millions scrubbing the corporation’s history so it would look like Ford did not promote the Nazi war effort or profit from Ford operations under the swastika, including the use of slave labor in its plants.
Henry Ford once said “history is bunk.”
If history is bunk, why suppress it?
Because for Ford, truth is a nightmare.
A nightmare about money.
A nightmare about sneaking a courier into Nazi-occupied France so Henry’s son Edsel Ford could communicate with Ford’s chief French executive, Maurice Dollfus, about operations in Ford’s Berlin-directed plant in Poissy, France. The factory was manufacturing trucks for the German Wehrmacht, with its output surpassing French car manufacturers. After Great Britain’s Royal Air Force bombed the Poissy plant four times, the Nazis awarded Ford 38 million francs in compensation, according to author Charles Higham in Trading with the Enemy.
General Motors should not rest easy. GM factories turned out machines for the Nazis, too. Our air crews risked their lives and many were killed to stop the Germans from getting war materials, yet the US in 1967 reimbursed General Motors $33 million for destruction of its aircraft and motor vehicle plants in Nazi Germany and Austria during World War II, according to Higham.
How many millions from Europe and the US died either trying to stop the Nazi war machine or in Nazi-inspired wartime attacks?
Is there a price that could be multiplied times all the people who were killed or ruined by the Nazis? What portion of all those deaths might be attributed to help the Nazis got from American companies like Ford and GM?
It would not cost millions for a crew of economic historians to calculate the profits Ford and GM made by trading with Hitler. Take the total and calculate compound interest to the present.
Could they pay the bill?
What if the cost is higher than the companies’ valuation?
Would they face bankruptcy?
Expropriation?
I don’t advocate destroying these companies. Just replace the leaders with people who respect human life, dignity, and the truth.
And order them to pay real compensation.
The truth is not bunk. It is Ford’s nightmare.
For more about the US-based companies that did business with the Nazi enemy, there is a book that describes these betrayals in detail: Charles Higham, Trading With the Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949 (New York, 1983, 1995). See also Max Wallace, The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich (New York, 2003); Albert Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews (New York, 1980); Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (New York, 2001).
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
