Henry Ford's Disturbing Link to Nazi Germany

Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford. These are not names you usually link together, but they both had a strange mutual understanding and admiration for each other.

It is common knowledge that Ford revolutionized the world of transportation and mass production with his Ford automobile plants that started in the United States and expanded into other parts of the world. What is not as well known is his fervent hatred towards Jewish people (a hatred shared by fellow super-financier J.P. Morgan) and Ford's flagrant financial and political backing of Adolf Hitler. As author Antony C. Sutton wrote in his book Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Henry Ford is something of an enigma, understanding his influence on the Western world is complicated and at times strange and sad.

Ford created the assembly line production of automobiles that revolutionized industrial production. The assembly line de-emphasized individual human creation and emphasized quick assembly of a machine with the help of humans in a machine-like, repetitive motion. For Ford people were labor, the abhorrent capitalism that Marx had railed against in his writings of the 1880's that inspired the Bolshevik revolution. Hitler believed in the master race as a similar cog in his machine in controlling Europe and then the world; both believed that Jews were not to be a part of either the master race or the new assembly-line human.

In 1920 Henry Ford distributed a series of 81 articles in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which focused on the "corruption" of Jews in American life. When "fighting filth," one of the articles professed, the "fight carries you straight to the Jewish camp." The filth referred to was the American cinema. The articles were reprinted in Germany and became widely read. In the same year Ford began financing the little known Adolf Hitler's anti-Jew, nationalist movement in Munich. It was Ford's funds (reported to be as high as $70,000) that helped finance Hitler's failed Bavarian rebellion in Munich. During Hitler's trial it was discovered that Ford's associates came in contact with Hitler's mentor Dietrich Eckart while trying to sell Germany tractors. Eckart asked for financial aid and got it almost immediately from Ford. Four days following Hitler's release from Landsberg prison, he stayed at the home of a wealthy friend where he received a new copy of Mein Leben und Werk (My Life and Work) by Henry Ford, a book he would revere and read carefully.

In 1928 Ford merged his assets with I.G. Farben, the German chemical cartel, which strengthened the Nazi cause further. In the 1930s, Ford built the Soviet Union's first modern automobile plan at Gorki. The same plant built trucks that were sent to Vietnam in support of the Viet Cong during the 1960s.

A Ford associate and fellow racist probably wrote the articles based on the infamous Protocols of Zion, fictional writing that was used by anti-semites to slander Judaism. Ford eventually published the articles in a book entitled The International Jew. Author Daniel Levitas (The Terrorist Next Door) described The International Jew as an American version of The Protocols of Zion. Its central theme was the assertion that Jews undermined the Christian social structure of America and Jews created Bolshevism. Ford's book sold more than a half a million copies and was translated into 16 languages.

Hitler hung Ford's picture on his wall and wrote in Mein Kampf that Ford was a great man who had confronted Jewish power; he quoted Ford's book extensively. Some of Ford's early quotes seem to be something straight out of Hitler's mouth: "The international financiers are behind all war. They are what is called the International Jew - German Jews, French Jews, English Jews, American Jews . . . the Jew is a threat." Hitler told a Detroit News reporter that he regarded "Henry Ford as my inspiration." Ford supported Nazis until his position made him treasonous.

Ford may have feared Jews as competition to his business. He peddled racism as a tool to defeat a business enemy. He called the motion picture industry, along with the music and liquor business, groups that were controlled by Jews. Of the American film industry he wrote, " . . . Americans every day place themselves voluntarily within range of a Jewish life, love, and labor . . . there are two families in this world, and on one the darkness dwells."

To show his appreciation for Ford's similar hatred toward Jews, Hitler awarded Henry Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, a Nazi citation reserved for foreign men of distinction. It was presented to Ford on his 75^th birthday in his Dearborn office. The award brought immediate concern from Jewish leaders, which led Ford to say that his acceptance of the medal did not mean he had sympathy for Nazism, and he was a person who was repulsed by anything that bred hate. The same kind of medal was given to the head of IBM (who returned it) and American aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, who was haunted all his life by his pre-war pro Nazi statements. Henry Ford never returned the medal though Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes denounced its acceptance publicly.

Sources:

Levitas, Daniel, The Terrorist Next Door, Thomas Dunne Books, New York, 2002.

Cronen, Isaac. Confronting Fear, Thunder's Mouth, New York, 2002.

Sutton, Antony. Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, chapter 6, http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street.

Baldwin, Neil. Henry Ford and the Jews, Public Affairs, New York, 2001.