Why Ford, GM Deals With Hitler Still Matter

by Ted Rall

I think I paid 10 bucks, but the haggard figure in the austere black-and-white picture is priceless. It's all there in neat cursive script: Dmitri Heremok, age 31, began work as an "ostarbeiter" -- foreign worker -- at the Hermann Goering Reichswerke factory at Strasbourg in the Nazi-occupied French province of Alsace on July 14, 1944.

The Allies may have liberated Dmitri later that fall, assuming that the Germans didn't drag him back east to build more stuff for them. But from the look on his face, I'd be surprised if he made it. His hair has fallen out in strange places and his eyes are sunken back into his skull. He wears a tight, forced wince, as if he's trying to comply with the photographer's order to say the German equivalent of cheese. His clothes hang off a skeletal frame. He's half-dead.

I keep Dmitri Heremok's ID, number 3259 if you care about such things, in front of me at the desk where I work. Whenever I start to feel sorry for myself for whatever reason, I look up at that picture. No indignity I've ever experienced or am likely to face could begin to compare with what Dmitri went through.

Nazi slave laborers were forcibly deported, often leaving their families behind without any means of support. They worked insane hours, day after day, without proper nutrition or medical care. Unsurprisingly, they died by the hundreds of thousands, their last days spent manufacturing goods for companies doing business with the Third Reich.

Few Americans can imagine the agony of being slowly worked to death in such unmitigated squalor, but with most able-bodied German men in the armed forces, slave labor was an integral component of the Nazi war economy. According to a new report by Lord Janner, chairman of Britain's Holocaust Education Trust, about 1 million Jews died under slave labor, and by late 1944 there were 7.7 million non-Jewish slave laborers working for the Nazi regime.

Many companies that fattened their profit-loss statements with slave labor from concentration and death camps are household names today: BMW, Daimler-Benz (now Daimler-Chrysler), Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp. and Volkswagen are all tainted with the blood of slave laborers murdered during World War II.

"I believe that these companies which are today run in a moral and decent way by honorable people will wish to make appropriate amends. There may be legal implications of a massive kind -- claims made against them -- but equally there is a huge moral obligation," Janner says. And in fact, the magazine Der Spiegel has reported that the country's new socialist government is secretly working with German corporate leaders to work out a settlement of reparations to the surviving slave laborers who have sued them in New York.

Unfortunately for their former "employees," here in America GM and Ford are taking the low road by continuing to deny the obvious. It's a smart legal strategy -- the plaintiffs are old, and will die sooner rather than later. All they have to do is keep stalling, they figure.

Nonetheless, what worked for five decades may work no longer. The Washington Post reported on Nov. 30 that archives prove that American car manufacturers allowed their German subsidiaries to convert to military production while simultaneously resisting pressure from their own government to increase military production here.

GM spokesman John Mueller denied the Post's charges: "Such allegations, purporting to portray GM as a supporter of the Nazi war effort, are slanderous and untrue and do a great disservice to the thousands of loyal GM employees and their families who worked for the U.S.-Allied cause in that war."

Yo, John, no one said anything about GM employees. We're talking about management here.

Of course, all of the companies now being sued might have bitten a far tastier bullet back in 1945 when litigants might have been bought off with a relative pittance. Five decades of being ignored and denied has a way of turning people mean, not to mention greedy.

But perhaps the greatest irony of the war- that- won't- leave is that the huge corporations involved are now just as important to our economy as they once were to Adolf Hitler's. Once again, the bottom line trumps morality.

Even if we sold off GM lock, stock and barrel, it would put thousands of innocent workers out of work while hardly putting a dent into what slave laborers ought to receive for their agony. After all, it's impossible to put a price tag on suffering, right? The trouble with the Big Three automakers is that they'd rather not even try.