The Silent Partner: How the Ford Motor Company Became an Arsenal of Nazism

Corporate responsibility is a popular buzzword in the news today, but the concept itself is hardly novel. In response to a barrage of public criticism, the Ford Motor Company commissioned and published a study of its own activities immediately before and during WWII. The study explores the multifaceted and complicated relationship between the American parent company in Dearborn and the German subsidiary in Cologne. The report's findings, however, are largely inconclusive and in some cases, dangerously misleading. This thesis will seek to establish how, with the consent of Dearborn, the German Ford company became an arsenal for Hitler's march on Europe. This thesis will clarify these murky relationships, and picking up where the Ford internal investigation left off, place them within a framework of corporate accountability and complicity. Ford's development as a transnational entity provides a perfect subject of study to embark on such a project. Many of the major themes of post-World War I Europe – economic stagnation, nationalism, coping with the aftermath of a devastating conflict, and eventually, the rise of authoritarian states – are all present in Ford's German story, and their consequences not only resonate within the fields of American, European, and business history but also that of corporate responsibility. The lessons are still relevant today.