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Undercover secret service Agent characters and able to perform successfully, has to do mainly in his belives that his actions activities us based on morale justifiable reasons to undertake missions in order to protect life of his fellow citizens against evils.Related terms:Charles A. Sennewald, Curtis Baillie, in Effective Security Management (Sixth Edition), 2016ExampleConsider a case in which the Security department contracts for the placement of an undercover agent in a warehouse for the purpose of gathering information on possible internal theft. The undercover agent’s primary employer is a contract service firm. The agent receives a salary from them as well as a regular paycheck, like every other warehouse employee, from the company that owns the warehouse. For a period of time some useful intelligence is obtained, but after a while the undercover agent becomes personally involved with other warehouse employees and the reports become valueless. Even though the agent wishes to remain employed in the warehouse, services can be terminated forthwith without violating the agent’s rights to job security, because the real (and primary) employer is the firm that sent the agent to the warehouse and is still paying the undercover salary (although it may be less than the warehouse salary).If, on the other hand, the Security department hires an applicant directly into the warehouse to serve as an undercover agent, that person would be entitled to some job protection and could not be summarily removed from the job. The use of contractual services has some very definite advantages.ect Behind the Keyboard, 2013Undercover and Informant OperationsUndercover operations in cybercrime investigations obviously will include use of electronic communication. Undercover (UC) agents email, text, and chat with suspects online to communicate. This can be in the form of the UC assuming the identity of a child to investigate child molestation cases or perhaps the UC will assume an identity of a high-tech criminal to investigate a hacker. Either method can require face-to-face interaction between the UC and criminal suspect. This interaction and investigative method will apply similarly to civil investigations.A great example of a successful undercover operation began in 1999 with the Internet Service Provider (ISP), Speakeasy Network, in Seattle, Washington. The Speakeasy Network was hacked from Russian IP addresses. The suspects contacted Speakeasy, identified themselves, and offered to not disclose Speakeasy’s flaws if Speakeasy would pay or hire them. The hackers also claimed to now possess thousands of passwords and credit card numbers from Speakeasy customers. These hackers, Alexey Ivanov and Vasily Gorshkov, continued to hack and extort businesses in this manner.The FBI conducted an intensive undercover operation, in which both Ivanov and Gorhkov agreed to enter the United States to discuss their hacking skills with FBI undercover agents. Through audio and video recorded conversations, keyloggers, sniffers, search warrants, undercover business fronts, and even setting up an undercover computer network for them to hack into, both were convicted on federal felony counts of computer fraud, mail fraud, and conspiracy.All undercover operations carry an inherent risk to personal safety. As an investigative method, it also carries a need for intensive resources and skilled UC operators. The effectiveness of a successful undercover operation cannot be overstated. A benefit to being able to speak openly to a suspect while assuming the role of a criminal or conspirator allows for intelligence to be gathered exponentially faster than physical surveillance. Confessions made to an undercover are just as valid as a confession made to a uniformed officer. Future suspect activities, something not easily obtainable otherwise, can be spoken directly to the UC to which future operations can be planned.Less extreme undercover activities can be conducted requiring no more than a phone call. If a specific time and place has been identified as a source of criminal activity, a simple phone call to the suspect will place the suspect at the location at a given time. The phone call need be no more than false pretenses in which the suspect is identified by voice or name. The phone call may not definitely place the suspect at a keyboard; however, tying the suspect to the location by voice is a strong indication. For criminal activity in progress, such as a victim receiving harassing emails from a previously identified location through an IP address trace, a call can be made while the activity is occurring to identify the suspect by voice.If a suspect email address has been identified, emails can be sent to the suspect with a tracking code that obtains the local IP address of the suspect, and then sends the date and time of the email being accessed along with the IP address of the suspect computer. These tracking codes are invisible to most users and email programs, but pose risk of compromise should the code be identified by the suspect through a warning from anti-virus software.Undercover operations coupled with surveillance may also be necessary in order to obtain evidence not able to be obtained otherwise. If a suspect obscures his IP address through any means, without having physical access to the system used in crimes, close contact with the suspect may be required. This contact could be in the form of befriending the suspect in hopes of having information disclosed to the UC. Even only if the manner of hiding the IP address was disclosed, investigative methods to counter the IP address hiding method could be conducted.Informant operations pose the same risks to safety and compromise of the investigation with the added danger of informants being untrained. Informants havevaried reasons for cooperating with law enforcement and not every reason is trustworthy. In many cases, informants are developed from cases, in which the arrested suspects agree to cooperate in consideration for lesser charges. Such was the case of Hector Xavier Monsegur, in June 2011, when he was arrested by the FBI. Monsegur agreed to work for the FBI as an informant, and in doing so, helped the FBI successfully investigate multiple hackers as conspirators. Although Monsegur did agree to cooperate, he also pleaded guilty to a multitude of computer crime charges.Probably the biggest benefit to using informants in a cybercrime investigation is being able to take advantage of this past history and contacts with other cybercriminals. Their reputations may be known and few, if any associates would suspect their long-time partner-in-crime to be working for law enforcement. Undercover officers enter without a history or known accomplices, unless an informant is used to vouch for the undercover officer.Dario Forte, Andrea de Donno, in Handbook of Digital Forensics and Investigation, 2010Investigations of Mobile SystemsInvestigations used to be carried out exclusively by people. In the pure spirit of investigation, you started from information obtained through an undercover agent followed by operations involving trailing suspects and intercepting ordinary mail. Without the help of technological systems, these investigations tended to last much longer than their more modern counterparts.Today, the initiation of an investigation may involve, in addition to verbal information, an anomalous bank record, an image from a surveillance camera, or of course highly visible crimes such as theft or murder.The first phase of the investigation involves interviewing people who may have relevant information and continues with monitoring the means of communication of suspects or others associated in some way with the case. In addition to the traditional telephone, there are other monitoring points such as electronic mailboxes, places visited by the suspect, Telepass accounts (devices used for automatic highway toll payment), credit card accounts, and other financial operations.Nowadays, investigations are supported by software that is customized to meet different requirements. The investigator enters all the data available on a subject into the interception system and the server performs a thorough analysis, generating a series of connections via the mobile devices involved, the calls made or received, and so on, providing criminal police with a well-defined scheme on which to focus the investigation, and suggesting new hypotheses or avenues that might otherwise be hard to identify. Obviously, thanks to the support of the NSP, the data can be supplemented with historical information or other missing data such as other mobile devices connected to a given BTS on a given date and time. Data can also be provided for public payphones, which are often used to coordinate crimes. Again, thanks to a connection with the NSP, it is possible to obtain a historical record of telephone calls made and the location of the payphone with respect to other mobile devices. The same sort of record may also be obtained for highway travel using Telepass (conventional name for automatic wireless toll payment), including average speed and stops.Having historical data of various kinds relating to an investigation accessible in a database can greatly assist the initial examination of a newly acquired mobile device. By extracting all telephone numbers in the phonebook of a mobile device seized during a search and entering names and numbers into the electronic system, digital investigators perform powerful analysis even in the initial phases of the investigation thanks to cross-referencing capabilities. For instance, investigative tools support advanced entity and relation searches, including the nicknames from phonebooks to locate additional related activities. In addition, some investigative tools enable digital investigators to perform traffic analysis, including georeferenced data and diagram generation as shown in Figure 10.2.Figure 10.2. Cellular telephone tracking software, showing the relative movements of two mobile devices over a given period of time.It is thus very important to have investigation software that can quickly import data online (secure and confidential connection with the MC) or from optical media, and that offers flexibility in subsequent processing.Charles A. Sennewald, Curtis Baillie, in Effective Security Management (Sixth Edition), 2016Coordinate with Security on Major or Important InvestigationsThere are occasions when a criminal case would be impossible to conclude successfully without the cooperative effort of both the private and public sectors. A dramatic example of such a case occurred in Los Angeles. Investigators for a chain of department stores learned that a large number of employees and nonemployees were working together in a concerted effort to remove merchandise from the department store’s warehouse. Most of the participants were identified, videos were taken of some of the theft activity, and an undercover agent was successfully placed in the midst of the group by the Security department to provide a flow of intelligence. The department store then went to the local authorities (in this particular case, the District Attorney’s office) for assistance.In a coordinated effort, the following actions occurred. A small electrical supply and service store was obtained about two miles from the warehouse. It was wired for voice recordings. A panel truck equipped with a 16-mm motion picture camera (before the sophisticated video cameras we have today) was parked behind the store. Two investigators from the District Attorney’s office posed as owners of the store and one manned the camera vehicle. Department store investigators secretly marked the kind of merchandise the undercover agent had indicated would be stolen the next day. Through the undercover agent, word was passed to the thieves that there was a new “fence” in the area (the electrical supply store). The department store provided the money to buy the goods. In a short time, regular trips were made to the back door of the “fence,” and investigators were buying stolen merchandise marked by other investigators the night before. The transactions were visually and audibly recorded by the hidden camera.A grand total of 27 culprits were either indicted and arrested, arrested and referred to juvenile authorities, or, in those cases in which a public offense could not be established, discharged from the company.A case of this complexity and magnitude could not have been resolved so successfully had it not been for the cooperation between private security and law enforcement. Criminal investigations provide frequent opportunities for this effective interaction.In Hiding Behind the Keyboard, 2016The Intended AudienceLaw enforcement officers, criminal investigators, and civil investigators are the intended audience simply because they usually confront covert communications in their positions. In actuality, many of these professionals may not even be aware of the covert communications that are already occurring in their investigations. When you do not know what you do not know, you will almost always miss critical evidence and information.Throughout this book, both these terms “suspects” and “targets” are used for the persons involved in covert communications you wish to investigate. The term target is used not as a political or tactical point other than a “target” being the subject of your investigation. A target can be a terrorist, criminal, or corporate spy for whom you want to uncover covert communications.As a practical matter, every person fitting within this intended audience should be well-versed in technology as it relates to communication. The criminals and terrorists of today exploit every means to communicate covertly and anonymously, and most involve technology. To delay learning the methods being used is to delay effectively investigating your targets.NoteHiding Behind the KeyboardJust because your targets use complex methods of covert communication does not mean you cannot use the same methods! Witnesses, informants, agents, undercover officers, and other persons should use secure communications to protect their identities and the information exchanged.Duration of Relevance for This GuideSimilar to Placing the Suspect Behind the Keyboard, this book has been written as a guide to outlast technology advances. Although technology changes constantly by employing the principles in this guide, you should be able to transfer what becomes old technology to the latest technology. It is mastering concepts and principles that are most important in becoming a great investigator.As for the technical information in the book, similar to other technologies, what is possible today may not be possible tomorrow and conversely, what is impossible today may be possible in the future. Simply some things get harder, and other things get easier. Either way, you are reading a book with tools to deal with both situations.Read full chapterView PDFChristopher Burgess, Richard Power, in Secrets Stolen, Fortunes Lost, 2008IntroductionAs the Haephrati case discussed in Chapter 1 illustrates, the theft of trade secrets and other intellectual property has expanded beyond classic industrial age espionage (largely focused on the turning of insiders) to include information age espionage (e.g., hacking into networks or using targeted malware). And it is also true, as has been previously noted, that the severity of the insider threat is often disproportionately emphasized in relation to the severity of the outsider threat.Nevertheless, much illegal activity, particularly in the arenas of economic espionage and trade secret theft, is still predicated on, or instigated by, insiders of one kind or another. Furthermore, this is true regardless of whether the criminal behavior is cyber-based or grounded in the physical world.Four stories from the United States, Korea, and Canada (all of which broke within a period of several weeks in 2006) underscore both the threat from inside, and its diverse manifestations:“The U.S. attorney in Detroit … announced charges of stealing trade secrets against three former employees of an auto supplier, saying economic espionage stabs at the heart of the Michigan economy and is a growing priority among his federal prosecutors. The former employees of Metaldyne Corp., arraigned in U.S. District Court after a 64-count grand jury indictment was unsealed, are accused of stealing the Plymouth, Mich., company’s trade secrets and sharing them with Chinese competitors. They each face up to 20 years in prison and fines of up to $250,000 if convicted. Metaldyne, which has 45 plants in 14 countries, makes a wide range of auto parts for engines, drive trains and chassis systems. The company has annual sales of $2 billion and about 6,500 employees.” (Trade-secret theft charged in Detroit, Baltimore Sun, 7-6-06)“US authorities last night charged three people with a cloak-and-dagger scheme to sell secrets from Coca-Cola to soft drink archrival PepsiCo, which helped in the investigation …. The offer of ‘confidential’ information from Coca-Cola sparked an FBI investigation with an undercover agent offering $US1.5 million dollars in cash. The investigation was launched after PepsiCo turned over to its cola rival a letter in May from a person identifying himself as ‘Dirk,’ who claimed to be employed at a high level with Coca-Cola and offered ‘very detailed and confidential information,’ a US Justice Department statement said. According to authorities, an FBIundercover agent met on June 16 with Dimson, who was posing as ‘Dirk’ at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta. Dimson gave the agent ‘a brown Armani Exchange bag containing one manila envelope with documents marked ‘highly confidential’ and one glass bottle with a white label containing a liquid product sample,’ the statement said.” (FBI lays charges on Coke secrets, The Australian, 7-6-06)“About a half of Korea’s top technology firms have suffered from leaks in industrial know-how one way or another over the past three years, although the companies have increased preventive measures, a report showed. According to the report released the Korea Industrial Technology Association on Monday, 11 of 20 Korean firms that had invested the most in research & development have suffered financial damage due to technology leaks in the past three years. When taking into account smaller firms, 20.9 percent out of 459 firms said that they suffered from industrial espionage cases during the period. The rate is 6.4 percentage points higher than three years ago, meaning that firms have become more vulnerable to technology theft …. As Roh pointed out, about 65 percent of the reported cases were found to involve employees from former companies. Only 18 percent and 16 percent of the cases involved current employees and subcontractors of the firms, respectively… The survey was done on 459 firms with in-house R&D departments.” (Cho Jin-seo, Half of Top Tech Firms Suffer Leaks, Korea Times, 6-19-06)“Intelligence files reportedly suggest that an estimated 1,000 Chinese agents and informants operate in Canada. Many of them are visiting students, scientists and business people, told to steal cutting-edge technology. An example being touted as copied technology is China’s Redberry—an imitation of the Blackberry portable e-mail device, created by Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion Ltd …. Juneau-Katsuya said the former Liberal government knew of the espionage, but were too afraid to act. ‘We didn’t want to piss off or annoy the Chinese,’ said Juneau-Katsuya, who headed the agency’s Asian desk. ‘(They’re) too much of an important market.’ However, he argued that industrial espionage affects Canada’s employment levels. ‘For every $1 million that we lose in intellectual property or business, we lose about 1,000 jobs in Canada,’ he said.” (Robert Fife, Government “concerned” about Chinese espionage, Catch Up On Full Episodes For Free News, 4-14-06)Without a robust, twenty-first century Personnel Security program, it won’t matter how much or how well you invest in Information Security, or how fool-proof and high-tech your Physical Security has become, because the perpetrators that will take advantage of your weak or nonexisting Personnel Security program will already be inside both your physical and cyber perimeters.In this chapter, we will highlight some of the most important aspects of what should be in your enterprise’s Personnel Security program, including an overall checklist of the top 20 controls mapped to ISO, and guidelines for background checks (Figure 10.1 illustrates the “hit ratio”—the information discrepancies uncovered during background screening), data, termination procedures, and a travel security program.Figure 10.1. Background Checks Reveal Vital Insights That Offer a Subtle Return on Investment—They Mitigate Risk and Limit LossesView chapterPurchase bookMarius-Christian Frunza, in Introduction to the Theories and Varieties of Modern Crime in Financial Markets, 20163.1 Focus on DerivativesThe role of derivatives is less studied and less well known in the money-laundering process. A basic laundering mechanism is the execution through a brokerage house of a long and short position on the same asset (buying and selling the same future contract or buying a call option and a put option or buying and selling a vanilla swap). The broker will pay the client for the position ending up in the money with clean money and will cancel in his records the out of the money transaction to avoid any audit trail. Technically only the transaction fee and the broker’s margin are costs for the client dealing with illegal funds, but in this way they manage to obtain proof of origin for the funds.Bank of Credit and Commerce International— The First Money LaunderingBackgroundFounded in 1972 by the Pakistani banker Agha Hasan Abedi, and having Bank of America as the main shareholder, BCCI became at one time the biggest private bank in the world. Incorporated in Luxembourg BCCI operated from London and Karachi. From the 1980s the bank became a main platform for global money laundering and was under scrutiny from many regulators and law enforcers.Derivatives and money launderingA well-known example is that of the Bank of Credit and Commerce Internationala and its derivatives arm Capcom led by Syed Ziauddin Ali Akbar, who explained the above scheme to undercover Agent Robert Mazur from US customs in 1988. Agent Mazur testified how Akbar used pairs of long short trades that was called “mirror image” trading to launder huge sums of money. Mirror image trading involved two accounts controlled by the same person and the bank was buying contracts for one account while selling an equal number from another account. Since both accounts are controlled by the same individual any profit or loss is effectively netted. One main advantage of this strategy is that being a zero-sum game it can pass under the radar of auditors among many millions of dollars worth of legitimate transactions, thereby making it untraceable.bTriviaUntil its fall in 1991, the BCCI served many dictators and criminal groups including the ex-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the Medelin Cartels. The CIA also held accounts with the bank to fund the Afghan resistance against the Soviet army, the forerunner of modern Talibans.The mirror trading scheme was also favored by a regulation concerning bunched orders of derivatives, which are orders entered by an account manager that are executed as a block and allocated after execution to customers so the trades may be cleared and for post trade allocation. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) regulation 1.35(a1) allowed a derivatives broker to not identify his client’s trade allocations during a trading session. The broker could do this in the post trade without specific rules. This specific regulation allowed all types of misconduct in the derivative world including money laundering.The regulation in the United States changed in 2012 when the CFTC imposed new rules on time limits for bunched orders, requiring that bunched orders be allocated as soon as practicable after execution, but also providing absolute deadlines by which allocation must occur. For trades that are cleared, allocation must occur sufficiently before the end of the day the order is executed to identify the ultimate customer for each trade. Account managers are forbidden from giving any account or group of accounts consistently favorable or unfavorable treatment relative to other accounts, in order to reduce the risk of mirror trades.If the cleared derivatives market requires strict monitoring of its participants, the OTC derivatives market offers more maneuver for launderers.3.1.1 OTC DerivativesOTC derivatives are bilateral agreements between two counterparties, that are not traded or executed on an exchange. In some cases, OTC deals can be registered via an exchange without the margin mechanism. Compared to the listed derivatives which are standardized, the OTC products are tailored depending on the needs of the two counterparties. The warning signals in these type of transactions are in the following situations:•The features of the OTC derivative are very different from the cleared versions. A swap with a premium at initiation is generally not a sign of confidence. The Goldman’s Sachs swap offer to the Greek treasury is one example of a derivative used as for malpractice. But in reality this type of instrument can hide other fund exchanges in a laundering scheme.•There is no economic basis for explaining that derivative. As an example a small retail enterprise based in Wales with all costs and revenues indexed in GBP, enter in an OTC Forex forward on YEN/CAD. In these cases, the OTC derivative can justify a one-time payment or flow. Not being marked to market regularly the settlement can occur whenever a fund needs to be transferred.•The valuation of the derivative is sophisticated and uses models which are based on traders’ opinions (Level 3 assets). An example can be a Swiss trading company entering in an OTC accumulator option2 on chrome prices with a Russian metal exporter. As the chrome market is illiquid with not many derivatives listed, the pricing of such a product is almost impossible. This ambiguity can be used to justify a fund transfer between the two firms, part of a laundering scam.Figure 1 shows a simple example of money laundering using OTC derivatives. A criminal group owning a company seeded with illegal funds makes an investment with a specialized firm. This firm does not need to be a financial company, and could easily be a trading house or an importer exporter. The investment firms purchase in OTC exotic derivative products from offshore firms. Sporadic settlements based on “mark to model” (“mark to mob”) justify a fund transfer to the offshore firm. The offshore firm has the same OTC derivative back to back with another counterparty controlled by the crime group, but with a clean record. The same “mark to mob” valuation justifies the transfer of funds to the counterparty resulting in clean funds. The very same scheme is used currently by firms to reduce their tax bills in countries with high taxation rates.Welcomehttps://www.sciencedirect.com/user/login?returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Ftopics%2Fcomputer-science%2Fundercover-agentFigure 1. Money-laundering OTC derivatives: Placement: A criminal group owning a company seeded with illegal funds makes an investment with a specialized firm. This firm does not need to be a financial company, and could easily be a trading house or an importer exporter. The investment firms purchase OTC exotic derivative products from offshore firms.Layering: Sporadic settlements based on “mark to model” (“mark to mob”) justify a fund transfer to the offshore firm. The offshore firm has the same OTC derivative back to back with another counterparty controlled by the crime group, but with a clean record.Insertion: The same “mark to mob” valuation justifies the transfer of funds to the counterparty resulting in clean funds.View chapterPurchase bookPolice, Sociology ofPolice as a formal institution of social control, organized within the framework of the nation state, emerged during the course of the eighteenth and …https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0080430767020040H.-J. Albrecht, D. Nogala, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 20012 Determining the SubjectAt first glance and seen from the surface it seems rather trivial to determine who and what constitutes ‘the police.’ One would expect that the police as a public institution is represented by (sworn) officers, i.e., representatives of the state and its government, who are (often) specially trained professionals and are invested with certain powers (like the authority to search or arrest a person). Usually this ‘apparent’ kind of police will appear in public as officers on the beat, a crew in a patrol car, behind a desk in a police station, or as plain-clothes detectives, doing investigations in the field. This is the common and popular image (in the Western world) of what police actually are, transmitted by the media and supported by occasional ordinary encounters. From time to time this picture is widened by the appearance of riot police in full gear, underlining the state's authorization and capability of using legitimately physical force against disobedient citizens or rioting crowds.When one looks again at who and what constitutes police, the semblance becomes more complicated: on the level of involved actors it becomes apparent that a good portion of the workforce employed by police consists of civilian staff, like secretaries or the clerks in the forensic laboratories; some sworn officers, such as staff who are responsible for conducting statistical analysis of criminal incidents or running a computer program for matching data, are rarely out in the field, while certain field officers, like undercover agents or specialists in charge of surveillance of telecommunication, often do not act openly as police. Furthermore there are other state agents who, having similar powers of investigation or intervention, perform certain functions of policing, but are not seen or labeled as ‘police.’ One might think here of custom officers, secret agents, public health inspectors, or prison guards. Still others appear in a policelike guise but are clearly not officers (at least lacking their full powers): city wardens, commercial guards and patrols, hired investigators, vigilante organizations like the ‘Guardian Angels,’ bodyguards, stewards in a football stadium, or bouncers.As professionals trained to use force legitimately in the name of the state's power, police share this somewhat exclusive right with the military and other law enforcement officials (prison, customs). But on the level of routine work processes, this distinguishing feature is a rather rare event compared to the overall picture of police duties. Instead, research has shown that a considerable part of the modern police workload is not at all focused on crime control and investigation of criminal cases, but consists of responding to general emergency calls, mediating conflicts, regulating motor vehicle traffic, and communication with other institutions or agencies like social services, insurance companies, etc.Although it might be clear from a commonsense point of view, what ‘police’ actually are—basically that formal institution which is vested with the powers and resources to respond to criminal acts or public order disturbances and calls itself ‘police’—the subject in question gets more diverse, the more we see it from a perspective of a peculiar organized social activity rather than as a matter of institutionalism. Thus a true ‘sociology of policing’ would cover a wider area and embrace more organizations than the initial ‘police studies.’But even from an institutional approach one has to speak of ‘the police’ either from a very abstract level or from a single case point of view only. Besides the common similarities in terms of historical developments, organizational models, practical strategies and tactics, and legal accountabilities, every country's police system has its own particularities and unique arrangement of forces.It should not be overlooked that police as a subject of sociological interest is linked in many ways with other social systems, all of them carrying their own, often overlapping, bodies of literature: as an instrument of executive governance ‘the police’ can be seen as a segment of the sociology of the state. Its quality of being an important part of the criminal justice system and its more or less explicit legal bindings does make it a component of the sociology of law. Last but not least, on the level of empirical studies there are clear ties to the field of organizational sociology.View chapterPurchase bookCopyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. or its licensors or contributors. ScienceDirect ® is a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V.

Henry Ford was being discussed if he should be charged with treasonHis writing formed a lot of Hitler’s view on jews. He was awarded a Nazi award and is the only American mentioned in Mein KampfGerman Ford served as an “arsenal of Nazism” with the consent of headquarters in Dearborn, says a US Army report prepared in 1945.While Ford Motor enthusiastically worked for the Reich, the company initially resisted calls from President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill to increase war production for the Allies. The Nazi government was grateful for that stance, as acknowledged in a letter from Heinrich Albert to Charles Sorenson, a top executive in Dearborn. Albert had been a lawyer for German Ford since at least 1927, a director since 1930 and, according to the Treasury report, part of a German espionage ring operating in the United States during World War I. “The ‘Dementi’ of Mr. Henry Ford concerning war orders for Great Britain has greatly helped us,“Ford has become a purely German company and has taken over all obligations so successfully that the American majority shareholder, independent of the favorable political views of Henry Ford, in some periods actually contributed to the development of German industry,” Cologne argued on June 18, 1941, only six months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.in 1940“The management of the Ford-Werke salutes our Führer with grateful heart, honesty, and allegiance, and–as before–pledges to cooperate in his life’s work: achieving honor, liberty and happiness for Greater Germany and, indeed, for all peoples of Europe,” reads the caption.Moreover, Ford’s cooperation with the Nazis continued until at least August 1942–eight months after the United States entered the war–through its properties in Vichy France. Indeed, a secret wartime report prepared by the US Treasury Department concluded that the Ford family sought to further its business interests by encouraging Ford of France executives to work with German officials overseeing the occupation. “There would seem to be at least a tacit acceptance by [Henry Ford’s son] Mr. Edsel Ford of the reliance…on the known neutrality of the Ford family as a basis of receipt of favors from the German Reich,” it says.Treasury Department officials were clearly aghast at Ford’s activities. An employee named Randolph Paul sent the report to Secretary Henry Morgenthau with a note that stated, “The increased activity of the French Ford subsidiaries on behalf of the Germans received the commendation of the Ford family in America.” Morgenthau soon replied, “If we can legally and ethically do it, I would like to turn over the information in connection with the Ford Motor Company to Senator [Harry] Truman.”.....................................The generous treatment allotted Ford Motor by the Nazi regime is partially attributable to the violent anti-Semitism of the company’s founder, Henry Ford. His pamphlet The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem brought him to the attention of a former German Army corporal named Adolf Hitler, who in 1921 became chairman of the fledgling Nazi Party. When Ford was considering a run for the presidency that year, Hitler told the Chicago Tribune, “I wish that I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help.” (The story comes from Charles Higham’s Trading With the Enemy, which details American business collaboration with the Nazis.) In Mein Kampf, written two years later, Hitler singled Ford out for praise. “It is Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union,” he wrote. “Every year makes them more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions; only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence.” In 1938, long after the vicious character of Hitler’s government had become clear, Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the Nazi regime’s highest honor for foreigners.Ford Motor set up shop in Germany in 1925, when it opened an office in Berlin. Six years later, it built a large plant in Cologne, which became its headquarters in the country. Ford of Germany prospered during the Nazi years, especially with the economic boom brought on by World War II. Sales increased by more than half between 1938 and 1943, and, according to a US government report found at the National Archives, the value of the German subsidiary more than doubled during the course of the war.Ford eagerly collaborated with the Nazis, which greatly enhanced its business prospects and at the same time helped Hitler prepare for war (and after the 1939 invasion of Poland, conduct it). In the mid-thirties, Dearborn helped boost German Ford’s profits by placing orders with the Cologne plant for direct delivery to Ford plants in Latin America and Japan. In 1936, as a means of preserving the Reich’s foreign reserves, the Nazi government blocked the German subsidiary from buying needed raw materials. Ford headquarters in Dearborn responded–just as the Nazis hoped it would–by shipping rubber and other materials to Cologne in exchange for German-made parts. The Nazi government took a 25 percent cut out of the imported raw materials and gave them to other manufacturers, an arrangement approved by Dearborn.According to the US Army report of 1945, prepared by Henry Schneider, German Ford began producing vehicles of a strictly military nature for the Reich even before the war began. The company also established a war plant ready for mobilization day in a “‘safe’ zone” near Berlin, a step taken, according to Schneider, “with the…approval of Dearborn.” Following Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland, which set off World War II, German Ford became one of the largest suppliers of vehicles to the Wehrmacht (the German Army). Papers found at the National Archives show that the company was selling to the SS and the police as well. By 1941 Ford of Germany had stopped manufacturing passenger vehicles and was devoting its entire production capacity to military trucks. That May the leader of the Nazi Party in Cologne sent a letter to the plant thanking its leaders for helping “assure us victory in the present [war] struggle” and for demonstrating the willingness to “cooperate in the establishment of an exemplary social state.”Ford vehicles were crucial to the revolutionary Nazi military strategy of blitzkrieg. Of the 350,000 trucks used by the motorized German Army as of 1942, roughly one-third were Ford-made. The Schneider report states that when American troops reached the European theater, “Ford trucks prominently present in the supply lines of the Wehrmacht were understandably an unpleasant sight to men in our Army.” Indeed, the Cologne plant proved to be so important to the Reich’s war effort that the Allies bombed it on several occasions. A secret 1944 US Air Force “Target Information Sheet” on the factory said that for the previous five years it had been “geared for war production on a high level.”While Ford Motor enthusiastically worked for the Reich, the company initially resisted calls from President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill to increase war production for the Allies. The Nazi government was grateful for that stance, as acknowledged in a letter from Heinrich Albert to Charles Sorenson, a top executive in Dearborn. Albert had been a lawyer for German Ford since at least 1927, a director since 1930 and, according to the Treasury report, part of a German espionage ring operating in the United States during World War I. “The ‘Dementi’ of Mr. Henry Ford concerning war orders for Great Britain has greatly helped us,” Albert wrote in July of 1940, shortly after the fall of France, when England appeared to be on the verge of collapse before the Führer’s troops.At the time, the Nazi government’s Ministry of Economy debated whether the opportunity afforded by the capital increase should be taken to demand a German majority at Ford Werke. The Ministry “gave up the idea”–this according to a 1942 statement prepared by a Ford Werke executive–in part because “there could be no doubt about the complete incorporation, as regards personnel, organization and production system, of Ford Werke into the German national economy, in particular, into the German armaments industry.” Beyond that, Albert argued in a letter to the Reich Commission for Enemy Property, the abolition of the American majority would eliminate “the importance of the company for the obtaining of raw materials,” as well as “insight into American production and sales methods.”As 1941 progressed, the board of Ford Werke fretted that the United States would enter the war in support of Britain and the government would confiscate the Cologne plant. To prevent such an outcome, the Cologne management wrote to the Reich Commission that year to say that it “question[ed] whether Ford must be treated as enemy property” even in the event of a US declaration of war on Germany. “Ford has become a purely German company and has taken over all obligations so successfully that the American majority shareholder, independent of the favorable political views of Henry Ford, in some periods actually contributed to the development of German industry,” Cologne argued on June 18, 1941, only six months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.In May of 1942, the Superior Court of Cologne finally put Ford Werke in “trusteeship,” ruling that it was “under authoritative enemy influence.” However, the Nazis never nationalized Ford’s German property–plant managers feared it would be turned over to Mercedes or the Hermann Goering Werke, a huge industrial network composed of properties seized by the Reich–and Dearborn maintained its 52 percent share through the duration of the war. Ford Werke even set aside dividend payments due to Dearborn, which were paid after the war. Ford claims that it received only $60,000 in dividend payments. It’s not possible to independently verify that–or anything else regarding Dearborn’s wartime economic relationship with Cologne–because Ford of America was privately held until 1956, and the company will not make available its balance sheets from the period.Meanwhile, Ford Werke offered enthusiastic political support for Hitler as well. The fraternal ties between Ford and the Nazis is perhaps best symbolized by the company’s birthday gift to the Führer of 35,000 Reichsmarks in April of 1939. Ford Werke’s in-house publication couldn’t have been more fanatically pro-Nazi if Josef Goebbels had edited it. “Führer,” the poem printed at the top of this story, ran in the April 1940 issue, which celebrated Hitler’s 51st birthday by running his picture on the cover. The issue carried an excerpt of a speech by Hitler in which he declared that “by natural law of the earth, we are the supreme race and thus destined to rule.” In another section of the speech, the Führer declared that communism was “second in wretchedness only to Judaism.” The issue from April of the following year–this at roughly the high point of the Third Reich’s military victories–featured a photograph of a beaming Hitler visiting with German soldiers on the front lines. “The management of the Ford-Werke salutes our Führer with grateful heart, honesty, and allegiance, and–as before–pledges to cooperate in his life’s work: achieving honor, liberty and happiness for Greater Germany and, indeed, for all peoples of Europe,” reads the caption.Robert Schmidt so successfully converted the plant to a war footing that the Nazi regime gave him the title of Wehrwirtschaftsführer, or Military Economic Leader. The Nazis also put Schmidt in charge of overseeing Ford plants in occupied Belgium, Holland and Vichy France. At one point, he and another Cologne executive bitterly argued over who would run Ford of England when Hitler’s troops conquered Britain.Schmidt’s personal contributions to Ford Werke’s in-house organ reflect his ardently pro-Nazi views. “At the beginning of this year we vowed to give our best and utmost for final victory, in unshakable faithfulness to our Führer,” he wrote in December of 1941, the same month as Pearl Harbor. “Today we say with pride that we succeeded if not in reaching all our goals, nevertheless in contributing to a considerable extent in providing the necessary transportation for our troops at the front.” The following March, Schmidt penned an article in which he declared, “It depends upon our work whether the front can be supplied with its necessities…. therefore, we too are soldiers of the Fuhrer.”The Ford family and company executives in Dearborn repeatedly congratulated the management of Ford Werke on the fine work they were doing under the Nazis. In October of 1940 Edsel Ford wrote to Heinrich Albert to say how pleased he was that the company’s plants in occupied lands were continuing to operate. “It is fortunate that Mr. Schmidt is in such authority as to be able to bring out these arrangements,” said Edsel, who died of cancer during the war. The same letter indicates that Ford was quite prepared to do business with the Nazis if Hitler won the war. Though it was difficult to foresee what would happen after the fighting ended, Edsel told Albert, “a general rearrangement of the ownership of our continental businesses may be required. You will no doubt keep as close to this subject as possible and we will have the benefit of your thoughts and suggestions at the proper time.”“To know that you appreciate our efforts in your and the company’s interests is certainly a great encouragement,” Albert replied the following month. He went on to praise Schmidt, who had been forced to shoulder immense responsibilities after war broke out. “In fulfilling his task his personality has grown in a way which is almost astonishing.”Ford’s behavior in France following the German occupation of June 1940 illustrates even more grotesquely its collaborationist posture. As soon as the smoke had cleared, Ford’s local managers cut a deal with the occupation authorities that allowed the company to resume production swiftly–“solely for the benefit of Germany and the countries under its [rule],” according to a US Treasury Department document. The report, triggered by the government’s concern that Ford was trading with the enemy,The Treasury Department found that Ford headquarters in Dearborn was in regular contact with its properties in Vichy France. In one letter, penned shortly after France’s surrender, Dollfus assured Dearborn that “we will benefit from the main fact of being a member of the Ford family which entitles us to better treatment from our German colleagues who have shown clearly their wish to protect the Ford interest as much as they can.” A Ford executive in Michigan wrote back, “We are pleased to learn from your letter…that our organization is going along, and the victors are so tolerant in their treatment. It looks as though we still might have a business that we can carry on in spite of all the difficulties.”The Ford family encouraged Dollfus to work closely with the German authorities. On this score, Dollfus needed little prodding. “In order to safeguard our interests–and I am here talking in a very broad way–I have been to Berlin and have seen General von Schell himself,” he wrote in a typed note to Edsel in August of 1940. “My interview with him has been by all means satisfactory, and the attitude you have taken together with your father of strict neutrality has been an invaluable asset for the protection of your companies in Europe.” (In a handwritten note in the margin, Dollfus bragged that he was “the first Frenchman to go to Berlin.”) The following month Dollfus complained about a shortage of dollars in occupied France. This was a problem, however, that might be merely temporary. “As you know,” he wrote Dearborn at the time, “our [monetary] standard has been replaced by another standard which–in my opinion–is a draft on the future, not only in France and Europe but, maybe, in the world.” In another letter to Edsel, this one written in late November of 1940, Dollfus said he wanted to “outline the importance attached by high officials to respect the desires and maintain the good will of ‘Ford’–and by ‘Ford’ I mean your father, yourself and the Ford Motor Company, Dearborn.”All this was to the immense satisfaction of the Ford family. In October of 1940, Edsel wrote to Dollfus to say he was “delighted to hear you are making progress…. Fully realize great handicap you are working under.” Three months later he wrote again to say that Ford headquarters was “very proud of the record that you and your associates have made in building the company up to its first great position under such circumstances.”Dearborn maintained its communication with Ford of France well after the United States entered the war. In late January of 1942, Dollfus informed Dearborn that Ford’s operations had the highest production level of all French manufacturers and, as summed up by the Treasury report, that he was “still relying on the French government to preserve the interests of American stockholders.”During the following months, Dollfus wrote to Edsel several times to report on damages suffered by the French plant during bombing runs by the Royal Air Force. In his reply, Edsel expressed relief that American newspapers that ran pictures of a burning Ford factory did not identify it as a company property. On July 17, 1942, Edsel wrote again to say that he had shown Dollfus’s most recent letter to his father and to Dearborn executive Sorenson. “They both join me in sending best wishes for you and your staff, and the hope that you will continue to carry on the good work that you are doing,” he said.As in Germany, Ford’s policy of sleeping with the Nazis proved to be a highly lucrative approach. Ford of France had never been very profitable in peacetime–it had paid out only one dividend in its history–but its service to the Third Reich soon pushed it comfortably into the black. Dollfus once wrote to Dearborn to boast about this happy turn of events, adding that the company’s “prestige in France has increased considerably and is now greater than it was before the war.”Treasury Department officials were clearly aghast at Ford’s activities. An employee named Randolph Paul sent the report to Secretary Henry Morgenthau with a note that stated, “The increased activity of the French Ford subsidiaries on behalf of the Germans received the commendation of the Ford family in America.” Morgenthau soon replied, “If we can legally and ethically do it, I would like to turn over the information in connection with the Ford Motor Company to Senator [Harry] Truman.”Production at Ford Werke slowed at the end of the war, in part because of power shortages caused by Allied bombing runs, but activity never came to a halt. Soon after Germany’s capitulation, Ford representatives from England and the United States traveled to Cologne to inspect the plant and plan for the future. In 1948 Henry Ford II visited Cologne to celebrate the 10,000th truck to roll off the postwar assembly line there. Two years later, Ford of Germany rehired Schmidt–who had been arrested and briefly held by US troops at the war’s end–after he wrote a letter to Dearborn in which he insisted that he had fervently hated the Nazis. He was one of six key executives from the Nazi era who moved back into important positions at Ford after 1945. “After the war, Ford did not just reassume control of a factory, but it also took over the factory’s history,” says historian Fings. “Apparently no one at Ford was interested in casting light upon this part of history, not even to explicitly proclaim a distance from the practices of Ford Werke during the Nazi era.” Schmidt remained with Ford until his death in 1962.The high point of Ford’s cynicism was yet to come. Before its fall, the Nazi regime had given Ford Werke about $104,000 in compensation for damages caused by Allied bombings (Ford also got money for bombing damages from the Vichy government). Dearborn was not satisfied with that amount. In 1965 Ford went before the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission of the US to ask for an additional $7 million. (During the hearings, commission attorney Zvonko Rode pointed to the embarrassing fact–which Ford’s attorney did not dispute–that most of the manufactured products destroyed during the bombings had been intended for the use of the Nazi armed forces.) In the end, the commission awarded the company $1.1 million–but only after determining that Ford had used a fraudulent exchange rate to jack up the size of the alleged damages. The commission also found that Dearborn had sought compensation for merchandise that had been destroyed by flooding.

One of the greatest contributors to Hitler’s view on jews was Henry Ford who supported Hitler all through WW2. Ford was rewarded with a medal from the NAZIs. A third of trucks that invaded Poland were FordsFord receiving the Nazi grand crossHitler paid tribute to Henry Ford in his biography and kept a portrait of him in his office, and with good reason. In the early 1920s, Ford began publishing in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, a series of articles alleging that a huge Jewish conspiracy was taking over America and causing the world's troubles. He bound the series into four volumes called The International Jew. Hitler saw in Ford a kindred soul, and in 1938 awarded him with the Grand Cross of the German Eagle (shown at left). Ford trucks, assembled in Cologne, were ready just in time for the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Ford's Cologne plant used slave laborers between 1941 and 1945.German Ford served as an “arsenal of Nazism” with the consent of headquarters in Dearborn, says a US Army report prepared in 1945.While Ford Motor enthusiastically worked for the Reich, the company initially resisted calls from President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill to increase war production for the Allies. The Nazi government was grateful for that stance, as acknowledged in a letter from Heinrich Albert to Charles Sorenson, a top executive in Dearborn. Albert had been a lawyer for German Ford since at least 1927, a director since 1930 and, according to the Treasury report, part of a German espionage ring operating in the United States during World War I. “The ‘Dementi’ of Mr. Henry Ford concerning war orders for Great Britain has greatly helped us,“Ford has become a purely German company and has taken over all obligations so successfully that the American majority shareholder, independent of the favorable political views of Henry Ford, in some periods actually contributed to the development of German industry,” Cologne argued on June 18, 1941, only six months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.in 1940“The management of the Ford-Werke salutes our Führer with grateful heart, honesty, and allegiance, and–as before–pledges to cooperate in his life’s work: achieving honor, liberty and happiness for Greater Germany and, indeed, for all peoples of Europe,” reads the caption.Moreover, Ford’s cooperation with the Nazis continued until at least August 1942–eight months after the United States entered the war–through its properties in Vichy France. Indeed, a secret wartime report prepared by the US Treasury Department concluded that the Ford family sought to further its business interests by encouraging Ford of France executives to work with German officials overseeing the occupation. “There would seem to be at least a tacit acceptance by [Henry Ford’s son] Mr. Edsel Ford of the reliance…on the known neutrality of the Ford family as a basis of receipt of favors from the German Reich,” it says.Treasury Department officials were clearly aghast at Ford’s activities. An employee named Randolph Paul sent the report to Secretary Henry Morgenthau with a note that stated, “The increased activity of the French Ford subsidiaries on behalf of the Germans received the commendation of the Ford family in America.” Morgenthau soon replied, “If we can legally and ethically do it, I would like to turn over the information in connection with the Ford Motor Company to Senator [Harry] Truman.”.....................................The generous treatment allotted Ford Motor by the Nazi regime is partially attributable to the violent anti-Semitism of the company’s founder, Henry Ford. His pamphlet The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem brought him to the attention of a former German Army corporal named Adolf Hitler, who in 1921 became chairman of the fledgling Nazi Party. When Ford was considering a run for the presidency that year, Hitler told the Chicago Tribune, “I wish that I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help.” (The story comes from Charles Higham’s Trading With the Enemy, which details American business collaboration with the Nazis.) In Mein Kampf, written two years later, Hitler singled Ford out for praise. “It is Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union,” he wrote. “Every year makes them more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions; only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence.” In 1938, long after the vicious character of Hitler’s government had become clear, Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the Nazi regime’s highest honor for foreigners.Ford Motor set up shop in Germany in 1925, when it opened an office in Berlin. Six years later, it built a large plant in Cologne, which became its headquarters in the country. Ford of Germany prospered during the Nazi years, especially with the economic boom brought on by World War II. Sales increased by more than half between 1938 and 1943, and, according to a US government report found at the National Archives, the value of the German subsidiary more than doubled during the course of the war.Ford eagerly collaborated with the Nazis, which greatly enhanced its business prospects and at the same time helped Hitler prepare for war (and after the 1939 invasion of Poland, conduct it). In the mid-thirties, Dearborn helped boost German Ford’s profits by placing orders with the Cologne plant for direct delivery to Ford plants in Latin America and Japan. In 1936, as a means of preserving the Reich’s foreign reserves, the Nazi government blocked the German subsidiary from buying needed raw materials. Ford headquarters in Dearborn responded–just as the Nazis hoped it would–by shipping rubber and other materials to Cologne in exchange for German-made parts. The Nazi government took a 25 percent cut out of the imported raw materials and gave them to other manufacturers, an arrangement approved by Dearborn.According to the US Army report of 1945, prepared by Henry Schneider, German Ford began producing vehicles of a strictly military nature for the Reich even before the war began. The company also established a war plant ready for mobilization day in a “‘safe’ zone” near Berlin, a step taken, according to Schneider, “with the…approval of Dearborn.” Following Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland, which set off World War II, German Ford became one of the largest suppliers of vehicles to the Wehrmacht (the German Army). Papers found at the National Archives show that the company was selling to the SS and the police as well. By 1941 Ford of Germany had stopped manufacturing passenger vehicles and was devoting its entire production capacity to military trucks. That May the leader of the Nazi Party in Cologne sent a letter to the plant thanking its leaders for helping “assure us victory in the present [war] struggle” and for demonstrating the willingness to “cooperate in the establishment of an exemplary social state.”Ford vehicles were crucial to the revolutionary Nazi military strategy of blitzkrieg. Of the 350,000 trucks used by the motorized German Army as of 1942, roughly one-third were Ford-made. The Schneider report states that when American troops reached the European theater, “Ford trucks prominently present in the supply lines of the Wehrmacht were understandably an unpleasant sight to men in our Army.” Indeed, the Cologne plant proved to be so important to the Reich’s war effort that the Allies bombed it on several occasions. A secret 1944 US Air Force “Target Information Sheet” on the factory said that for the previous five years it had been “geared for war production on a high level.”While Ford Motor enthusiastically worked for the Reich, the company initially resisted calls from President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill to increase war production for the Allies. The Nazi government was grateful for that stance, as acknowledged in a letter from Heinrich Albert to Charles Sorenson, a top executive in Dearborn. Albert had been a lawyer for German Ford since at least 1927, a director since 1930 and, according to the Treasury report, part of a German espionage ring operating in the United States during World War I. “The ‘Dementi’ of Mr. Henry Ford concerning war orders for Great Britain has greatly helped us,” Albert wrote in July of 1940, shortly after the fall of France, when England appeared to be on the verge of collapse before the Führer’s troops.At the time, the Nazi government’s Ministry of Economy debated whether the opportunity afforded by the capital increase should be taken to demand a German majority at Ford Werke. The Ministry “gave up the idea”–this according to a 1942 statement prepared by a Ford Werke executive–in part because “there could be no doubt about the complete incorporation, as regards personnel, organization and production system, of Ford Werke into the German national economy, in particular, into the German armaments industry.” Beyond that, Albert argued in a letter to the Reich Commission for Enemy Property, the abolition of the American majority would eliminate “the importance of the company for the obtaining of raw materials,” as well as “insight into American production and sales methods.”As 1941 progressed, the board of Ford Werke fretted that the United States would enter the war in support of Britain and the government would confiscate the Cologne plant. To prevent such an outcome, the Cologne management wrote to the Reich Commission that year to say that it “question[ed] whether Ford must be treated as enemy property” even in the event of a US declaration of war on Germany. “Ford has become a purely German company and has taken over all obligations so successfully that the American majority shareholder, independent of the favorable political views of Henry Ford, in some periods actually contributed to the development of German industry,” Cologne argued on June 18, 1941, only six months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.In May of 1942, the Superior Court of Cologne finally put Ford Werke in “trusteeship,” ruling that it was “under authoritative enemy influence.” However, the Nazis never nationalized Ford’s German property–plant managers feared it would be turned over to Mercedes or the Hermann Goering Werke, a huge industrial network composed of properties seized by the Reich–and Dearborn maintained its 52 percent share through the duration of the war. Ford Werke even set aside dividend payments due to Dearborn, which were paid after the war. Ford claims that it received only $60,000 in dividend payments. It’s not possible to independently verify that–or anything else regarding Dearborn’s wartime economic relationship with Cologne–because Ford of America was privately held until 1956, and the company will not make available its balance sheets from the period.Meanwhile, Ford Werke offered enthusiastic political support for Hitler as well. The fraternal ties between Ford and the Nazis is perhaps best symbolized by the company’s birthday gift to the Führer of 35,000 Reichsmarks in April of 1939. Ford Werke’s in-house publication couldn’t have been more fanatically pro-Nazi if Josef Goebbels had edited it. “Führer,” the poem printed at the top of this story, ran in the April 1940 issue, which celebrated Hitler’s 51st birthday by running his picture on the cover. The issue carried an excerpt of a speech by Hitler in which he declared that “by natural law of the earth, we are the supreme race and thus destined to rule.” In another section of the speech, the Führer declared that communism was “second in wretchedness only to Judaism.” The issue from April of the following year–this at roughly the high point of the Third Reich’s military victories–featured a photograph of a beaming Hitler visiting with German soldiers on the front lines. “The management of the Ford-Werke salutes our Führer with grateful heart, honesty, and allegiance, and–as before–pledges to cooperate in his life’s work: achieving honor, liberty and happiness for Greater Germany and, indeed, for all peoples of Europe,” reads the caption.Robert Schmidt so successfully converted the plant to a war footing that the Nazi regime gave him the title of Wehrwirtschaftsführer, or Military Economic Leader. The Nazis also put Schmidt in charge of overseeing Ford plants in occupied Belgium, Holland and Vichy France. At one point, he and another Cologne executive bitterly argued over who would run Ford of England when Hitler’s troops conquered Britain.Schmidt’s personal contributions to Ford Werke’s in-house organ reflect his ardently pro-Nazi views. “At the beginning of this year we vowed to give our best and utmost for final victory, in unshakable faithfulness to our Führer,” he wrote in December of 1941, the same month as Pearl Harbor. “Today we say with pride that we succeeded if not in reaching all our goals, nevertheless in contributing to a considerable extent in providing the necessary transportation for our troops at the front.” The following March, Schmidt penned an article in which he declared, “It depends upon our work whether the front can be supplied with its necessities…. therefore, we too are soldiers of the Fuhrer.”The Ford family and company executives in Dearborn repeatedly congratulated the management of Ford Werke on the fine work they were doing under the Nazis. In October of 1940 Edsel Ford wrote to Heinrich Albert to say how pleased he was that the company’s plants in occupied lands were continuing to operate. “It is fortunate that Mr. Schmidt is in such authority as to be able to bring out these arrangements,” said Edsel, who died of cancer during the war. The same letter indicates that Ford was quite prepared to do business with the Nazis if Hitler won the war. Though it was difficult to foresee what would happen after the fighting ended, Edsel told Albert, “a general rearrangement of the ownership of our continental businesses may be required. You will no doubt keep as close to this subject as possible and we will have the benefit of your thoughts and suggestions at the proper time.”“To know that you appreciate our efforts in your and the company’s interests is certainly a great encouragement,” Albert replied the following month. He went on to praise Schmidt, who had been forced to shoulder immense responsibilities after war broke out. “In fulfilling his task his personality has grown in a way which is almost astonishing.”Ford’s behavior in France following the German occupation of June 1940 illustrates even more grotesquely its collaborationist posture. As soon as the smoke had cleared, Ford’s local managers cut a deal with the occupation authorities that allowed the company to resume production swiftly–“solely for the benefit of Germany and the countries under its [rule],” according to a US Treasury Department document. The report, triggered by the government’s concern that Ford was trading with the enemy,The Treasury Department found that Ford headquarters in Dearborn was in regular contact with its properties in Vichy France. In one letter, penned shortly after France’s surrender, Dollfus assured Dearborn that “we will benefit from the main fact of being a member of the Ford family which entitles us to better treatment from our German colleagues who have shown clearly their wish to protect the Ford interest as much as they can.” A Ford executive in Michigan wrote back, “We are pleased to learn from your letter…that our organization is going along, and the victors are so tolerant in their treatment. It looks as though we still might have a business that we can carry on in spite of all the difficulties.”The Ford family encouraged Dollfus to work closely with the German authorities. On this score, Dollfus needed little prodding. “In order to safeguard our interests–and I am here talking in a very broad way–I have been to Berlin and have seen General von Schell himself,” he wrote in a typed note to Edsel in August of 1940. “My interview with him has been by all means satisfactory, and the attitude you have taken together with your father of strict neutrality has been an invaluable asset for the protection of your companies in Europe.” (In a handwritten note in the margin, Dollfus bragged that he was “the first Frenchman to go to Berlin.”) The following month Dollfus complained about a shortage of dollars in occupied France. This was a problem, however, that might be merely temporary. “As you know,” he wrote Dearborn at the time, “our [monetary] standard has been replaced by another standard which–in my opinion–is a draft on the future, not only in France and Europe but, maybe, in the world.” In another letter to Edsel, this one written in late November of 1940, Dollfus said he wanted to “outline the importance attached by high officials to respect the desires and maintain the good will of ‘Ford’–and by ‘Ford’ I mean your father, yourself and the Ford Motor Company, Dearborn.”All this was to the immense satisfaction of the Ford family. In October of 1940, Edsel wrote to Dollfus to say he was “delighted to hear you are making progress…. Fully realize great handicap you are working under.” Three months later he wrote again to say that Ford headquarters was “very proud of the record that you and your associates have made in building the company up to its first great position under such circumstances.”Dearborn maintained its communication with Ford of France well after the United States entered the war. In late January of 1942, Dollfus informed Dearborn that Ford’s operations had the highest production level of all French manufacturers and, as summed up by the Treasury report, that he was “still relying on the French government to preserve the interests of American stockholders.”During the following months, Dollfus wrote to Edsel several times to report on damages suffered by the French plant during bombing runs by the Royal Air Force. In his reply, Edsel expressed relief that American newspapers that ran pictures of a burning Ford factory did not identify it as a company property. On July 17, 1942, Edsel wrote again to say that he had shown Dollfus’s most recent letter to his father and to Dearborn executive Sorenson. “They both join me in sending best wishes for you and your staff, and the hope that you will continue to carry on the good work that you are doing,” he said.As in Germany, Ford’s policy of sleeping with the Nazis proved to be a highly lucrative approach. Ford of France had never been very profitable in peacetime–it had paid out only one dividend in its history–but its service to the Third Reich soon pushed it comfortably into the black. Dollfus once wrote to Dearborn to boast about this happy turn of events, adding that the company’s “prestige in France has increased considerably and is now greater than it was before the war.”Treasury Department officials were clearly aghast at Ford’s activities. An employee named Randolph Paul sent the report to Secretary Henry Morgenthau with a note that stated, “The increased activity of the French Ford subsidiaries on behalf of the Germans received the commendation of the Ford family in America.” Morgenthau soon replied, “If we can legally and ethically do it, I would like to turn over the information in connection with the Ford Motor Company to Senator [Harry] Truman.”Production at Ford Werke slowed at the end of the war, in part because of power shortages caused by Allied bombing runs, but activity never came to a halt. Soon after Germany’s capitulation, Ford representatives from England and the United States traveled to Cologne to inspect the plant and plan for the future. In 1948 Henry Ford II visited Cologne to celebrate the 10,000th truck to roll off the postwar assembly line there. Two years later, Ford of Germany rehired Schmidt–who had been arrested and briefly held by US troops at the war’s end–after he wrote a letter to Dearborn in which he insisted that he had fervently hated the Nazis. He was one of six key executives from the Nazi era who moved back into important positions at Ford after 1945. “After the war, Ford did not just reassume control of a factory, but it also took over the factory’s history,” says historian Fings. “Apparently no one at Ford was interested in casting light upon this part of history, not even to explicitly proclaim a distance from the practices of Ford Werke during the Nazi era.” Schmidt remained with Ford until his death in 1962.The high point of Ford’s cynicism was yet to come. Before its fall, the Nazi regime had given Ford Werke about $104,000 in compensation for damages caused by Allied bombings (Ford also got money for bombing damages from the Vichy government). Dearborn was not satisfied with that amount. In 1965 Ford went before the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission of the US to ask for an additional $7 million. (During the hearings, commission attorney Zvonko Rode pointed to the embarrassing fact–which Ford’s attorney did not dispute–that most of the manufactured products destroyed during the bombings had been intended for the use of the Nazi armed forces.) In the end, the commission awarded the company $1.1 million–but only after determining that Ford had used a fraudulent exchange rate to jack up the size of the alleged damages. The commission also found that Dearborn had sought compensation for merchandise that had been destroyed by flooding.