Hitler in one of his Mercedes cars (Photo: ShutterStock, ShutterStock)
On May 27, 1943, Yosef Herman sent a somber personal letter to Ferdinand Porsche, with whom he had worked at Daimler Austria 20 years before.
Porsche was then a connected person in the Nazi regime, the one who headed the New People's Car project before the war and was given responsibility for the production of central weapons systems when it broke out.
Only two years earlier, Adolf Hitler had appointed him to head the National Tank Commission to develop a new generation of armored vehicles for the Wehrmacht.
He is considered a genius engineer, independent in his views, not an ideological Nazi.
Herman, on the other hand, escaped with his sister to the Netherlands.
At the time of writing the letter, the nurse had already been deported from the Netherlands and murdered in Auschwitz.
Herman did not know what had become of her, but he asked Porsha to contact the person in charge of the SS forces in the Netherlands, and mention Herman's contribution to the economy and industry in Austria, in an attempt to save his life and get an exemption from his own deportation thanks to his contribution in peacetime.
In rare cases the SS recognized such a contribution.
In retrospect, it turned out that Porsche's secretary prepared a reply letter to Hermann, which was never sent.
"Har Porsha feels unable to send the commander of the security forces a confirmation of your civilian service in the past," it said.
Herman was finally deported from the Netherlands and died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on March 20, 1945, about a month before the liberation of the camp by the British army.
He was 75 years old when he died.
Ferdinand Porsche and his son Perry.
The father provided Hitler with the People's Car, his son was an SS officer (Photo: Porsche)
De Jong's book.
Follow in the footsteps of the money (Photo: Matar Publishing)
This event, which is described in the book by the journalist David De Jung "The Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of the Rich Families in Germany" (Mater Publishing, 2023, translated by: Dana Elazar Halevi) is one of the many revelations in the book about the part of the German automobile industry in the Nazi war machine, but also in the process The deportation of the Jews that preceded the war, their industrial extermination and their exploitation as forced laborers during the Holocaust.
The years 1939-1945 have long been considered a period that is not talked about in Mercedes, BMW, Opel, Ford Germany, in Volkswagen which was founded by the Nazis and in Porsche which received an economic boost from them which allowed it to start producing sports cars itself and not just designing cars for other manufacturers.
But in recent years, due to public criticism and independent investigations like De Jong's, the wall of silence has been cracked, and even BMW and Mercedes are now publishing on their own websites references to their activities in those dark years, although still softened and cleaned up.
These are the events they preferred to silence.
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Ferdinand Porsche was a well-known engineer in the German automobile industry, who in the 1920s even served as the chief engineer of Daimler, maker of the Mercedes brand.
He is considered a genius, someone who designed a hybrid car as early as 1900, but has difficulty with human relations, a successful engineer but one who has difficulty working with financiers and developing products that will also be competitive in price.
When Hitler came to power, Porsche, whose design office he opened independently did not really prosper, offered to design the people's car that Hitler promised to provide to the German people.
The tyrant demanded that the car cost just 1,000 reichsmarks, after scolding existing German car manufacturers for focusing only on luxury cars and that "millions of hard-working, decent people cannot even consider buying a car".
Porsche received the project in 1934, after Hitler determined that it should carry 4 people and be equipped with air cooling.
In May 1938, the cornerstone was laid for the Wolfsburg factory, and Porsche was disappointed when Hitler refused to name the car after him.
His son Perry, an SS officer, drove Hitler and his father, who sat in the back, in an open Beetle at the event.
Porsche's reputation for not being able to build cheaply proved itself: up to that point the project had already cost the Germans 200 million Reichsmark instead of 90 million.
Anton Piach, Porsche's son-in-law, and the father of Ferdinand Piach, who 70 years later would make Volkswagen the largest car manufacturer in the world, was responsible for managing the factory.
On April 20, 1939, Hitler received the first mass-produced Beetle, open black, at an event for his 50th birthday.
Hermann Goering, commander of the German air force, the Luftwaffe, received the second car produced and Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels the fourth.
Only 630 Beetles were produced before the war at a cost that had already swelled to 280 million Reismarks, by the time the new factory in Wolfsburg was converted to weapons production.
First he built the Koblewagen, a light all-terrain vehicle based on the Beetle, and from 1941 the amphibious Schwimwago.
Beetle production in Wolfsburg (photo: Volkswagen)
Later V1 cruise missiles, Junkers U 88 bombers and the Messerschmidt 262 jet were produced in the Wolfsburg factory, and with them a stream of forced laborers.
First Russian prisoners, and from 1942 prisoners from the concentration camps.
In May 1944, the factory received a shipment of 300 Hungarian Jewish metal workers who had been transferred from Auschwitz, who joined 500 Jews who had previously arrived from the camp, and a group of 650 Jewish women who were employed on the production line at the factory. About 5,000 prisoners from the concentration camps.
In 1947, production at the factory was resumed by the British who were looking for employment for the Germans as part of the reconstruction of their country.
In September 1948, Volkswagen CEO Heinz Nordhoff signed an agreement with Porsche, according to which he would receive royalties on every Beetle produced and that his family would be the main distributor of the company's models in Austria. In 2011, Volkswagen purchased the operation for $4.6 billion.
The Piach family is still the main shareholder in the Volkswagen Group.
Ferdinand and Perry Porsche together with the first 356.
From the left: Erwin Komanda, the car's designer (photo: Porsche)
Porsche: founded on Jewish land
In 1944 Porsche returned with his family to Austria, leaving Stuttgart bombed by the Allies.
He also did not feel safe in his house in the hills overlooking the city, and near it an anti-aircraft post was placed in a house that had previously belonged to a Jewish family.
In the Austrian town of Gmund, the son Perry began developing what would become the first Porsche, the 356, a sports car based on the Beetle.
In April 1945 Anton Piach stole 10 million reichsmarks from the Wolfsburg factory to fund the new company, before fleeing to Austria as well. But by July, Porsche, Piach and Perry were arrested by the Allies for their contribution to the Nazi war machine. "Hitler's support was simply necessary to successfully implement the ideas Mine," Porsche claimed to the investigators.
After he was released to house arrest, representatives of the French government approached Porsche with a proposal to design a popular vehicle similar to the Beetle for the government-owned Renault.
But he was later arrested, according to De Jong, because of Peugeot's complaint that seven of its workers were deported to concentration camps after Volkswagen took over one of its factories, and three of them perished.
At the time of the arrest, Porsche was asked to advise Renault on the development of a new family with air cooling, Qatar included.
The irony of fate: ten years later the car will also be assembled at the Kaiser Illin plant in Haifa, this time by Jewish workers who did it of their own free will.
Porsche was released in 1947 and officially acquitted of the charges in court in 1948.
He died in 1951.
His son Perry continued to develop the company, also recruiting ex-Nazi Baron Fritz Hoschke von Henstein, who was appointed PR manager of the young company, after being a successful racing driver in the 1930s and a favorite of Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler.
During the war he served as an SS officer who was involved in the "resettlement" of Jews in Poland.
Perry Porsche was also the man who moved the company's operations from Austria to the area the family purchased
in Zoffhausen, in the suburbs of Stuttgart.
The area, which is still part of the headquarters complex and the main factory of Porsche, was purchased by the family in 1937 from the Wolff family as part of the "arization" procedure: taking over Jewish property at a price lower than the market price.
Ferdinand's son managed to turn the sports car manufacturer into a prosperous company, which also developed an engineering consulting business, and used the knowledge gained since the founder's days to design tanks, including consulting for the best design of the Israeli Merkava tank.
Prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp assist in the production of BMW aircraft engines (Photo: BMW)
BMW: Jewish female prisoners without protective equipment
The manufacturer from Bavaria was one of the beneficiaries of the rise of the Nazis to power.
It produced motorboats and cars for the German military, but what got a big boost was its aircraft engine division, which was used by Luftwaffe bombers.
During the war, BMW also developed the jet engines.
On the company's website, which is designed to present the dark years in its history, it boasts that in 1933, when the Nazis came to power, it employed 6,514 workers who recorded sales of 35.56 million reichsmarks.
In 1939 the numbers already stood at 275.5 million Reichsmarks and 29,918 workers and in 1944, at 750 million Reichsmarks and 56,213 workers.
Only then about half of the workers were already forced laborers, many of them provided by the SS from the concentration camps.
During the war, more than 50,000 forced laborers, not all Jewish, were employed in difficult and dangerous conditions, without protective equipment, in continuous 12-hour shifts, without adequate food and medical conditions.
Gunther and Herbert Quandt, whose heirs still own the company, were very close to the Nazi regime, and used the "Arization" regulations to take over companies owned by Jews, who were forced to sell them for low amounts, and then were charged "exit taxes" if they sought to escape for their lives to the states others.
Among the companies: the battery manufacturer AFA, which supplied batteries for the U-Boats submarines, and employed Jewish women on the dangerous production line, without protection from the toxic materials they handled.
In 2016, as part of its 100th anniversary celebrations, BMW issued an official announcement that "under the National Socialist regime of the 1930s and 1940s, BMW operated exclusively as a supplier to the German arms industry. As the demand for the company's air engines increased, forced laborers, prisoners and inmates from concentration camps were recruited to assist in their production. The enormous suffering caused to them and the fate of many forced laborers remains a matter of deepest regret."
Hitler in his Mercedes (Photo: AP)
Mercedes: Jewish forced laborers in a company named after a Jewish woman
Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes, was also an important cog in the wartime production, when even before that its racing team, the "Silver Arrows", starred in the Grand Prix tracks funded by Hitler, to showcase the superiority of Nazi technology.
Hitler also chose the Mercedes 770 as his estate car, and he used to hand them out to other dictators who were allies of his, such as Mussolini, Franco and Antonescu.
The main production of Mercedes after 1941 was trucks and aircraft engines.
Sub-camps of the concentration camps were established next to its factories to provide manpower for the production lines, many of them Jewish male and female prisoners, which the SS provided to the company for a payment of 4 to 6 Reichsmarks per day, which was paid to the organization that was primarily responsible for the murder of the Jews in the Holocaust.
Mercedes truck of the type produced by the company for the Nazi army (photo: Mercedes)
On the company's website, Daimler admits that "workers from Eastern Europe and prisoners of war were imprisoned in barracks camps with poor prison-like conditions. Concentration camp inmates were monitored by the SS in inhumane conditions. They were 'loaned' to companies in exchange for money. In 1944, almost half of 63,610 Daimler Benz workers were civilian forced laborers, prisoners of war or concentration camp detainees."
Long after the war, Daimler-Benz admitted its ties to the Nazi regime, became involved in the 'Remembrance, Responsibility and Future' initiative of the German Industrial Foundation, whose work included providing humanitarian aid to former forced laborers.
In 1998, Daimler paid 11.8 million dollars in compensation to the descendants of the forced laborers it employed, a small amount compared to the scope of the "deal", which was paid many years after the exploitation.
Certainly for a company named after the daughter of Emil Yelnik, the son of a rabbi, and one of its biggest marketers at the beginning of the 20th century.
Henry Ford.
Anti-Semitism became an active aid to the Nazi government (Photo: Walla! NEWS system, Wikipedia)
Opel and Ford: the Americans looked away and continued to make money
Opel Blitz truck (photo: manufacturer's website)
Opel and Ford Germany were exceptions in the automobile industry during the Third Reich, being American companies, Opel wholly owned by General Motors and Ford Germany owned by the American Ford.
This did not prevent their local administrators from subservient to the needs of the Nazi administration, benefiting from looted Jewish property, and using cheap coercive measures provided to them by the SS.
All this while the parent companies in the USA claim that they have lost control of their German divisions, which in some years continued to transfer profits to Detroit, and some of which they transferred after the war, after employing thousands of forced laborers, some of them Jewish. In contrast to BMW and Mercedes, which were relatively small
companies Focusing on luxury cars, Opel and Ford in 1938 held about 70% of the German car market and dominated its popular market segments.
The German army was a big customer of Opel's blitz trucks, some of which were used at the beginning of the days of the Final Solution as "gas trucks" to exterminate Jews, by lifting 70 people into their closed trunk and pouring their exhaust gases into it.
The SS operated a fleet of more than 100 such trucks, which were estimated to be enough to kill about 700,000 Jews before the Nazi government decided that this was too slow a solution, and decided to establish extermination camps to kill Jews at a faster rate.
Alfred Sloan, President of General Motors during the Nazi era.
"Not our business" (photo: manufacturer website, manufacturer)
Alfred Sloan, then president of General Motors, wrote in 1939 to a shareholder who demanded that he sever the company's ties to Germany that "GM should not risk alienating its German hosts by meddling in Nazi affairs. In other words, to put the proposition quite bluntly , such matters should not be treated as the business of General Motors management."
When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Sloan informed shareholders who approached him that "GM is too big to be bothered by small international squabbles."
The person responsible for the company's export activities, Janes Mooney, received the Iron Cross decoration from the Nazi government in 1938, after Germany had already annexed Austria and a few days before Kristallnacht.
Henry Ford's anti-Semitism was better known.
Although he refused to donate money to the Nazi party, Ford expressed sympathy for Hitler and his ideas, and was in contact with the Nazis as early as 1924.
He financed anti-Semitic publications in the US and Europe, accused that Jewish financiers caused the outbreak of World War I, and claimed that the Jews were guilty of pogroms against them. Ford and Hitler expressed mutual respect and Ford even received the Iron Cross a week before Mooney from General Motors. In April 1945, When Ferdinand Porsche gave Hitler a Beetle as a birthday present, Ford Germany gave him 35,000 Reichsmarks, the price of 35 Beetles, as its own birthday present.
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