General Motors and the Nazis: The Struggle for Control of Opel, Europe's Biggest Carmaker (review)

Time and again since the defeat of Germany in World War II, Ford and General Motors (GM) have been accused of having provided not only the allied forces with weaponry via their German subsidiaries Fordwerke and Opel but the Nazi military as well. In 1998, survivors of the shoah filed class action suits against both automobile giants. On behalf of GM, a research team directed by Henry Turner browsed the documents of a dozen archives in 1999 and 2000. Five years later, Turner presents a book that, as he is eager to emphasize in the preface, neither was commissioned by GM nor even read by any of its representatives and thus is "an independent undertaking" (p. viii).

The book is not a comprehensive company history of Opel in the Third Reich. It is confined exclusively to answering the question how far GM—which, since early 1931, held all shares of Adam Opel AG—is to be held responsible for the activities of its German subsidiary in the Third Reich. In fashionable terms, the book is simply devoted to the question whether there was still a principal-agent relationship between the two firms.

The documents assembled by his research team, presented in a masterly fashion by Turner, leave little doubt that after mid-1941—that is, half a year before Germany and the U.S. were formally at war—GM no longer held control over Opel, which had become something of a contended prey of rivaling Nazi factions. Moreover, if we can believe Turner, GM ignored even the most fundamental changes of its subsidiary. According to his account, GM did not even know that the Nazi power game resulted in a bizarre stalemate in which a law-abiding non-Nazi career bureaucrat became Commissar of Opel (alien property since 1942) and held his hand over GM's most valuable foreign direct investment, while an experienced and loyal Opel production manager ran the plant—installed by no less than Hermann Göring, still then the Reich's number two leader.

More difficult is the assessment of GM's comportment in the period between 1933 and 1941. Seen from GM's perspective, the most far-reaching governmental measure was not undertaken by the Nazi regime, but by one of its (more or less) democratic predecessors. In the course of the banking crisis in July 1931, the Brüning government imposed stringent currency exchange controls that prevented GM from divesting and selling its shares in Opel (had it wished so) for convertible currency. The GM management had to accept that its German investment was locked in; not even Opel's dividends could be transferred outside of Germany at reasonable conditions.

After the Nazis seized power, GM increasingly lost ground in a hopeless defense battle against the covetousness of the local Nazi chieftain (the Gauleiter of Hesse) and the production demands of the armaments bureaucracy in Berlin. In the course of this battle, the American GM representatives in Germany, by playing the less dangerous Berlin card to fend off the Gauleiter, agreed in the spring of 1938 to get into direct armaments production for the Luftwaffe, and in so doing probably gave away advanced American technology to the Germans. GM headquarters expressed regret over this move in 1939, but clearly should have spoken out against joining Germany's aggressive armaments program (most Opel trucks went to the German military) when it happened. Turner argues that if GM deserves criticism with respect to Opel and the Nazis, it should be aimed at this badly deliberated decision of its local representatives at Opel.

I found Turner's main point, which is more or less an absolution for GM, convincing. Moreover, his concise account of the power games in the complex relationship between the firm, the party, and the armaments bureaucracy, is a fascinating read. Turner's account, however...