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Jacques R. Pauwels, "Profits uber Alles! American Corporations and Hitler," Labour/Le Travail, 51 (Spring 2003), 223-49.
Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation (London: Crown Publishers, 2001)
Walter Hofer and Herbert R. Reginbogin, Hitler, der Westen und die Schweiz 1936-1945 (Zurich: NZZ Publishing House, 2002)
Reinhold Billstein, Karola Fings, Anita Kugler, and Nicholas Levis, Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor during the Second World War (New York: Berghahn, 2000)
Research Findings About Ford-Werke Under the Nazi Regime (Dearborn, MI: Ford Motor Company, 2001)
IN THE UNITED STATES, World War II is generally known as "the good war." In contrast to some of America's admittedly bad wars, such as the near-genocidal Indian Wars and the vicious conflict in Vietnam, World War II is widely celebrated as a "crusade" in which the US fought unreservedly on the side of democracy, freedom, and justice against dictatorship. No wonder President George W. Bush likes to compare his ongoing "war against terrorism" with World War II, suggesting that America is once again involved on the right side in an apocalyptic conflict between good and evil. Wars, however, are never quite as black-and-white as Mr. Bush would have us believe, and this also applies to World War II. America certainly deserves credit for its important contribution to the hard-fought victory that was ultimately achieved by the Allies. But the role of corporate America in the war is hardly synthesized by President Roosevelt's claim that the US was the "arsenal of democracy." When Americans landed in Normandy in June 1944 and captured their first German trucks, they discovered that these vehicles were powered by engines produced by American firms such as Ford and General Motors.(1) Corporate America, it turned out, had also been serving as the arsenal of Nazism.
Fans of the Fuhrer
Mussolini enjoyed a great deal of admiration in corporate America from the moment he came to power in a coup that was hailed stateside as "a fine young revolution."(2) Hitler, on the other hand, sent mixed signals. Like their German counterparts, American businessmen long worried about the intentions and the methods of this plebeian upstart, whose ideology was called National Socialism, whose party identified itself...