The People's Car

[Jeffrey L. Meikle]

Lindsay Gillies mentioned how Ford profited from WWII military activity in
Germany, but the real automotive story is that of General Motors--rivaling
the multinational adventures attributed by TRP to Shell in GR.  General
Motors assisted in Germany's illegal rearmament by (among other things)
building a military truck plant at Brandenburg in 1936.  For that and other
activities, the American head of GM's overseas arm received Nazi Germany's
highest civilian medal from Hitler in about 1938.  Communications (and
transfer of funds?) persisted throughout the war, and the German government
didn't officially take control of GM's German plants until about a year
after Pearl Harbor.  And, to top it off, both GM and Ford collected
reparations into the millions of dollars from the U.S. government after the
war to pay for their German plants destroyed by Allied bombing.  GM was
sitting pretty no matter who won the war.  For details, see a highly
opinionated account:  Bradford C. Snell, "American Ground Transport," in
_The Industrial Reorganization Act: Hearings before the Subcommittee on
Antitrust and Monopoly of the Committee on the Judiciary United States
Senate...on S. 1167_ (Washington:  GPO, 1974), part 4A.  Snell also tells
the juicy conspiratorial tale of how GM, Standard Oil, and one of the
rubber companies formed a holding company that operated in the 1910s and
1920s to buy up healthy streetcar companies in about a dozen cities
throughout the US, close them down, replace them with fleets of GM buses
burning Esso gas and riding on ______ rubber tires, and then sell them back
to local owners at a profit.  End of clean electrified American mass
transit.  Snell's account, though possibly overstated and wrong on some
points, is a must for conspiracy theorists not yet overdosed on TRP and
Oliver Stone.  It's been going on for a long time...
Happy New Year to all...

Jeff Meikle