Did Alfred P. Sloan’s brainchild collude with the Nazis?
No, is the short answer from Yale historian Henry Ashby Turner Jr. But as Turner explains in this fascinating and troubling book, the longer answer is nuanced and infinitely more complicated. He writes that General Motors did not intentionally support the Nazi effort with its German-based Opel subsidiary, where its American personnel were effectively barred from the country as the war got underway, replaced by loyal Nazis. But the executives, whose actions Turner probes, also made serious errors before and after the war. Even today’s managers who share little interest in history or the crimes of Nazi Germany will probably find this account of one company’s tangles with an evil regime sobering and cautionary.
GM’s purchase of Opel, its first foray into the European market, seemed a wise move in 1931. Based near the Main River, Opel, “one of the country’s most venerable and best-known manufacturing companies,” as Turner writes, was founded in 1862 by Adam Opel. Its first products were sewing machines and bicycles; in 1899 it began to churn out automobiles and a successful line of trucks called Blitz. Through a process of slow, disturbing evolution, the firm essentially became “a hostage of Hitler’s regime.” GM lost control. The hardy Blitz trucks were co-opted as the German army’s vehicle of choice; Opel also ended up producing essential components for Luftwaffe warplanes, often using slave labor.
This short history is made contemporary through Turner’s remarkable use of the GM files to demonstrate managerial decision making. Turner, who was granted free and full access to internal documents—material now available at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library—shows how executives dealt bit by bit with surveillance and intimidation, always believing that German aggression would be short-lived. Sloan, it must be noted, remained profoundly skeptical of a more naive executive’s optimism about quieting the Nazi drumbeat: “I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was wasting his time dealing with that crowd, although that’s how I felt. ...A racketeer is an outlaw. He will never recognize anything but force. The only way to meet the issue is through more force.”
The result of Turner’s search through the original source material is a well-written, detail-rich, rather haunting journey through one of history’s and business’s darkest chapters.
- Martha Lagace