Ford-Werke Aktiengesellschaft

World War II era. Stock printed by Giesecke & Devrient-Berlin. A very historic piece directly related to Nazi Germany. The certificate is dated March of 1941.

Henry Ford, the legendary American automobile manufacturer, was given the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle by Hitler for their service to the Third Reich: The highest party allocate a foreigner could receive. At this time - 1937 and 1938 - Hitler’s rearmament program was already running at full speed. The German subsidiary of Ford Motors, Ford Werke AG had willingly become involved in Hitler’s war preparations.

The German plant "became an eager, aggressive and successful bidder for forced laborers" after a Nazi labor official encouraged German industries to use such workers to meet quotas.

The first forced labor brought to the plant were French POWs in 1941, and by 1943 half the work force was slave labor, the suit said. "By 1944 Russians, Ukrainians, Italians, and Belgian civilians, as well as concentration camp inmates from Buchenwald, were laboring at Ford's Cologne plant under utterly barbarous conditions," it said.

Laborers who became ill were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp and were replaced by other concentration camp inmates, the lawsuit said. Workers who failed to meet production quotas were beaten with rubber clubs and execution or transfer to Buchenwald punished escape attempts, the suit said.

Later, Ford issued a statement acknowledging slave labor was used at the plant. But it said historians who wrote a company history in the 1950s determined the company lost contact with its German operations before the United States entered the war and only regained control seven years later. (History from Learning from History Website)