Ford Linked To Auschwitz
Ford Motor Co. is listed among nearly 500 companies that had links to the Auschwitz death camp, which supplied Nazi Germany with slave laborers during World War II, the head of archives at the Auschwitz museum said Thursday.
The list, based on newly released Nazi documents from Russia, doesn't give information on the exact link each company had to the notorious death camp, where some 1.1 million people died.
The list includes both companies that used slave labor and others that inquired about using workers from Auschwitz, said Auschwitz museum historians compiling the list.
Apart from Ford's German subsidiary, German industrial giants such as Krupp, Siemens, IG Farben and M.A.N. also are named.
Ford has acknowledged that slave labor was used at its Cologne, Germany, plant during the war, but says it had lost control of its German operations during World War II.
"There's no question that the Nazis assigned forced labor to the Cologne plant," said Ford spokesman Jim Vella. "It was out of our control. ... [But] we don't have anything in our research that pertains to workers from Auschwitz."
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| Auschwitz, file photo. |
Barbara Jarosz, the head of Auschwitz museum archives, said she had no details about Ford's link to Auschwitz. Jarosz said archivists were still reviewing the documents to establish names of slave laborers, which will provide evidence for compensation claims.
The Polish state museum paid the equivalent of $10,000 to Russia for copies of the documents -- only a part of the camp archive taken to Russia by Red Army soldiers who helped defeat the Nazis, officials said.
The newly available documents include construction plans, orders for raw materials or services, invoices and reports from work on the death camp, which the Nazis started building in 1940. The documents also include lists of workers, including camp inmates, used by some companies, Jarosz said.
Victims' organizations say detailed files of more than 100,000 workers would be helpful in their claims. But those papers remain in Moscow, where they were taken along with all the other camp documents shortly after the Red Army freed Auschwitz in 1945.
In December, General Motors Corp. said it hired a Yale University professor to look into the company's activities in Nazi Germany.
GM has said that GM's Adam Opel plants in Germany were taken over by the Nazis during the war and denied that it aided the Nazis.