1938 Henry Ford Receives the Grand Cross of German Eagle from Nazis: Or Why My Dad Never Allowed Us to Buy FORDS

From cojs.org

At a ceremony in Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford is presented with the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle on his 75th birthday. Henry Ford is the first American recipient of this, an honor created a year earlier by Adolf Hitler. This is the highest honor Nazi Germany could give to any foreigner and represents Adolf Hitler’s personal admiration and indebtedness to Henry Ford. The presentation is made by Karl Kapp, German consul in Cleveland, and Fritz Heller, German consular representative in Detroit. Ford is the only American mentioned in Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf”.

The peculiar admiration that National Socialists had for Henry Ford and the supposed sympathies that the Detroit industrialist harbored for Nazism keep attracting the curious, both academic historians and internet readers. There is something irresistible about the connection between the man taken to symbolize American industrial modernity and the quintessential villains of the twentieth century. The New York Times reported that a portrait of Henry Ford graced Hitler’s Munich office 1922. Hitler acknowledged Ford in Mein Kampf and Baldur von Schirach testified in court in Nuremberg that “the decisive anti-Semitic book” he had read was Ford’s International Jew.

According to Prince Louis Ferdinand, Hitler told him over lunch in 1933 that he was “a great admirer of Ford’s” and would do his “best to put his theories into practice in Germany.” German diplomats awarded Ford a prestigious decoration in 1938. Robert Ley, head of the Nazi labor organization German Labor Front, wrote a letter to Henry Ford from his Nuremberg prison cell, days before his suicide.

We also know that Nazi engineers and industrial managers adapted technological and functional aspects of Fordism. Flow production (assembly lines and vertical integration) had considerable appeal after 1936, when the Four-Year Plan sparked renewed interest in industrial rationalization. The Volkswagen plant invoked Ford’s Rouge Factory as a model, and the German Labor Front hired Ford engineers to staff it. Finally, the Nazi-appointed manager of the airplane builder Junkers, Heinrich Koppenberg, was a vocal disciple of Ford production techniques.

Historians have proposed different understandings of the Ford-Nazi connection. Some have offered muckraking indictments of the American industrialist as a Nazi sympathizer and war profiteer. For others, the connection exhibited Nazi “reactionary modernism,” that paradoxical Fusion of technological zeal and anti-modern romanticism supposedly characteristic of Nazism. Others again have suggested a structural nexus between Fordism and Fascism. In this vein, Fordism is essentially understood as a device of capitalist control over the industrial work force. In Germany, it is asserted, Fordism only became dominant under Nazism.

But depite these interpretations, the Ford-Nazi connection still leaves us with considerable uneasiness. It fits only awkwardly into the master narratives of a historiography still dominated by national conceptual frameworks. In the American case, the status of Henry Ford as a herald of the roaring 1920’s makes it difficult to integrate his Antisemitism and indelicate political leanings into a unified appreciation of his historical role, which, in turn, creates the clichéo of the man as an “enigma.” Meanwhile, in German historiography, the juxtaposition of “Ford” and “Nazis” is still more likely to elicit ruminations about the relationship between National Socialism and modernity rather than empirical investigation. Source

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Ukraine Unlikely to Take Back Crimea–Donbass Corridor Through Military Means: Zelenskyy

I do think that an attempt by Ukraine to take back Crimea would absolutely result in a World War.

I am not saying that I am for “Putin” regarding Crimea; but I do know that this region is primarily Russian speaking and that the greater percentage of people in Crimea wanted to be annexed by Russia back in 2014.

Ukainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stands in the town of Bucha, northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, on April 4, 2022. (Ronaldo Schemidt//AFP via Getty Images)

From theepochtimes.com

Ukraine will unlikely resort to military means to take back Donbass and Crimea in the short term, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyysaid on Tuesday.

Russia has its own vision of Donbsas, and Ukraine has its own. So I had a simple suggestion. I believe that we will not be able to agree on all points at once. This is impossible, even if we have negotiations,” he said during an interview with Ukrainian media.

Ukrainian armed forces could lose thousands of soldiers if they’re ordered to take back Donbass and Crimea, which he called “temporarily occupied territories.”

It will also endanger the general security of his country as the group who is fighting in Donbass are the elite segment of the Ukrainian militaries.

“Our state needs a strong army. And if we want to lose the most powerful, most experienced people because ‘I want it now,’ we must understand that [Russian armed forces] will return to us, and not in two or three years, but in the same month. All the military know and think about it,” he elaborated. “This is a very serious story.”

Taking back control of the city of Mariupol, which was taken by Russia after the invasion started on Feb. 24, is also very difficult, he said.

Epoch Times Photo
The remains of cars are seen in front of an apartment building destroyed during the Ukraine-Russia conflict in Mariupol, Ukraine, on April 3, 2022. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)

Zelenskyy made the remarks as the Russian armed forces withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv after trying to occupy the Ukrainian capital in month-long battles and shifting to the disputed territories in eastern Ukraine.

Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and the conflicts in Donbass between the Ukrainian military and Russia-backed separatists escalated into a war the same year.

Both areas have been de facto occupied by Russia or separatists.

The Kremlin said earlier that the Donbass is the main goal of the full-scale invasion ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Zelenskyy acknowledged that the intention of Russia’s military operation is to occupy the corridor connecting Crimea and Donbass, with Mariupol being a key city along the corridor.

“Donbass, and the south of Ukraine, and the corridor to Crimea, and the Kherson region, and the Zaporizhzhia region,” he said. “We basically understand what they are doing.”

Epoch Times Photo
A map by the U.K. Ministry of Defense shows the troop locations of Russia and Ukraine as of April 5. (U.K. Ministry of Defense)

Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, which the Kremlin called “a special military operation.”

The United Nations said that as of April 4, 1,430 civilians have been killed and 2,097 injured in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion and over 4.2 million people have fled Ukraine.

Zelenskyy’s statement reaffirmed one of the two major concessions from the former Soviet country after the war started.

Ukrainian negotiators proposed a security guarantee mechanism including multiple nations at the end of March in the draft ceasefire deal. Crimea and Donbass are excluded from the proposal.

In another major concession, Ukraine renounced the pursuit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership. SOURCE

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