Trump, Henry Ford, and anti-Semitism

Henry Ford was a Nazi sympathizer who wrote a publication called “The International Jew, the World’s Foremost Problem.”

He directly inspired Hitler Youth & said Jews provoke mass violence.

Unsurprising that a man who calls Jews disloyal invokes him. You're both antisemites. https://t.co/U68od9w43c

— Bend the Arc: Jewish Action (@jewishaction) August 21, 2019

Since Trump rarely seems to know much about whatever he's talking about, it's possible that he didn't know about the mutual affinity of Henry Ford and Hitler.

But I'm glad to see this aspect of Ford's story get new attention. Especially since left-leaning commentary sometimes holds Ford up as some kind of a model of good management-labor relations.

Sanjana Karanth discusses it in Trump Invokes Anti-Semite Henry Ford After Accusing Jewish Democrats Of Disloyalty HuffPost 08/21/2019.

Hitler was indeed an admirer of Ford. In his Mein Kampf, he wrote this, quoted here from Hitler, Mein Kampf Eine kritische Edition Bd. 2 (2016), p. 1619:

Er ["Der Jude"] sieht die heutigen europäischen Staaten bereits als willenlose Werkzeuge in seiner Faust, sei es über dem Umweg einer sogenannten westlichen Demokratie oder in der Form der direkten Beherrschung durch russischen Bolschewismus. Aber nicht nur die alte Welt halt er so umgarnt, sondern auch der neuen droht das gleiche Schicksal. Juden sind die Regenten der Börsenkräfte der amerikanischen Union. Jedes Jahr lagt sie mehr zum Kontrollherrn der Arbeitskraft eines Einhundertzwanzig-Millionen-Volkes aufsteigen; ein einziger Großer, Ford, steht auch heute noch, zu ihrem Zorne, unabhängig da.

[He ["The Jew"] already sees today's European states as unwilling tools in his fist, whether through the detour of a so-called Western democracy or in the form of direct domination by Russian Bolshevism. But not only does he keep the Old World so encircled, but also the New one is threatened by the same fate. Jews are the regents of the stock-exchange forces of the American Union. Each year it has become more of a master of the labor power of a 120 million strong people; a single great man, Ford, still stands independent, infuriating them {Jews}.] {my emphasis}

(The translations from German in this post are mine.)

The editors include this commentary in a footnote (paragraph breaks added; German original not shown here):

Hitler's admiration for the American industrialist Henry Ford went back to the series of anti-Semitic articles that Ford published in his weekly Dearborn Independent in 1920 and subsequently published a selection of them as a book titled The International Jew. The pamphlet appeared in German in 1921 under the Titel Der internationale Jude and was warmly received by the völkisch rightwing; it was no coincidence that it was also to be found on a list of reading recommendations for new members of the NSDAP [Nazi Party]. However, the book was not above doubt in the party.

Thus Joseph Goebbels drew a very ambivalent conclusion in his diary on 04/08/1924. Although he regarded Ford's work as "exceptionally interesting and salutary" and illuminating on to the "development of the Jewish question in non-German countries." But he cautioned that one should not get "too caught up in the author's tangled reasoning.” He also thought that Ford “really writes a little too pro domo [for himself]. … Peculiar: Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, takes aim at Jewish capitalism. The world really is a big theater.”

For reasons that cannot be clearly ascertained, the mention of Ford was deleted from the text of Mein Kampf from 1931 on and replaced by the vague formulation that a "very few" are standing "independent even still today ". However, that did not entail a definitive aversion against Ford, who on 07/08/1927 had distanced itself from his hate piece in a statement distributed worldwide: On 07/30/1938, Ford was awarded the Eagle Shield of the German Reich for his 75th birthday.

Ford also had the very dubious distinction of published the czarist anti-Semitic "class", The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in the US for the first time.

Ford's Anti-Semitism PBS American Experience (n/d; accesssed 08/22/2019):

In 1938, Ford received an award from the Nazi regime called the "Grand Cross of the German Eagle." How do we make sense of this award? What does it mean?

The Germans honor[ed] Ford, we could say, for a couple reasons. For one thing, they're very taken with the whole assembly line technological modernization. The Model T and Volkswagen are sort of similar cars. The idea of the Volkswagen, the people's car, was to be affordable to the average German. It's kind of like the Model T of its day; that the automobile shouldn't just be something for the elite, but it should be a car that the ordinary German could afford. So the Ford Model T and Volkswagen, we might think of as sort of in a similar category.

From the point of view of anti-Semitism, Hitler could look at Ford as somebody who was -- let's call him an age-mate. They were both in the 1920s beginning to write and disseminate information about what they both considered to be this great powerful threat, "the Jew."

And Hitler was very much inspired by Ford's writing. And the idea that this could happen in the United States, I think, was very important to Hitler as well, because as people in the United States were speaking out against Nazism and were using a kind of rhetoric, "Well, it could never happen here," and "We are the bastions of democracy," I think Hitler would have derived a degree of satisfaction to be able to point to Ford as, in a way, just as good an anti-Semite as he was. [my emphasis]

Translation comment: The quote above from the editors of Mein Kampf Eine kritische Edition; names the award "Adlerschild des Deutschen Reiches", which does not translate directly as "Grand Cross". The English-language Wikipedia article on it also translates it as "Eagle Shield of the German Reich".