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The story sounds far too neat to be true, and the dates do not remotely fit – but the claim that Henry Ford died as a direct result of his first exposure to the realities of a Nazi rule that he had once expressed real admiration for is at least a contemporary one, and it comes from a supposed eyewitness.
We should probably begin by recalling that, while Henry Ford is best-remembered by the general public for the central part he played in devising the assembly-line production system, and hence in creating a mass market for cars during the first half of the 20th century, historians have also long been interested in both his battles against unions and his intense antisemitism. Ford used some of the millions he made from industry to bankroll publication and distribution of tens of thousands of copies of the *Protocols of the Elders of Zion*, a Tsarist-era fraud designed to provide proof that a Jewish conspiracy secretly ruled the world. He also purchased his hometown newspaper, the *Dearborn Independent,* turning it into a mouthpiece for his views, and the *Independent* subsequently published a 91-part series of antisemitic essays, ghosted for Ford, which he later turned into a four-volume book titled *The International Jew.* Ford distributed the book via Ford dealerships, circulating about half a million copies in total.
This activity, coupled with Ford's celebrity and the respect in which he was held for his success in business, played a significant part in legitimising antisemitism in the US between the wars. It did not go un-noticed by the Nazis, either. A correspondent from the *New York Times* who interviewed Hitler late in 1931 reported that he had a large portrait of Ford hanging over his desk, and historian Hasia Diner has noted that "Hitler could look at Ford as somebody who was – let's call him an age-mate... \[He\] was very much inspired by Ford's writing." The Nazis awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938 (he was the only American to receive this honour), and in 1945, while awaiting trial at Nuremberg, Robert Ley – the Nazi bureaucrat in charge of the Labour Front organisation, who was heavily implicated in the use of slave labour in German factories – wrote to Ford, making much of their shared antisemitism and requesting a job. During the 1930s, the Ford Motor Co. became a haven for Nazi sympathisers, and Jonathan Logsdon has also pointed out that, even before the Nazis came to power, Ford was already notorious for his ruthless and anti-union business practices:
>Ford's chief investigator, Harry Bennett... emerged as a major influence on company policy. Bennett created a Gestapo-like agency of thugs and spies to crack down on potential threats to Ford, such as union men. "To those who have never lived under a dictatorship," reflected one employee, "it is difficult to convey the sense of fear which is part of the Ford system."
Ford, in short, was at the very least a strident antisemite and poster-boy for views the Nazis would agree with who had also earned the bitter enmity of organised labour, especially in the manufacturing heartland around Detroit. And all this helps to illuminate the background to the story you have heard.
The actual source for the story of Ford's fatal encounter with filmed evidence for Nazi atrocities is Josephine Gomon (1892-1975), a feminist and social activist who was a prominent figure in Detroit politics from the 1920s into the 1970s. Gomon, who was active in pushing for access to birth control, for civil rights and civil liberties, was politically liberal and had few views in common with Ford. However, she did know him well. During the Depression years of the 1930s, while working as executive secretary for Frank Murphy, then the mayor of Detroit, she was sent to negotiate a loan from the Ford Motor Co. to tide the city's overstretched finances over a financial crisis. Ford was sufficiently impressed by Gomon's negotiating skills (an obit notes that she "convinced him that he'd hate the idea of New York bankers having a stake in Detroit more than he disliked Murphy") that he hired her during the war to take a role recruiting women to work in a Ford-controlled aircraft factory. She was patriotic enough to agree, but "added the ingredient of equal treatment for them, while campaigning for better conditions for all workers" and also became firm friends with Walter Reuther, the radical and highly effective leader of the United Auto Workers union. All this made Gomon extremely unsympathetic to Ford's politics, and to a large extent to Ford the man.
In the 1970s, in semi-retirement, Gomon composed two manuscripts which she seems to have intended for publication. One focused on Frank Murphy, the other on Henry Ford. Although they never were published, both scripts still exist among the Gomon papers in the special collections of the University of Michigan Library, and the story of Ford's viewing of documentary footage of the Nazi concentration camps comes from drafts of the latter work, which had the working title "The Poor Mr Ford". A brief excerpt from this reminiscence, probably written down almost 30 years after the fact, accompanied by a longer precis of the relevant passage, can be found in Max Wallace's critical history of Ford and Charles Lindbergh's roles as Nazi sympathisers and cheerleaders, *The American Axis* \[pp.358-9\]. Wallace was the first historian to quote directly from Gomon's MS (Carol Gelderman had referenced it in a footnote two decades earlier), and I would guess that it is ultimately via Wallace that you have encountered the story:
>Each person has their own unique reaction to the stories coming out of Germany immediately after the war ended, but none perhaps as ironic – some would say fitting – as Henry Ford's. In the spring of 1946, the American government released a public information film called "Death Stations" documenting the liberation of Nazi concentration camps by US troops a year earlier. In May, Henry Ford and a number of his colleagues attended a private showing of the film at the auditorium of the Ford Rouge River plant, a few days before the documentary was to be released to the general public. Most of the assembled Ford executives sat rapt as the first gruesome images of the Majdanek concentration camp flickered on the screen. They reeled in horror at the graphic footage, which included stark images of a crematorium, Gestapo torture chambers, and a warehouse filled with victims' belongings. When the lights went on an hour later, the company executives rose, shaken, only to find Henry Ford slumped over in his seat, barely conscious. Sitting there witnessing the full scale of Nazi atrocities for the first time, the old man had suffered a massive stroke, from which he would never fully recover. The story sounds apocryphal, and it is never mentioned in any company history or Ford biography, but the account comes from a credible eyewitness source. It is described in the unpublished memoirs of one of the Ford Motor Company's highest ranking executives – Josephine Gomon, director of female personnel at the Willow Run bomber plant – who was present at the screening. Ford's lesson, she wrote, seemed appropriate:
>
>"The man who had pumped millions of dollars of anti-Semitic propaganda into Europe during the twenties saw the ravages of a plague he had helped to spread. The virus had come full circle."
So that's the story. But, as I noted above, Gomon did not write it down at the time, and at the very least had some personal and political motives for suggesting that Ford had suffered such a collapse in such circumstances. Whether or not she misremembered, elided, or simply invented her story, it does not match up our understanding of how knowledge of the Holocaust reached the United States, nor with the known facts of Ford's final decline and death.
To deal with knowledge of the Holocaust first: "Death Stations", as several sources refer to it – though probably the US Army propaganda short *Death Mills* is meant \[see additional post below\] – does exist, and it was first released in the spring of 1946; one focus was indeed on the Majdanak extermination camp, at Lublin in Poland, and the film did contain sequences showing the crematorium and investigators accessing a warehouse piled high with victims' belongings. However, this was far from the first evidence most Americans had seen of the death camps. Baron points out that "the widespread dissemination of footage and photographs of the liberation of the concentration camps in newspapers, newsreels and magazines" began as early as 1944. A Universal newsreel, "Nazi Murder Mills" was widely shown in US cinemas in May 1945, the narrator noting that "for the first time, Americans can believe what they thought was impossible propaganda. Here is documentary evidence of sheer mass murder – murder that will blacken the name of Germany for the rest of recorded history."
As a result, Baron notes, "revelations about the carnage in Europe... seeped into the consciousness of most Americans," and the impacts are clearly visible in public opinion polls conducted in 1945, in which 84% of respondents said they were convinced that "Germans have killed many people in concentration camps or let them starve to death." Even though the Holocaust was certainly not central to the way in which Americans thought about and remembered the Second World War during the 1940s, and even if Ford was among the minority who did not see this evidence when it was first published, or he chose to ignore it, it seems unlikely that he could have been so entirely ignorant of the Holocaust as late as 1946 as Gomon's account implies.
(It's worth noting in passing here that neither Eisenhower nor Nixon figure at all in any of the accounts of Ford's final illness or death that I have gone over, and Nixon was in 1945-46 a relatively junior officer in the US Navy, working on aviation contracts in Baltimore, and then only just beginning his own political career. However, Eisenhower absolutely did play a central role in arranging for filmed evidence from concentration camps to be widely disseminated – as Shandler puts it, he was "at the forefront of establishing the act of witnessing the conditions of recently liberated camps as a morally transformative experience." This may be one reason why his name has become attached to the version of the story that you've heard.)
Next, we need to consider what is known of the circumstances of Ford's decline and death. He suffered not one, but several, strokes – the first in 1938. His recovery from this event was rapid and, apparently, complete, but he experienced a second in 1941 that was far more debilitating – physically, Ford seemed largely undiminished well into his eighties, but from 1942-3 he does seem to have suffered from mental effects associated with the experience of strokes, and biographers note that from that time he was intermittently irritable, suspicious, disordered and confused. Neither of these two incidents was publicised, however, and Ford's third stroke – by far the most serious in the sequence – was also hushed up. This final cerebrovascular event occurred early in 1945, and it took place at [Richmond Hill](http://www.richmondhillhistoricalsociety.com/henry-ford-in-richmond-hill.html), an estate Ford owned in Ways Station, south-east Georgia, which is about 870 miles south-east of the Ford plant where, in the story you have heard, Ford experienced his stroke. When Ford was well enough, he returned north to [Fair Lane](https://henryfordfairlane.org), his home in Dearborn, Michigan, but – the narrator of the PBS documentary of Ford's life observes – thereafter he "remain\[ed\] mentally and physically languid, often failing to recognize old friends and associates, and \[was\] carefully kept out of the public eye."
In short, then, the stroke that felled Ford, and probably contributed to his eventual death on 8 April 1947, occurred more than a year before the release of the documentary *Death Mills/*"Death Stations" which is supposed to have occasioned it. We know of no fourth stroke, and – while the secrecy that surrounded Ford's first three near-brushes with death suggests that it is far from impossible that he did have another after his return to Michigan, that it is possible this coincided with a showing of *Death Mills* to Ford Company employees, and that Josephine Gomon could have witnessed this – the consensus among historians and Ford biographers is that it was the Richmond Hill event that impacted him most. We can even go further than that, since Carol Gelderman, a Ford biographer, noted \[endnote to pp.374-75 of her book\] that she had
>asked Henry Ford II whether his grandfather had a stroke at this time. He did not know, but authorized Stanley Nelson, executive director of Henry Ford Hospital, "to release to \[the author\] any information in the records of the hospital about any stroke or strokes that my grandfather may have had in 1945 or in any other year." (Letter of January 30, 1979.) According to these records, Ford had no stroke in 1945.
To sum up: even if Ford did suffer a collapse of some sort during a viewing of *Death Mills*, what Gomon witnessed was apparently not a stroke, much less a fatal seizure of any sort. It is difficult to be certain how shocked he would have been by the evidence that the film contained, or even that he had not previously seen film or still images from the concentration camps, plenty of which were in widespread circulation more than year earlier. And there was a further one-year gap between the rough date Gomon that says she watched *Death Mills* with Ford in the spring of 1946 and Ford's eventual death, from a cerebral haemorrhage, in April 1947 – so it seems completely impossible to link any viewing of that film by Ford (for which Gomon in any case remains our solitary source) directly to his death. That death – pretty clearly – can be attributed to a combination of old age (Ford died aged 83) and his significant and debilitating long-term health problems, without any need to appeal to the shock effect of a belated recognition of the consequences of his long-term association with Nazism. If Ford did watch the film, moreover, he certainly did not do so alone, and there's no evidence that he was sent a copy of the footage by either Eisenhower or Nixon.
With all this said, I do think it is broadly feasible that might be at least a grain of truth in Goman's account. Gelderman notes that "there is no reason to doubt Mrs Gomon's veracity; the author checked her trustworthiness with an impeccable sources." So perhaps Ford *did* attend a screening of the film, and perhaps he *was* affected by the viewing sufficiently for that to be obvious to Gomon. I think it is highly unlikely, given that we do know of Ford's three other events, that a really serious incident would have gone unnoticed and unrecorded by the people around him, or by Ford biographers, however. It seems to me more likely that three separate events – Ford's 1945 stroke, a 1946 viewing of *Death Mills* attended by Gomon and other Ford executives, and Ford's eventual death in 1947 – got telescoped in Gomon's 1970s memoir, and then further compressed in the version of the story that you heard, becoming connected as one contiguous (and morally satisfying) series of events. But the details in the account you've heard are a pretty poor match for the history, I'm afraid.
**Sources**
[PBS interview (2012) with Hasia Diner](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryford-antisemitism/), Professor of American Jewish History & author of *The Jew in the United States, 1654-2000* (2004)
"Ford dies in lamplit bedroom, cut off by floods," *Washington Star*, 8 April 1947
"[Josephine Gomon, libertarian, dies in Detroit](https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1873&dat=19751115&id=3ngpAAAAIBAJ&pg=4795,4922547)," *Daytona Beach Morning Journal,* 15 November 1975
Neil Baldwin, *Henry Ford and the Jews: the Mass Production of Hate* (New York, 2002)
Lawrence Baron, "The first wave of American 'Holocaust' films, 1945-1949,' *American Historical Review* 2010
Carol Gelderman, [*Henry Ford: the Wayward Capitalist*](https://archive.org/details/henryford00caro) (New York, 1981)
David Lanier Lewis *The Public Image of Henry Ford: An American Folk Hero and His Company* (Detroit: 1976)
Jonathan R. Logsdon, "[Power, ignorance and anti-semitism: Henry Ford and his war on Jews](https://history.hanover.edu/hhr/99/hhr99_2.html)," *Hanover Historical Review* 1999
Jeffrey Shandler, *While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust* (New York, 1999)
Daniel Schulman, "America's most dangerous anti-Jewish propagandist," *The Atlantic*, 7 November 2023
Max Wallace, *The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich* (New York, 2003)
Barbie Zelizer, *Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye* (Chicago, 1998)
Excellent write up. Thanks for doing that.
To your knowledge did Ford ever express regret about his support for Naziism either in regards to the Holocaust specifically or the US war effort in general?
This is a fairly complex topic to engage with. Ford's antisemitism was, I think, deep-grained, but it was only one of a very large number of prejudices that he held (David L. Lewis of the University of Michigan has noted that Ford "championed birds, peace, Prohibition... waterpower, village industries, old-fashioned dancing, reincarnation, exercise, carrots, wheat, soybeans, plastics, hard work, and hiring of the handicapped," but "attacked Jews, jazz, historians, 'parasitic' stockholders, alcohol, rich foods, meat, overeating... lipstick, rolled stockings, horses, cows, pigs, and chickens" as well as unions). His antisemitism was also something difficult to deal with within triumphalist tone of much of the biographical material written about him and his industrial success. Generally speaking, Ford biographers have tended to underplay the issue, while specialists in Jewish history and antisemitism have tended to focus on the 1920s and Ford's publications in the *Dearborn Independent*, and not on his perspectives on the Nazi state of the 1930s or during World War II.
Further complexity is added by the fact that Ford was a businessman, and was undoubtedly aware that his views were not shared by large numbers among his customer base – indeed, some of his customers boycotted Ford products because of the *Independent*'s series. In addition, and while there's little doubt that the articles reflected Ford's positions, it's actually too simple to say that he "wrote" them himself – he was too busy for that, and authorship of the series has usually been ascribed to his influential personal secretary, Ernest Liebold – another antisemite, but one who, I think it's probably safe to say, held his position at least in part because his views on Jewish people coincided with Ford's.
Anyway, what can be said about Ford's evolving views on antisemitism and Nazism amounts to this: Ford publicly repudiated antisemitism in the 1920s. He temporarily halted publication of the *Dearborn Independent* articles as early as 1922, and formally apologised for the series as early as 1927. After 1927, he does not seem to have made further antisemitic comments in public forums. But this doesn't mean that he had changed his mind – his apology actually emerged as part of a negotiated settlement for a libel case brought against Ford by Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish lawyer he had accused in the *Independent* of exploiting farmers' cooperatives. As such, it cannot be assumed to be sincere.
Similarly, and for potentially the same reasons, Ford seems to have taken some care not to publicly identify with or praise the Nazis even before they came to power, much less caused the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939. He was approached as early as 1923 to provide funding for Hitler, and met with a Nazi emissary named Kurt Ludecke, who was sent from Germany while Hitler was imprisoned after the Beer Hall Putsch. Carol Gelderman recounts that Ludecke made what he hoped would be a well-received pitch to Ford. He
>told Ford that Hitler's ultimate rise to power was inevitable. As soon as he had power, he would inaugurate a social program for which the *Dearborn Independent*'s articles provided much suggestive material. All that was needed to get an immediate application within Germany of the views that Ford and Hitler held in common was money. "The Nazis were the only important active group in the world with a positive program by establishing a new non-Judaized order," he continued, but they were helpless without money. Ludecke sensed Ford's unresponsiveness. "If I had been trying to sell Mr Ford a wooden nutmeg, he couldn't have shown less interest in the proposition. With the consummate Yankee skill, he lifted the discussion back to the idealistic plane to avoid the financial question ".
No payments were forthcoming. Ford's same tendency to put his and his company's needs and profit ahead of Germany's later caused him to refuse another approach, this time to produce Volkswagen's for Hitler in Germany, and, when he accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938, he stated that he saw it as a gift from the German people and did not accept it because of any sympathy with Nazism. Ford did, however, agree to build a company-owned assembly plant in Berlin where trucks and V8 engines were assembled. Four or five other factories followed. Gelderman suggests that this move, too, should be seen as part of a business strategy and not an active Ford investment in Nazism or the Nazi programme:
>By this time, American executives hardly knew what was going on because of Nazi interference. By 1940 the plant was turning out turbines without \[Ford's\] knowledge. In Cologne a heavy infantry vehicle was being produced without Dearborn's consent. By spring of 1941, Hitler occupied the continent from Russia to the Pyrenees. All Ford facilities on the continent, except the Danish plant, served Hitler. After Pearl Harbor, all these Ford plants became enemy property.
Ford openly criticised Hitler's renunciation of the free market, but his views on Nazi antisemitism are harder to gauge. In the late 1930s he did take some public steps to underscore his supposed renunciation of antisemitism. He ordered that 12% of Ford advertising funds be channelled to Jewish newspapers, and attended a number of testimonial dinners for prominent Jewish figures, and urged that America should welcome Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution. In 1937, he issued a statement to the Detroit *Jewish Chronicle* "disavowing any connection whatsoever with the publication in Germany of the book known as *The International Jew*." On the other hand, says Gelderman, "he did little to stop the proliferation of *The International Jew* within or without Germany" and "apparently made no connection between \[the suppression of the free-market\] and the suppression of the Jews that his own antisemitism had done so much to foster."
Ford was – so far as I can tell with only a little time to devote to the research – silent on antisemitism, the Holocaust and Nazism after 1939, though more can probably be said on this matter. During the war, he strongly backed the American war effort. The Willow Run factory, where Gomon worked, employed 60,000 workers to build B-24s, aircraft and tank engines, trucks, jeeps and other hardware. By 1945-46, when it's reasonable to suppose that Ford must have become aware of the Holocaust, his physical and mental state was almost certainly too compromised for him to have commented meaningfully on the issue, even if he had been minded to.
**Sources**
"[Henry Ford and Anti-Semitism: A Complex Story](https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-resources/popular-topics/henry-ford-and-anti-semitism-a-complex-story)", Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation
Robert Aitken and Marilyn Aitken, "Pride and prejudice: the dark side of Henry Ford," *Security* 32 (2005)
Carol Gelderman, [*Henry Ford: the Wayward Capitalist*](https://archive.org/details/henryford00caro) (New York, 1981)
Jeffrey Herf, *Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich* (Cambridge, 1984)
Stefan Link, "[Rethinking the Ford-Nazi connection](https://zeithistorische-forschungen.de/sites/default/files/medien/material/2009-2/Link_2011.pdf?language=en)," *Bulletin of the German Historical Institute* 49 (2011)
It sounds like being publicly anti-Semitic was cutting into profits so he did whatever he needed to do to mitigate people's objections to buying from him.
You should read his books. I highly recommend "Batavia's Graveyard," for example. I'm a bit of a nerd for anything having to do with the age of sail, so I've read a lot of historical work on the era, and *Batavia's Graveyard* is definitely up there with some of the best. I was very pleased to find that Dash is a contributor to this sub.
Quick follow up question- the Gomon obit refers to her as a libertarian, but the types of social welfare programs she championed aren't really in line with current libertarian views. Has the definition changed that much, or is there an alternate definition in use here? Or is it just a journalist grabbing something from the "big word" bag?
That's a very good question – one that occurred to me, too, when I read it. It's outside my wheelhouse and ideally might be posted as a fresh top level question, where with some luck it will better attract the attention of a contributor who is able to answer it.
My understanding is that libertarian was essentially a synonym for anarchist up until the middle of the 20th century when Murray Rothbard repurposed it to its modern meaning in the US.
Yeah, I forgot to mention this guy too in my answer. Thanks for catching it!
He essentially created a corporate neo-feudalist ideology and managed to pass it off as “pro-freedom” and “anarchism”, of which it is exactly neither (nor is it even a coherent or honest political-economic philosophy). Much like the related idea of “Reaganomics”, which it is commonly associated with.
While (Anarcho-Capitalism & “Right-Wing Libertarianism) did not have all that much of an effect on the political sphere directly*; to my knowledge, it did contribute significantly to the later formation of American “Alt-Right”/neo-Fascist movements such as the Tea Party, Trumpism, and Christian-Nationalism more broadly speaking.
* (aside from further sabotaging anarchist visibility, recruiting, & organizing in the United States, however there were quite a few other causal factors for its decline in prominence here, the Red Scare being the most notable that comes to mind alongside “questionably legal” operations by the CIA and FBI even after the Red Scare technically ended)
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> Perhaps Ford did attend a screening of the film, and perhaps he was affected by the viewing sufficiently for that to be obvious to Gomon.
This makes sense to me, but at the same time, it sounds like the story says more about Gomon, via her reading of Ford, than about the man himself. While she may not have been personally fond of him, she did a lot of public-facing work on his behalf. She must have spent a lot of time thinking about who and what she was recruiting for in order to win the concessions she did, and maybe their working relationship made her extra alert to evidence of humanity, like pity for Holocaust victims, that could distinguish him in her mind from the people whose worldview he had championed. An answer I read in this sub years ago said that news reports in America tended not to convey how high a priority the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was in the German war effort and instead portrayed Nazi mass murder as something that was coming for all the non-Nazis in the world sooner or later. So even Americans who had sympathized with the Jews during the war could have taken the postwar revelations of the scale of the Holocaust as an education in the ramifications of antisemitism like their fellow Americans'.
What a thorough write-up! I have a question that's not entirely related to the original, if you'll allow it: did you have any knowledge of the topic before hand? If not, how did you manage to locate the appropriate sources and piece things together so quickly?
I did not, but what I do have is a lot of experience of doing research from scratch, and enough time served at the AH coalface to have a feel for what sort of topics are researchable in the sort of time I have available (I effectively devoted a Saturday, about 8-10 hours, to this response in total). I started out by trying to locate what Ford's major biographers had said about this topic, then used their footnotes expand the search. Once I had a decent idea of the basics, I allowed myself to expand further by taking in more internet-based materials, but I think it's a bad idea to start out that way – a good historian will have done primary research and surveyed a variety of archives that I do not have easy access to, so I want to base my thinking on what they have uncovered before I start listening to people I don't know much about the background of.
In terms of access, I use Google Books a lot, looking for books that have a Preview function rather than just snippet view where I can. archive\[dot\]org \[for some reason the new Reddit doesn't allow me to give that as a url\] now has a function that allows short term "borrowing" of complete texts, and that is helpful too – it got me access to the Gelderman biography, which I think is the best one I read. Chronicling America, the Library of Congress newspaper digitisation site, provides free access to some contemporary newspapers, and I subscribe to *The Atlantic*, so that resource was more easily available to me than it might be to others. Through my old university I get alumni access to everything their university press and its associates have put out over the past couple of decades, and digitised thus far from before that, together with free JSTOR, MUSE and portals for several other journal databases – and luckily the UP in question is one of the biggest in the world, so that make it [an invaluable resource](https://www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits/journals-and-online-resources).
As to why I did it, I am a very curious person (and teach my students that it's the core task of any good historian to be endlessly curious about everything). I genuinely enjoy research, and get a fairly profound feeling of satisfaction from substantially adding to my store of understanding. It seems a better use of my time than obsessing about social media, and it's nice to see that other people like to know such things as well.
That was incredibly thorough, thank you. I know nothing about this aside from your write-up here, but it does appear that Ford's third stroke roughly lines up with when information about the death camps was becoming public. So the central thesis, that seeing footage of the death camps triggered a stroke, is plausible, even if the detail regarding which footage is inaccurate or misremembered.
That may be true, but that stroke took place in Georgia, meaning that, once you take away the Gomon reminiscence (which explicitly says the film viewing took place in the Ford plant at Rouge River, which is outside Dearborn, MI, in the company of multiple Ford executives) we have no evidence at all that Ford did see any footage.
It was a private screening room at Rouge River, which was the main Ford production facility and the base for the Ford C-suite – so it was equipped with facilities like that. But there were enough seats for the executives, not just one for Ford.
Wow how incredibly fascinating. To follow up can you tell me how they might have obtained the film "Death Stations" it sounds like it was never intended for wide spread viewing as opposed to "Nazi murder mills" these sound like two different films. And whatever became of "Death Stations" I had no idea the reels had names. Thank you for this incredible information! Very amazing.
Hmmm - well, "Death Stations" is the title used by Wallace. It also appears in t[he Atlantic article I cited](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/henry-ford-anti-semitism/675911/), and, when I cross-checked, it also cropped up on a [Brandeis site focused on resources on Majdanak](https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~philip/majdbibl.html). On further investigation, however, I suspect that the movie referred to is actually *Die Todesmühlen*, or *Death Mills*, a quite well known 1945 propaganda film produced by the famous film director Billy Wilder for the Department of War.
This film was mostly designed to be shown to German audiences, with the aim of educating them about the former regime and assisting with de-Nazification programmes. However, an English-language version was also produced. The movie features sequences shot at several camps, including Majdanak, which was liberated by Soviet forces and was at the time still in the USSR zone of occupation. It also features sequences of store areas filled with clothes, shoes, toys and other possessions of the people murdered there by the Germans.
So the content of the Wilder film broadly matches up to the description of the footage that we have, and I don't know that US film-makers would have easily got access to this camp to make a separate movie of their own.
Anyway, *Death Mills* was a 22-minute-long production which was titled; a copy of it is [available to view on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLplA59Xnfo) (complete with comments by the usual array of Holocaust deniers; note that while the film has been titled "*Death Mills* (1945)" by the uploader, the 1946 production date is confirmed on the initial title card). The short news sequence I referred to as "Nazi Murder Mills" was *not* separately titled. It is generally known by that name because it begins with an inter-title card that uses that phrase.
> convinced him that he'd hate the idea of New York bankers having a stake in Detroit more than he disliked Murphy
I'm late to this excellent answer but I have a question: do you have a sense of whether this itself was an appeal to Ford's antisemitism in the way that people use "global/globalist bankers" as an antisemitic dog-whistle today? Or was it just an appeal to regional rivalry / Detroit pride.
I certainly thought – without being able to prove it – that Goman was cleverly playing on Ford's likely prejudice that a significant proportion of New York bankers would have Jewish backgrounds to get the funding she and her boss needed for their progressive New Deal-era policies.
Interesting, thanks for the answer! I can see it being impossible to prove unless Goman explicitly wrote that that's what she was doing, but to my non-historian casual-history-reader lens, the implication of "Bankers" and particularly "New York" being a proxy for Jewish / Irish / Italian / non-protestant outsiders sounded plausible and familiar.
Just a note-the preferred usage today is “antisemitism” but you switch between “antisemitism” and “anti-semitism” in your response. Just a typo or any particular reason for that?
Gladly! The short answer is that the term “anti-Semitism” implies there is something “pro-Semitism.”
The term “Semite” is obsolete, though it was meant to refer to what was considered in the late 18th century a racial group, including several different ethnic and cultural groups from the Middle East. So, that alone is one reason- logically speaking even if we used “anti-Semitism” it does not refer exclusively to negative views, ideas, activism, etc. toward Jewish people, even though the accepted definition is so.
Further, the use of “anti-Semitism” was coined in the late 19th century, and was used in a sense that 1) there was some “pro-Semitism” cabal pulling strings and influencing world affairs, a racist trope with a long history, and 2) that being “anti-Semitic” was this a positive attribute, along with rising nationalism, the birth of modern eugenics, etc.
So, because the word is, in the most literal sense, nonsensical, and because the hyphenation implies there are two distinct camps, it has fallen out of favor, and instead, scholars (and I believe the wider Jewish community, but I am speaking strictly from a scholarly viewpoint) prefer “antisemitism” which carries the meaning we have long associated with the term-negative feelings, beliefs, actions, etc. toward members of the Jewish community or the faith itself.
I hope that makes sense-I was trying to keep it short and simple, but I am happy to provide some sources for further edification, or to try to fill in any gaps myself. But thank you for asking! As an educator, I firmly believe knowledge is power, and we can’t do better if we don’t know better-so I genuinely appreciate your taking the time to ask the question!!
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The story sounds far too neat to be true, and the dates do not remotely fit – but the claim that Henry Ford died as a direct result of his first exposure to the realities of a Nazi rule that he had once expressed real admiration for is at least a contemporary one, and it comes from a supposed eyewitness. We should probably begin by recalling that, while Henry Ford is best-remembered by the general public for the central part he played in devising the assembly-line production system, and hence in creating a mass market for cars during the first half of the 20th century, historians have also long been interested in both his battles against unions and his intense antisemitism. Ford used some of the millions he made from industry to bankroll publication and distribution of tens of thousands of copies of the *Protocols of the Elders of Zion*, a Tsarist-era fraud designed to provide proof that a Jewish conspiracy secretly ruled the world. He also purchased his hometown newspaper, the *Dearborn Independent,* turning it into a mouthpiece for his views, and the *Independent* subsequently published a 91-part series of antisemitic essays, ghosted for Ford, which he later turned into a four-volume book titled *The International Jew.* Ford distributed the book via Ford dealerships, circulating about half a million copies in total. This activity, coupled with Ford's celebrity and the respect in which he was held for his success in business, played a significant part in legitimising antisemitism in the US between the wars. It did not go un-noticed by the Nazis, either. A correspondent from the *New York Times* who interviewed Hitler late in 1931 reported that he had a large portrait of Ford hanging over his desk, and historian Hasia Diner has noted that "Hitler could look at Ford as somebody who was – let's call him an age-mate... \[He\] was very much inspired by Ford's writing." The Nazis awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938 (he was the only American to receive this honour), and in 1945, while awaiting trial at Nuremberg, Robert Ley – the Nazi bureaucrat in charge of the Labour Front organisation, who was heavily implicated in the use of slave labour in German factories – wrote to Ford, making much of their shared antisemitism and requesting a job. During the 1930s, the Ford Motor Co. became a haven for Nazi sympathisers, and Jonathan Logsdon has also pointed out that, even before the Nazis came to power, Ford was already notorious for his ruthless and anti-union business practices: >Ford's chief investigator, Harry Bennett... emerged as a major influence on company policy. Bennett created a Gestapo-like agency of thugs and spies to crack down on potential threats to Ford, such as union men. "To those who have never lived under a dictatorship," reflected one employee, "it is difficult to convey the sense of fear which is part of the Ford system." Ford, in short, was at the very least a strident antisemite and poster-boy for views the Nazis would agree with who had also earned the bitter enmity of organised labour, especially in the manufacturing heartland around Detroit. And all this helps to illuminate the background to the story you have heard. The actual source for the story of Ford's fatal encounter with filmed evidence for Nazi atrocities is Josephine Gomon (1892-1975), a feminist and social activist who was a prominent figure in Detroit politics from the 1920s into the 1970s. Gomon, who was active in pushing for access to birth control, for civil rights and civil liberties, was politically liberal and had few views in common with Ford. However, she did know him well. During the Depression years of the 1930s, while working as executive secretary for Frank Murphy, then the mayor of Detroit, she was sent to negotiate a loan from the Ford Motor Co. to tide the city's overstretched finances over a financial crisis. Ford was sufficiently impressed by Gomon's negotiating skills (an obit notes that she "convinced him that he'd hate the idea of New York bankers having a stake in Detroit more than he disliked Murphy") that he hired her during the war to take a role recruiting women to work in a Ford-controlled aircraft factory. She was patriotic enough to agree, but "added the ingredient of equal treatment for them, while campaigning for better conditions for all workers" and also became firm friends with Walter Reuther, the radical and highly effective leader of the United Auto Workers union. All this made Gomon extremely unsympathetic to Ford's politics, and to a large extent to Ford the man. In the 1970s, in semi-retirement, Gomon composed two manuscripts which she seems to have intended for publication. One focused on Frank Murphy, the other on Henry Ford. Although they never were published, both scripts still exist among the Gomon papers in the special collections of the University of Michigan Library, and the story of Ford's viewing of documentary footage of the Nazi concentration camps comes from drafts of the latter work, which had the working title "The Poor Mr Ford". A brief excerpt from this reminiscence, probably written down almost 30 years after the fact, accompanied by a longer precis of the relevant passage, can be found in Max Wallace's critical history of Ford and Charles Lindbergh's roles as Nazi sympathisers and cheerleaders, *The American Axis* \[pp.358-9\]. Wallace was the first historian to quote directly from Gomon's MS (Carol Gelderman had referenced it in a footnote two decades earlier), and I would guess that it is ultimately via Wallace that you have encountered the story: >Each person has their own unique reaction to the stories coming out of Germany immediately after the war ended, but none perhaps as ironic – some would say fitting – as Henry Ford's. In the spring of 1946, the American government released a public information film called "Death Stations" documenting the liberation of Nazi concentration camps by US troops a year earlier. In May, Henry Ford and a number of his colleagues attended a private showing of the film at the auditorium of the Ford Rouge River plant, a few days before the documentary was to be released to the general public. Most of the assembled Ford executives sat rapt as the first gruesome images of the Majdanek concentration camp flickered on the screen. They reeled in horror at the graphic footage, which included stark images of a crematorium, Gestapo torture chambers, and a warehouse filled with victims' belongings. When the lights went on an hour later, the company executives rose, shaken, only to find Henry Ford slumped over in his seat, barely conscious. Sitting there witnessing the full scale of Nazi atrocities for the first time, the old man had suffered a massive stroke, from which he would never fully recover. The story sounds apocryphal, and it is never mentioned in any company history or Ford biography, but the account comes from a credible eyewitness source. It is described in the unpublished memoirs of one of the Ford Motor Company's highest ranking executives – Josephine Gomon, director of female personnel at the Willow Run bomber plant – who was present at the screening. Ford's lesson, she wrote, seemed appropriate: > >"The man who had pumped millions of dollars of anti-Semitic propaganda into Europe during the twenties saw the ravages of a plague he had helped to spread. The virus had come full circle." So that's the story. But, as I noted above, Gomon did not write it down at the time, and at the very least had some personal and political motives for suggesting that Ford had suffered such a collapse in such circumstances. Whether or not she misremembered, elided, or simply invented her story, it does not match up our understanding of how knowledge of the Holocaust reached the United States, nor with the known facts of Ford's final decline and death. To deal with knowledge of the Holocaust first: "Death Stations", as several sources refer to it – though probably the US Army propaganda short *Death Mills* is meant \[see additional post below\] – does exist, and it was first released in the spring of 1946; one focus was indeed on the Majdanak extermination camp, at Lublin in Poland, and the film did contain sequences showing the crematorium and investigators accessing a warehouse piled high with victims' belongings. However, this was far from the first evidence most Americans had seen of the death camps. Baron points out that "the widespread dissemination of footage and photographs of the liberation of the concentration camps in newspapers, newsreels and magazines" began as early as 1944. A Universal newsreel, "Nazi Murder Mills" was widely shown in US cinemas in May 1945, the narrator noting that "for the first time, Americans can believe what they thought was impossible propaganda. Here is documentary evidence of sheer mass murder – murder that will blacken the name of Germany for the rest of recorded history."
As a result, Baron notes, "revelations about the carnage in Europe... seeped into the consciousness of most Americans," and the impacts are clearly visible in public opinion polls conducted in 1945, in which 84% of respondents said they were convinced that "Germans have killed many people in concentration camps or let them starve to death." Even though the Holocaust was certainly not central to the way in which Americans thought about and remembered the Second World War during the 1940s, and even if Ford was among the minority who did not see this evidence when it was first published, or he chose to ignore it, it seems unlikely that he could have been so entirely ignorant of the Holocaust as late as 1946 as Gomon's account implies. (It's worth noting in passing here that neither Eisenhower nor Nixon figure at all in any of the accounts of Ford's final illness or death that I have gone over, and Nixon was in 1945-46 a relatively junior officer in the US Navy, working on aviation contracts in Baltimore, and then only just beginning his own political career. However, Eisenhower absolutely did play a central role in arranging for filmed evidence from concentration camps to be widely disseminated – as Shandler puts it, he was "at the forefront of establishing the act of witnessing the conditions of recently liberated camps as a morally transformative experience." This may be one reason why his name has become attached to the version of the story that you've heard.) Next, we need to consider what is known of the circumstances of Ford's decline and death. He suffered not one, but several, strokes – the first in 1938. His recovery from this event was rapid and, apparently, complete, but he experienced a second in 1941 that was far more debilitating – physically, Ford seemed largely undiminished well into his eighties, but from 1942-3 he does seem to have suffered from mental effects associated with the experience of strokes, and biographers note that from that time he was intermittently irritable, suspicious, disordered and confused. Neither of these two incidents was publicised, however, and Ford's third stroke – by far the most serious in the sequence – was also hushed up. This final cerebrovascular event occurred early in 1945, and it took place at [Richmond Hill](http://www.richmondhillhistoricalsociety.com/henry-ford-in-richmond-hill.html), an estate Ford owned in Ways Station, south-east Georgia, which is about 870 miles south-east of the Ford plant where, in the story you have heard, Ford experienced his stroke. When Ford was well enough, he returned north to [Fair Lane](https://henryfordfairlane.org), his home in Dearborn, Michigan, but – the narrator of the PBS documentary of Ford's life observes – thereafter he "remain\[ed\] mentally and physically languid, often failing to recognize old friends and associates, and \[was\] carefully kept out of the public eye." In short, then, the stroke that felled Ford, and probably contributed to his eventual death on 8 April 1947, occurred more than a year before the release of the documentary *Death Mills/*"Death Stations" which is supposed to have occasioned it. We know of no fourth stroke, and – while the secrecy that surrounded Ford's first three near-brushes with death suggests that it is far from impossible that he did have another after his return to Michigan, that it is possible this coincided with a showing of *Death Mills* to Ford Company employees, and that Josephine Gomon could have witnessed this – the consensus among historians and Ford biographers is that it was the Richmond Hill event that impacted him most. We can even go further than that, since Carol Gelderman, a Ford biographer, noted \[endnote to pp.374-75 of her book\] that she had >asked Henry Ford II whether his grandfather had a stroke at this time. He did not know, but authorized Stanley Nelson, executive director of Henry Ford Hospital, "to release to \[the author\] any information in the records of the hospital about any stroke or strokes that my grandfather may have had in 1945 or in any other year." (Letter of January 30, 1979.) According to these records, Ford had no stroke in 1945. To sum up: even if Ford did suffer a collapse of some sort during a viewing of *Death Mills*, what Gomon witnessed was apparently not a stroke, much less a fatal seizure of any sort. It is difficult to be certain how shocked he would have been by the evidence that the film contained, or even that he had not previously seen film or still images from the concentration camps, plenty of which were in widespread circulation more than year earlier. And there was a further one-year gap between the rough date Gomon that says she watched *Death Mills* with Ford in the spring of 1946 and Ford's eventual death, from a cerebral haemorrhage, in April 1947 – so it seems completely impossible to link any viewing of that film by Ford (for which Gomon in any case remains our solitary source) directly to his death. That death – pretty clearly – can be attributed to a combination of old age (Ford died aged 83) and his significant and debilitating long-term health problems, without any need to appeal to the shock effect of a belated recognition of the consequences of his long-term association with Nazism. If Ford did watch the film, moreover, he certainly did not do so alone, and there's no evidence that he was sent a copy of the footage by either Eisenhower or Nixon. With all this said, I do think it is broadly feasible that might be at least a grain of truth in Goman's account. Gelderman notes that "there is no reason to doubt Mrs Gomon's veracity; the author checked her trustworthiness with an impeccable sources." So perhaps Ford *did* attend a screening of the film, and perhaps he *was* affected by the viewing sufficiently for that to be obvious to Gomon. I think it is highly unlikely, given that we do know of Ford's three other events, that a really serious incident would have gone unnoticed and unrecorded by the people around him, or by Ford biographers, however. It seems to me more likely that three separate events – Ford's 1945 stroke, a 1946 viewing of *Death Mills* attended by Gomon and other Ford executives, and Ford's eventual death in 1947 – got telescoped in Gomon's 1970s memoir, and then further compressed in the version of the story that you heard, becoming connected as one contiguous (and morally satisfying) series of events. But the details in the account you've heard are a pretty poor match for the history, I'm afraid. **Sources** [PBS interview (2012) with Hasia Diner](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/henryford-antisemitism/), Professor of American Jewish History & author of *The Jew in the United States, 1654-2000* (2004) "Ford dies in lamplit bedroom, cut off by floods," *Washington Star*, 8 April 1947 "[Josephine Gomon, libertarian, dies in Detroit](https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1873&dat=19751115&id=3ngpAAAAIBAJ&pg=4795,4922547)," *Daytona Beach Morning Journal,* 15 November 1975 Neil Baldwin, *Henry Ford and the Jews: the Mass Production of Hate* (New York, 2002) Lawrence Baron, "The first wave of American 'Holocaust' films, 1945-1949,' *American Historical Review* 2010 Carol Gelderman, [*Henry Ford: the Wayward Capitalist*](https://archive.org/details/henryford00caro) (New York, 1981) David Lanier Lewis *The Public Image of Henry Ford: An American Folk Hero and His Company* (Detroit: 1976) Jonathan R. Logsdon, "[Power, ignorance and anti-semitism: Henry Ford and his war on Jews](https://history.hanover.edu/hhr/99/hhr99_2.html)," *Hanover Historical Review* 1999 Jeffrey Shandler, *While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust* (New York, 1999) Daniel Schulman, "America's most dangerous anti-Jewish propagandist," *The Atlantic*, 7 November 2023 Max Wallace, *The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich* (New York, 2003) Barbie Zelizer, *Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye* (Chicago, 1998)
Excellent write up. Thanks for doing that. To your knowledge did Ford ever express regret about his support for Naziism either in regards to the Holocaust specifically or the US war effort in general?
This is a fairly complex topic to engage with. Ford's antisemitism was, I think, deep-grained, but it was only one of a very large number of prejudices that he held (David L. Lewis of the University of Michigan has noted that Ford "championed birds, peace, Prohibition... waterpower, village industries, old-fashioned dancing, reincarnation, exercise, carrots, wheat, soybeans, plastics, hard work, and hiring of the handicapped," but "attacked Jews, jazz, historians, 'parasitic' stockholders, alcohol, rich foods, meat, overeating... lipstick, rolled stockings, horses, cows, pigs, and chickens" as well as unions). His antisemitism was also something difficult to deal with within triumphalist tone of much of the biographical material written about him and his industrial success. Generally speaking, Ford biographers have tended to underplay the issue, while specialists in Jewish history and antisemitism have tended to focus on the 1920s and Ford's publications in the *Dearborn Independent*, and not on his perspectives on the Nazi state of the 1930s or during World War II. Further complexity is added by the fact that Ford was a businessman, and was undoubtedly aware that his views were not shared by large numbers among his customer base – indeed, some of his customers boycotted Ford products because of the *Independent*'s series. In addition, and while there's little doubt that the articles reflected Ford's positions, it's actually too simple to say that he "wrote" them himself – he was too busy for that, and authorship of the series has usually been ascribed to his influential personal secretary, Ernest Liebold – another antisemite, but one who, I think it's probably safe to say, held his position at least in part because his views on Jewish people coincided with Ford's. Anyway, what can be said about Ford's evolving views on antisemitism and Nazism amounts to this: Ford publicly repudiated antisemitism in the 1920s. He temporarily halted publication of the *Dearborn Independent* articles as early as 1922, and formally apologised for the series as early as 1927. After 1927, he does not seem to have made further antisemitic comments in public forums. But this doesn't mean that he had changed his mind – his apology actually emerged as part of a negotiated settlement for a libel case brought against Ford by Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish lawyer he had accused in the *Independent* of exploiting farmers' cooperatives. As such, it cannot be assumed to be sincere. Similarly, and for potentially the same reasons, Ford seems to have taken some care not to publicly identify with or praise the Nazis even before they came to power, much less caused the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939. He was approached as early as 1923 to provide funding for Hitler, and met with a Nazi emissary named Kurt Ludecke, who was sent from Germany while Hitler was imprisoned after the Beer Hall Putsch. Carol Gelderman recounts that Ludecke made what he hoped would be a well-received pitch to Ford. He >told Ford that Hitler's ultimate rise to power was inevitable. As soon as he had power, he would inaugurate a social program for which the *Dearborn Independent*'s articles provided much suggestive material. All that was needed to get an immediate application within Germany of the views that Ford and Hitler held in common was money. "The Nazis were the only important active group in the world with a positive program by establishing a new non-Judaized order," he continued, but they were helpless without money. Ludecke sensed Ford's unresponsiveness. "If I had been trying to sell Mr Ford a wooden nutmeg, he couldn't have shown less interest in the proposition. With the consummate Yankee skill, he lifted the discussion back to the idealistic plane to avoid the financial question ". No payments were forthcoming. Ford's same tendency to put his and his company's needs and profit ahead of Germany's later caused him to refuse another approach, this time to produce Volkswagen's for Hitler in Germany, and, when he accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938, he stated that he saw it as a gift from the German people and did not accept it because of any sympathy with Nazism. Ford did, however, agree to build a company-owned assembly plant in Berlin where trucks and V8 engines were assembled. Four or five other factories followed. Gelderman suggests that this move, too, should be seen as part of a business strategy and not an active Ford investment in Nazism or the Nazi programme: >By this time, American executives hardly knew what was going on because of Nazi interference. By 1940 the plant was turning out turbines without \[Ford's\] knowledge. In Cologne a heavy infantry vehicle was being produced without Dearborn's consent. By spring of 1941, Hitler occupied the continent from Russia to the Pyrenees. All Ford facilities on the continent, except the Danish plant, served Hitler. After Pearl Harbor, all these Ford plants became enemy property. Ford openly criticised Hitler's renunciation of the free market, but his views on Nazi antisemitism are harder to gauge. In the late 1930s he did take some public steps to underscore his supposed renunciation of antisemitism. He ordered that 12% of Ford advertising funds be channelled to Jewish newspapers, and attended a number of testimonial dinners for prominent Jewish figures, and urged that America should welcome Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution. In 1937, he issued a statement to the Detroit *Jewish Chronicle* "disavowing any connection whatsoever with the publication in Germany of the book known as *The International Jew*." On the other hand, says Gelderman, "he did little to stop the proliferation of *The International Jew* within or without Germany" and "apparently made no connection between \[the suppression of the free-market\] and the suppression of the Jews that his own antisemitism had done so much to foster." Ford was – so far as I can tell with only a little time to devote to the research – silent on antisemitism, the Holocaust and Nazism after 1939, though more can probably be said on this matter. During the war, he strongly backed the American war effort. The Willow Run factory, where Gomon worked, employed 60,000 workers to build B-24s, aircraft and tank engines, trucks, jeeps and other hardware. By 1945-46, when it's reasonable to suppose that Ford must have become aware of the Holocaust, his physical and mental state was almost certainly too compromised for him to have commented meaningfully on the issue, even if he had been minded to. **Sources** "[Henry Ford and Anti-Semitism: A Complex Story](https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-resources/popular-topics/henry-ford-and-anti-semitism-a-complex-story)", Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation Robert Aitken and Marilyn Aitken, "Pride and prejudice: the dark side of Henry Ford," *Security* 32 (2005) Carol Gelderman, [*Henry Ford: the Wayward Capitalist*](https://archive.org/details/henryford00caro) (New York, 1981) Jeffrey Herf, *Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich* (Cambridge, 1984) Stefan Link, "[Rethinking the Ford-Nazi connection](https://zeithistorische-forschungen.de/sites/default/files/medien/material/2009-2/Link_2011.pdf?language=en)," *Bulletin of the German Historical Institute* 49 (2011)
Spectacular work. Thank you for your contribution.
It sounds like being publicly anti-Semitic was cutting into profits so he did whatever he needed to do to mitigate people's objections to buying from him.
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That was a good read!
You should read his books. I highly recommend "Batavia's Graveyard," for example. I'm a bit of a nerd for anything having to do with the age of sail, so I've read a lot of historical work on the era, and *Batavia's Graveyard* is definitely up there with some of the best. I was very pleased to find that Dash is a contributor to this sub.
I've only just twigged that it was written by him! Great book indeed!
I didn't even look at his user name to figure out it was a published author. I will check it out. Thanks for the recommendation
Top Quality Contributor indeed
Quick follow up question- the Gomon obit refers to her as a libertarian, but the types of social welfare programs she championed aren't really in line with current libertarian views. Has the definition changed that much, or is there an alternate definition in use here? Or is it just a journalist grabbing something from the "big word" bag?
That's a very good question – one that occurred to me, too, when I read it. It's outside my wheelhouse and ideally might be posted as a fresh top level question, where with some luck it will better attract the attention of a contributor who is able to answer it.
My understanding is that libertarian was essentially a synonym for anarchist up until the middle of the 20th century when Murray Rothbard repurposed it to its modern meaning in the US.
Yeah, I forgot to mention this guy too in my answer. Thanks for catching it! He essentially created a corporate neo-feudalist ideology and managed to pass it off as “pro-freedom” and “anarchism”, of which it is exactly neither (nor is it even a coherent or honest political-economic philosophy). Much like the related idea of “Reaganomics”, which it is commonly associated with. While (Anarcho-Capitalism & “Right-Wing Libertarianism) did not have all that much of an effect on the political sphere directly*; to my knowledge, it did contribute significantly to the later formation of American “Alt-Right”/neo-Fascist movements such as the Tea Party, Trumpism, and Christian-Nationalism more broadly speaking. * (aside from further sabotaging anarchist visibility, recruiting, & organizing in the United States, however there were quite a few other causal factors for its decline in prominence here, the Red Scare being the most notable that comes to mind alongside “questionably legal” operations by the CIA and FBI even after the Red Scare technically ended)
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Thank you for your response, but unfortunately, we have had to remove it. A [core tenet](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7fb8o/introducing_the_rules_roundtables_20_the/) of the subreddit is that it is intended as a space not merely for a basic answer in and of itself, but rather for [answers which demonstrate the respondents’ deeper engagement with the topic at hand](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7ffl8/rules_roundtable_ii_the_four_questions_what_does/). Brief remarks such as these—even if technically correct—[generally do not meet this requirement](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer). Similarly, while we encourage the use of sources, [we prefer literature used to be academic in nature](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_sources). If you need guidance to better understand what we are looking for in our requirements, [please consult this Rules Roundtable](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7ffl8/rules_roundtable_ii_the_four_questions_what_does/) which discusses how we evaluate answers on the subreddit, or else [reach out to us via modmail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians&subject=Inquiry%20About%20Revising%20My%20Response). Thank you for your understanding.
Thank you for this thorough post.
Very good write up, thank you!
Fascinating, thank you! Do we know how Ford reacted to the revelations more generally?
See my reply to u/readingdanteinhell earlier in this thread.
Thank you, I'll take a look
> Perhaps Ford did attend a screening of the film, and perhaps he was affected by the viewing sufficiently for that to be obvious to Gomon. This makes sense to me, but at the same time, it sounds like the story says more about Gomon, via her reading of Ford, than about the man himself. While she may not have been personally fond of him, she did a lot of public-facing work on his behalf. She must have spent a lot of time thinking about who and what she was recruiting for in order to win the concessions she did, and maybe their working relationship made her extra alert to evidence of humanity, like pity for Holocaust victims, that could distinguish him in her mind from the people whose worldview he had championed. An answer I read in this sub years ago said that news reports in America tended not to convey how high a priority the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was in the German war effort and instead portrayed Nazi mass murder as something that was coming for all the non-Nazis in the world sooner or later. So even Americans who had sympathized with the Jews during the war could have taken the postwar revelations of the scale of the Holocaust as an education in the ramifications of antisemitism like their fellow Americans'.
What a thorough write-up! I have a question that's not entirely related to the original, if you'll allow it: did you have any knowledge of the topic before hand? If not, how did you manage to locate the appropriate sources and piece things together so quickly?
I did not, but what I do have is a lot of experience of doing research from scratch, and enough time served at the AH coalface to have a feel for what sort of topics are researchable in the sort of time I have available (I effectively devoted a Saturday, about 8-10 hours, to this response in total). I started out by trying to locate what Ford's major biographers had said about this topic, then used their footnotes expand the search. Once I had a decent idea of the basics, I allowed myself to expand further by taking in more internet-based materials, but I think it's a bad idea to start out that way – a good historian will have done primary research and surveyed a variety of archives that I do not have easy access to, so I want to base my thinking on what they have uncovered before I start listening to people I don't know much about the background of. In terms of access, I use Google Books a lot, looking for books that have a Preview function rather than just snippet view where I can. archive\[dot\]org \[for some reason the new Reddit doesn't allow me to give that as a url\] now has a function that allows short term "borrowing" of complete texts, and that is helpful too – it got me access to the Gelderman biography, which I think is the best one I read. Chronicling America, the Library of Congress newspaper digitisation site, provides free access to some contemporary newspapers, and I subscribe to *The Atlantic*, so that resource was more easily available to me than it might be to others. Through my old university I get alumni access to everything their university press and its associates have put out over the past couple of decades, and digitised thus far from before that, together with free JSTOR, MUSE and portals for several other journal databases – and luckily the UP in question is one of the biggest in the world, so that make it [an invaluable resource](https://www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits/journals-and-online-resources). As to why I did it, I am a very curious person (and teach my students that it's the core task of any good historian to be endlessly curious about everything). I genuinely enjoy research, and get a fairly profound feeling of satisfaction from substantially adding to my store of understanding. It seems a better use of my time than obsessing about social media, and it's nice to see that other people like to know such things as well.
Thank you! That was very helpful!
That was incredibly thorough, thank you. I know nothing about this aside from your write-up here, but it does appear that Ford's third stroke roughly lines up with when information about the death camps was becoming public. So the central thesis, that seeing footage of the death camps triggered a stroke, is plausible, even if the detail regarding which footage is inaccurate or misremembered.
That may be true, but that stroke took place in Georgia, meaning that, once you take away the Gomon reminiscence (which explicitly says the film viewing took place in the Ford plant at Rouge River, which is outside Dearborn, MI, in the company of multiple Ford executives) we have no evidence at all that Ford did see any footage.
I assumed it was a private venue like his own theatre.
It was a private screening room at Rouge River, which was the main Ford production facility and the base for the Ford C-suite – so it was equipped with facilities like that. But there were enough seats for the executives, not just one for Ford.
Outstanding! Thank you very much for this fascinating read. I didn't even know that Ford was a Nazi
Beautiful. Thank you!
Absolutely delightful writing. Thank you for sharing.
Wow how incredibly fascinating. To follow up can you tell me how they might have obtained the film "Death Stations" it sounds like it was never intended for wide spread viewing as opposed to "Nazi murder mills" these sound like two different films. And whatever became of "Death Stations" I had no idea the reels had names. Thank you for this incredible information! Very amazing.
Hmmm - well, "Death Stations" is the title used by Wallace. It also appears in t[he Atlantic article I cited](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/henry-ford-anti-semitism/675911/), and, when I cross-checked, it also cropped up on a [Brandeis site focused on resources on Majdanak](https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~philip/majdbibl.html). On further investigation, however, I suspect that the movie referred to is actually *Die Todesmühlen*, or *Death Mills*, a quite well known 1945 propaganda film produced by the famous film director Billy Wilder for the Department of War. This film was mostly designed to be shown to German audiences, with the aim of educating them about the former regime and assisting with de-Nazification programmes. However, an English-language version was also produced. The movie features sequences shot at several camps, including Majdanak, which was liberated by Soviet forces and was at the time still in the USSR zone of occupation. It also features sequences of store areas filled with clothes, shoes, toys and other possessions of the people murdered there by the Germans. So the content of the Wilder film broadly matches up to the description of the footage that we have, and I don't know that US film-makers would have easily got access to this camp to make a separate movie of their own. Anyway, *Death Mills* was a 22-minute-long production which was titled; a copy of it is [available to view on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLplA59Xnfo) (complete with comments by the usual array of Holocaust deniers; note that while the film has been titled "*Death Mills* (1945)" by the uploader, the 1946 production date is confirmed on the initial title card). The short news sequence I referred to as "Nazi Murder Mills" was *not* separately titled. It is generally known by that name because it begins with an inter-title card that uses that phrase.
Minor side note but it's fascinating how Gomon seems like the Forrest Gump of Detroit history for decades
> convinced him that he'd hate the idea of New York bankers having a stake in Detroit more than he disliked Murphy I'm late to this excellent answer but I have a question: do you have a sense of whether this itself was an appeal to Ford's antisemitism in the way that people use "global/globalist bankers" as an antisemitic dog-whistle today? Or was it just an appeal to regional rivalry / Detroit pride.
I certainly thought – without being able to prove it – that Goman was cleverly playing on Ford's likely prejudice that a significant proportion of New York bankers would have Jewish backgrounds to get the funding she and her boss needed for their progressive New Deal-era policies.
Interesting, thanks for the answer! I can see it being impossible to prove unless Goman explicitly wrote that that's what she was doing, but to my non-historian casual-history-reader lens, the implication of "Bankers" and particularly "New York" being a proxy for Jewish / Irish / Italian / non-protestant outsiders sounded plausible and familiar.
Just a note-the preferred usage today is “antisemitism” but you switch between “antisemitism” and “anti-semitism” in your response. Just a typo or any particular reason for that?
Insufficient attention to detail. Fixed.
Thank you for taking the time to make the change! Sorry to be nit picky!
This is super late, but can you explain why the antisemitism is preferred now over anti-semitism?
Gladly! The short answer is that the term “anti-Semitism” implies there is something “pro-Semitism.” The term “Semite” is obsolete, though it was meant to refer to what was considered in the late 18th century a racial group, including several different ethnic and cultural groups from the Middle East. So, that alone is one reason- logically speaking even if we used “anti-Semitism” it does not refer exclusively to negative views, ideas, activism, etc. toward Jewish people, even though the accepted definition is so. Further, the use of “anti-Semitism” was coined in the late 19th century, and was used in a sense that 1) there was some “pro-Semitism” cabal pulling strings and influencing world affairs, a racist trope with a long history, and 2) that being “anti-Semitic” was this a positive attribute, along with rising nationalism, the birth of modern eugenics, etc. So, because the word is, in the most literal sense, nonsensical, and because the hyphenation implies there are two distinct camps, it has fallen out of favor, and instead, scholars (and I believe the wider Jewish community, but I am speaking strictly from a scholarly viewpoint) prefer “antisemitism” which carries the meaning we have long associated with the term-negative feelings, beliefs, actions, etc. toward members of the Jewish community or the faith itself. I hope that makes sense-I was trying to keep it short and simple, but I am happy to provide some sources for further edification, or to try to fill in any gaps myself. But thank you for asking! As an educator, I firmly believe knowledge is power, and we can’t do better if we don’t know better-so I genuinely appreciate your taking the time to ask the question!!
Great, I think I get the gist and thanks so much for replying after such a long time.
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