War Factories | Season 3, Episode 5: Opel - The Trucks of Blitzkrieg | Free Documentary History

thank you the untold story of war production all the walls are about competition in production the side that can produce more is always going to Triumph This is a war between the factory the real story of how the world wars were fought and won it may sound strange but modern Wars they're not won by battles they're won by factories they swamped the other side with a tide of mass production and those factories would shape the modern world and Brands like Porsche skoda Rolls Royce they all honed their Craft on the research and development that was needed to win Wars foreign [Music] 1939 German panzers pour across the border into Poland for the start of World War II this is blitzkrieg lightning walk the German panzers are the Glory Boys of the Blitzkrieg operation they're the ones they go charging ahead breaking through the lines surrounding the enemy and they get all the Press the whole strategy behind it is based on mass ranks of German armor punching hard and fast through the schweppel to the point of attack and then Fanning out behind it what this does is to let the second wave of panzers and mobile inventory fall through the gaps and exploit the Breakthrough and envelop the enemy from behind work without mobile infantry supporting the panzers riding no one ever really gives it a second thought but the true unheralded hero of Modern Warfare is the truck Modern War doesn't work without Supply you can have all the great attacking forces you want but if you can't get them the equipment the ammunition the food all the backup they need to fight they're useless none of that could be done with the tanks it had to be done with the humble truck and that's why the truck was really the unsung hero of this whole story it's the fuel in the engine of the Modern War Machine it's what keeps the whole thing running without the truck Blitzkrieg would not have been possible for blitzkrie to work German armor and infantry has to travel deep Behind Enemy Lines what it's got to do is to carry all the supplies it needs to hold a position on its own for at least 24 hours and you cannot do that without trucks and the a Course Truck behind the Nazi Blitzkrieg had a very apt name the opal Blitz the opal Blitz was a superb design it rugged it was reliable it could work almost anywhere in the world it had benches it put infantry on so it carried troops we could carry all manner of supplies in deserts it can be used in the winter it can be used throughout sort of Western Europe so it becomes a Workhorse of the German Army but behind the story of the opal Blitz lies a little-known fact not a lot of people know this but the War factories that made the Nazi Blitzkrieg work weren't owned by the Germans at all no they were owned by the Americas in March 1929 the President of General Motors Alfred P Sloan bought an 80 share in the German car manufacturer Adam Opel the 33.3 million dollars this was a huge amount of money it actually is the equivalent of about half a billion dollars today but it did seem like a good investment what the Americans have been trying to do is find a way to get into the European market which is dominated by local producers and that's one of the reason opal seems such an attractive offer to them the Opel Brothers had Diversified their father successful bike and sewing machine business into the largest car manufacturer in Europe that produces something like what 45 of all the trucks and cars made in Germany between them Opel and General Motors had a real chance to grab a large chunk of the world's automobile market so this was a merger that was made in heaven then Wall Street crashed it would have been a good investment had the Roaring Twenties continued the problem for Sloan is he buys opal just as the Great Depression is about to break out so he piles a huge amount of cash into a a company that is going to have a sales crisis in the late 20s and early 30s as the global depression hits unsurprisingly GM's Investments soured almost overnight it even before the crash they discovered that Opel was carrying overdrafts of more than what three million dollars and so now with Europe this kind of nose diving into depression opel's sales figures drop off a cliff and in fact they're so bad that in December 29 the management has to close the factory and lay off its entire Workforce for two weeks to see the catastrophe that GM has on its Hands by 1930 opal has lost 3 million dollars annually and by 1932 GM has had to pump eight million dollars into Opel just to try and keep the company afloat thank you to make matters worse German Financial reforms meant that GM could not simply cut its losses and dump this Millstone round its neck in response to their financial crisis the Weimar government took drastic action in 1931 and it effectively imposed currency controls preventing foreign money from leaving Germany and what they did was to make sending money out of the country so difficult that it effectively locks any foreign currency invested in local companies in Germany for the duration so GM now finds itself trapped with this German subsidiary that's losing money hand over fist it goes from being a prize acquisition to what seems to be a turkey something had to be done to turn the company around something had to make Opals worth buying a game the company needed a grand gesture that would capture the public imagination and put Opel back on the map [Music] then in 1930 opal was struck by lightning in the wake of the Great Depression struggling businesses needed a fast reliable and cheap way to move Goods around so opel's Engineers came up with a new truck which had to be able to carry Goods almost anywhere very quickly and cheaply while its marketing department hits on this really great novel idea to promote the new brand what they do is to launch a competition companies were quite Savvy back then and Oprah is one of them and it passed the German population to come up with a name for their snazzy new truck win an opal trumpeted full page newspaper ads we are looking for a name we want to make famous all over the world the competition calls on the German people to come up with a name for a new truck they wanted something that really marked and captured the spirit of the age it had to demonstrate a German origin it had to be pronounceable in all languages and crucially it only must have five letters at the end of 1930 opel's sales manager unveiled the winning entry at the Opel dealers conference in Frankfurt the name chosen from one and a half million entries was the blitz now somewhat suspiciously this is the same name Opel had used for a highly successful line of bikes manufactured by Adam Opel so you do sort of wonder how far they had to go to find the winning entry did they really go through all one and a half million entries yeah a cynic might say not but the marketing campaign is a work of Genie Blitz means lightning and whilst this wasn't possibly strictly true when describing a truck it wasn't slow with a road speed of around 80 kilometers an hour 50 miles an hour which despite it being a lorry is actually faster than some cars at the time but trucks value it's not really the speed it gives on the road it's what it can carry in its payload and the blitz could carry up to 3 000 kilograms three times on Far distances and a regular good speed it also has this petrol engine which has pretty decent fuel consumption for its day of 30 liters per 100K that's about 10 miles to the gallon to it simply it was just better designed and better made than most European trucks at the same time Opel plant at russell'sheim near Frankfurt wasn't big enough to churn out blitzes at the rate the GM required so the company decided to build a much bigger plant in Brandenburg under Harvel just west of Berlin opel's Brandenburg plot was massive over 850 000 square meters it's over 200 acres and can turn out trucks in a way that no other company had churned out trucks in Europe before there were 13 parallel rows of machines being continuously producing crankshafts camshafts axles these Move Along 27 fully automated transport belts and if you put them end to end they had a measured five kilometers long they could turn out 50 trucks a day might not sounded a lot for us but for 1930s that's a very impressive amount to come out of a factory at any time at its peak this is a factory that's churning out around 25 000 trucks a year these are astonishing numbers by 1938 almost a third of those trucks were going to the German military because behind the success story of the Opel Blitz a very different story was being played out in the smoke-filled boardrooms of Opel and GM there's an Old English expression he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon well GM was about to find just that because no spoon is long enough if you're dealing with the Nazis January 1933 Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany this sent alarm Bells through GM as one year earlier Hermann Goering had threatened to take over opal when the Nazis gained power [Music] what swiftly becomes clear to the managers of GM is that Hitler's Nazis were there to stay now that means that Germany was under the control of an ultra-nationalist government which was frankly pretty open amid hostility towards foreign owned companies they want Germany for the Germans and they're not naturally going to cut deals with an American-made company so Opel has to bend over backwards to get the Nazis on side to resolve the situation GM president Alfred Sloan turned to his top European fixer James D Mooney James Mooney was in charge of all of General Motors overseas activities he'd actually risen through the ranks working in their overseas Department he dealt with over a hundred countries Sloan had come to see him as the person to go and see to fix any major foreign problems now he had a real problem on his hands in this instance how how to keep control of Opel whilst making it look very much like a German company as far as possible so look German pay America so during the 1930s Mooney adopted a strategy of camouflage in a nutshell Mooney rearranged opel's managerial structure to make it look like Germans were in charge while actually they were reporting back to America all the while so Germans are put in nominal charge of all of opel's major departments although effective control remains with GM American men opal's Treasurer a man named Rudolph Schleicher became the point man for all day-to-day contact with the Nazis but all the while he was actually subordinate to opel's company director Cyrus Osborne most critically fleisha and Mooney's right-hand man Graham Howard approached a Nazi Economist called Carl lure and offers him a position on the board a way that opal can appeal to the Nazi status by hiring Nazis if you show the party you're welcome moving on board then they're more likely to give you business Lua was what the Nazis called an old fighter he was a propagandist for the Nazi party an advocate for them and he had successfully purged frankfurt's Chamber of Commerce of Jews when he had been its president so he was very very loyal to the Nazis no experience of the car industry but he was made point of contact with the Nazi leaders it was believed that he would be very effective he had the right beliefs he had the contacts he would be if you like a very good catalyst so that the company could work effectively to smooth the wheels of the transition Mooney met with Hitler twice once in 1934 and later in 1936. in his Memoirs Mooney clearly recalls practicing his sieg heil salute in front of the mirror ready for that first crucial meeting with Hitler so he's completely thrown off balance but instead of receiving the salute Hitler pumps his hand in a very business-like typical handshake he found Hitler very Charming Nicola thanked him very much for the work that General Motors was doing with Opel in Germany and of course the fact is that Hitler did have this ability to be very Charming in person he could disarm people by being very normal people would go along to meet Hitler expect him to be the great ranting demagogue and of course in private he wasn't like that Mooney would have further meetings with Hitler over the next two years and in one of them Hitler complimented Opel on having located their Factory in Brandenburg and in gratitude the Nazi party determined to Grant opal export commissions on all Opals leaving the country the Fool's facade as one GM official called it appeared to be working now of course there were very good reasons for Hitler's warm welcome for one thing by moving the factory to Brandenburg it meant that it was out of range of any Allied bombers it was effectively safe but then there was also the matter of the currency regulations that the German government had put into place because any trucks that were sold overseas the money from those trucks would have to be pumped back into Germany Mooney was painfully aware that not see currency controls were crippling his business as early as 1934 Mooney was attempting to offset some of these currency regulations by doing barter deals by finding ways round the restrictions they do try to come up with certain wheezers they start doing barter agreements with companies we give you trucks or truck parts will you give us things we can convert to cash and those are all well and good but ultimately opal is a German car company in Germany it was Mooney's right-hand man Howard puts it since GM's huge investment Opel was locked into Germany it's going to be quote extremely short-sighted to offend the German government so Mooney bent over backwards to stay on the right side of the Nazis in the years before the war one thing working in his favor was that opel's trucks were needed by the Army what this means is that Opel can use what's called military authorization as a way of getting around Nazi restrictions on their use of raw materials so what they do is to even invoke the Army to stop Nazi jobsworth in Brandenburg from blocking the expansion of opel's truck works but of course this is going to work both ways if Opel needed Nazi Germany the Nazi State actually needed opal as well one of the things that Hitler does very early on is initiate a major military buildup as he rebuilds the German Army after the verify restrictions in the first world war and if you're gonna have a successful military buildup you're going to need car companies truck companies like opal on side the 1936 the Army basically tells opal if you'd make a trucks exclusively in the Brandenburg Factory we will buy those trucks and we will take those trucks and opal just says that's a no-brainer we are going to become the German armories truck manufacturer and by 1938 they're the largest truck manufacturer in Europe was too good a deal to refuse Opel can make a lot of money because you're not subject to sort of Civilian standards in building the trucks you can actually have a much higher profit margin and what we can tell Opel is making 40 more selling trucks to the German State than it is selling it to the civilian Market almost a third of all opal blitzes were being sold to the German Army all right this does have some drawbacks in 1937 for instance Opel has to disrupt its assembly schedule because the Army Demands a block booking a four-wheel drive blitzes and as Graham had put it Opel has a duty to provide the army with whatever it requires and what the Army required was the wheels to run the Blitzkrieg by the spring of 1939 it was very clear that Germany's territorial Ambitions extended well beyond their borders and in fact Oaks had already been called up German troops into the Rhineland to move German troops into Czechoslovakia but in a letter to a concerned shareholder on the 6th of April 1939 Alfred Sloan explained that Germany's political Ambitions were no concern of his Sloane basically said that the internal politics of Nazi Germany and none of GM's business what he says is we must conduct ourselves as a German organization that's what he tells the shareholders we've got no right to shut down the plot two weeks later Hitler repudiated the German polish non-aggression pact and diplomatic talks broke down but Opel continued to churn out blitzes for the German Army now to most commentators that seems pretty reprehensible but okay why don't we try Playing devil's advocate just for a moment you're gonna look at what GM's options are GM can't pull out of Opel without losing a huge amount of money so if it's going to keep opal it's going to have to keep making the Blitz and it's going to have to keep making the puts for the German Army and faced with that reality the company does what most capitalist companies do they choose to make money and it wasn't alone there was a German Ford works and that was producing almost as many trucks for the German Armed Forces as Opel and they're not all alone so if you look at it from a purely business perspective and that's what slain does he feels that GM has every right to stand above the politics keep on making profits from the Germans on the face of it James Mooney seemed to be actively pursuing his boss's agenda in February 1940 six months after the German invasion of Poland James Mooney returns to Germany on a business trip now while he's there he States in his Memoir that he personally monitored the transition of the Brandenburg Truck Works to wartime production so he goes to Brandenburg to see truck production ramped up he goes to Russell Vine to see parts for the famous Stuka dive bomber production ramped up now you know a lot of commentators see this as direct evidence that GM did not lose control of their German factories in September 39 but was actively working with the Nazis frankly to Tool up for war but actually what moon he had was a far more secret agenda because behind the scenes something else was going on the business trip was a cover for something much more monumental Mooney was acting as a secret agent for none other than the president of the United States on the 4th of March 1940 as the culmination of his business trip to Germany James Mooney had a personal meeting with Adolf Hitler in it Mooney reveals that he was personally authorized by none other than President Roosevelt himself to put forward a peace proposal to the German dictator what he said was that Roosevelt wanted to be a moderator in peace discussions now up to a point this was true Roosevelt wasn't interested in a world war he didn't want it to happen he wanted people to back down but at the same time Mooney didn't have the authority to present himself as someone offering terms on behalf of America and he slightly overplayed his hand passes on an offer that Roosevelt's willing to make to Hitler to end the war and the offer is the United States will not intervene Hitler must promise not to attack to the west and exchange Hitler can have basically everything it seized in the east Hitler seemed to take him very seriously Hitler put on his glasses he was never seen with his glasses in public he read the papers that Mooney brought to him and he talked to him as though he was an equal and Mooney was excited by that Hitler and gurring looked at this and they responded by demanding that Germany should be given equal respect as a world how is that given to Britain and France and they said that if the Allies ceased to interfere with European issues outside their boundaries could be achieved Mooney telegraphed the results of this meeting to Roosevelt on the 11th of March and returned home in May there on the 1st of June 1940 three weeks after the Nazis began their Blitz Greek through France he delivered a speech to the American public and he says the United States can help bring peace Europeans don't want war implying actually the Nazi Germany is not a war-like state and the Americans should use their influence to try and prevent war in Europe the response he got was not what he expected certainly the pro-allied opinion in America Mooney at this point seems dangerously close to being a Nazi sympathizer in August 1940 you have a New York daily paper called the PM launching a concerted campaign against Mooney and accusing him of being a pro-nazi and then in February 41 you got a French paper accusing Mooney of acting as a go-between carrying sensitive information to German officials in Paris in reaction to Mooney's statement and other operations the FBI actually initiates an investigation of GM Senior Management to try and discover their loyalties which found that Mooney wasn't a Pisa he had set out to pacify Hitler but he was not pro-nazi and you know what I think they were probably right Mooney was really a company man at heart and that company was GM his job after all is to keep Opel running and make money for the company so in his mind the best way of doing that is by brokering peace and by keeping the Nazis sweet I think Mooney was working on two different levels on the one hand he was the company man he was working for Oakland on the other hand he also saw himself as a sort of international Peacemaker and I think he slightly confused these two roles and if that means gearing up Opel for war well after the last surprise Mooney feels he has to pay to get a secret meeting with Hitler so the FBI actually quotes him as saying that Hitler held all the cards and that he refused to do anything that would quote make Hitler mad he felt he was right at the heart of world events if he could be responsible for peace then he would go down in history as some sort of you know Great Peacemaker he wouldn't just be a representative of an American company he would be an international figure of History so you know he's going to be seduced by the idea of that there he is at the Crux of the ultimate power play on the planet and the fact that he got fooled by Hitler doesn't really make him in some ways any worse than anybody else who got fooled by Hitler foreign [Music] who was self-important and naive was he actively pro-german no I don't think he was at all I think he believed that he could genuinely bring peace to bear in Europe so yeah and Ibiza yes naive yes a Nazi I don't think so letters from the time between Sloane and Mooney also show that Mooney was acting without the blessing of GM Sloane's letters to Mooney on this subject are pretty clear and forthright he's saying that the two men clearly have differences of political opinion and the business Executives shouldn't really get involved in those kind of discussions but fascinatingly he's not accusing Mooney of being pro-hitler he's accusing him of being pro Roosevelt Sloane looks at Roosevelt's reforms and he basically sees them as being fundamentally anti-business he really really hates Roosevelt and so much that he funds at least two Auntie Roosevelt pressure groups and he actually gets involved with several deeply racist organizations to Bringing Roosevelt down and what's more Roosevelt actually knew this because he once says of Sloane his cronies they're absolutely unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred despite Sloane's opposition James Mooney kept campaigning for a negotiated peace until August 1941 but peace did not come instead German infantry Blitz creeped into Poland France and ultimately the Soviet Union and in each of those blitzkriegs they were carried on Opel trucks [Music] but opal wasn't alone [Music] between them the Germans had surgery of GM and Ford produced almost two-thirds of all the medium and heavy trucks built in Germany for the Vermont during World War II now that's an enormous figure you've got to say in that sense that the German war effort was substantially helped by these American companies General Motors public relations Representatives stated that after September 1939 they lost all day-to-day control over operations of the plant in Germany it all boils down to what you think is meant by control all right Opel was nominally under the day-to-day control of Germans like Fleischer and Lua and Heinrich Wagner but they had all been appointed by GM years earlier to act basically as camouflage for Oppa so Opel was not under the day-to-day control of Americans but it absolutely was under the day-to-day control of the men that GM had put in place there back in 1935 to make it look like it was under the control of the Germans it wasn't until November 1942 11 months after America entered the war but Opel was put under direct Nazi control and the man they put in charge was Carl Lewis their very same Economist whom GM had put in charge as the point contact with the Nazis in 1935 and the vice president was a man called Heinrich Wagner who have been GM opal's production manager and Deputy plant leader until Osborne had resigned in 1939 in other words the men appointed by the Nazis to take day-to-day control of Opel were exactly the same whom GM had appointed to do the same thing still there is no denying that from 1939 onwards Opel was to all intents and purposes under the control of German Nationals albeit Germans who'd been initially appointed by GM if you're going to be fair on GM some of those Germans had gone a bit native I mean Lua had always been a Nazi I mean that was why GM had approached him in the first place Fleischer had joined the Nazi party in 1938 and Wagner had joined the Nazi party in 1940 after he had taken control of Opel but this had always been viewed as suspicious by the Nazis so GM can certainly Glenn after 39 Opel was controlled by GM appointees who had turn Nazi the trucks they turned out according to American intelligence formed the backbone of the German military transport system trucks are vital in winning wars they're not glamorous they're not sexy they're not going to end up on the highlight reels of any war footage but the lonely truck Convoy passing down the road is the lifeblood of any armor it doesn't matter how many pandas you've got if you can't get fuel and ammo to your panzers they're just great big scrap hulks sitting around waiting you know to be hit it doesn't matter how good your infantry is if you can't get them from point A to point B at the correct time you simply can't fight a modern war all right you can get your men into certain areas by trains but you know railway lines only go to so many places you're gonna have to bring the equipment from the Depots to the advancing troops by trucks trucks can go on to roads they can go on dirt trails they can go off that if you don't have trucks you'll have to cycle or use horses to move men and equipment around all of which is incredibly time consuming and laborious though it might seem counter-intuitive trucks are actually cheaper to run than horses to keep horses in the field you need massive amounts of fodder to feed the horses to keep the horses going cost-effective than horses because the amount of folder you need to give a horse actually weighs more than the amount of kit that a horse can carry so you know to carry three tons of supplies you need to take six tons worth of horses trucks require much less weight and cost of fuel than horses require fodder that's because trucks can carry much more than horses a truck has three times the speed hundred times the capacity and eight times the range of a horse so to move its 300 tons of daily supplies a German mobile division needs 100 blitzes or 3 000 horses so having trucks increases and cheapens your ability to supply your forces that's why they were so vital so while horses are left to the bulk of the Infantry the Elite Mobile units are issued with trucks the German attack in France it shows how the Germans plan to proceed in the war at this point which is they're going to concentrate their trucks on their advancing units what's known as the schweppel which are the mass armored forces that famously go through the ardent what the Germans do is they over Supply the SharePoint with tanks each Panzer group that attacks into the Ardennes is given an extra 4 800 tons of truck capacity and this means that they can extend their operations by another 200 miles which proves decisive and the most versatile track in the German Army was the GM Opel Blitz it can operate effectively in the deserts of North Africa the mountains of Italy the wide Farm fields of france and the freezing expanses of Russia and it can also go through quite deep water it can drive through 100 feet half a meter of water and it also comes in four-wheel drive which obviously makes it far more adaptable over lots of terrain in many ways it's one of the greatest lorries of all time it also had some unique features that stood it in good stead during the Russian winter when the Russian mud became an issue one SS unit hit upon the idea of detaching the wheels at the back of the Blitz and replacing them with the tank under Carriage of a planter the result was a half track truck that could power its way through the mud of Russia in the Eastern front it wasn't strong enough to carry a full three-ton load perhaps two or two thousand kilograms but it was so successful they created a production model and called it the mule and the vast wastes of Russia would take an even bigger toll on the German Blitz it's during Barbarossa that the real problem in German war production is revealed tank glasses they can make up truck losses however far exceed the German ability to replace them in the first six months of operation Barbarossa they lose 39 870 trucks same time they're making about 39 000 a year and this reveals the real problem for the Germans even with company like opal and Ford helping to build their trucks they haven't invested enough to have wartime capacity truck production was a continual headache for the Germans in 1942 they built just over what around 80 000 trucks in total in 1943 that had gone up to 110 000 and that drops to less than 90 044. that's nothing like enough to keep the Army running their biggest headache was fuel this fuel gets more and more scarce in the latter years of the war it becomes much harder to run these ambitious combined Panzer Blitz strike forces because there simply wasn't enough petrol to go around Germany didn't have an indigenous source of crude oil insignificant enough volume to run a war machine this they had discovered as early as World War One and in the 1920s they heavily invested in synthetic fuel technology which combined coal and hydrogen into very high pressure to form petrol and oils one promising solution was a way of eking out Gasoline by creating tetraethyl leaded fuel and one company which helped the Germans to do this in the run-up to World War II was General Motors um in 1935 the German pharmaceutical company IG farben formed a joint venture called Ethel gmbh with the American corporate Giant's Exxon subsidiaries and General Motors what the Germans have begun to realize that they simply didn't have enough petrol reserves to fuel this kind of new kind of warfare that their own military planners were designing so what they did was they kind of reached out to the American companies who are experimenting the synthetic fuel the contract went ahead and IG farben constructed the plant and through this learning process they come up with an additive called tetraethyl lead which allows for the development of a higher octane fuel it's basically the same stuff that we all used to use before unleaded petrol made it illegal so American Technology and know-how is very important in the creation of a German synthetic fuel industry and in much the same way that they're willing to make trucks for the German Army In fairness to the Americans the patents for leaded petrol were already in the public domain and German law meant that if the Americans didn't cooperate the Nazis could simply have stolen it from so what they chose to do was to make a profit from the Germans rather than losing out completely but you know they were well aware of the military potential this technology because they reported it back to the US and it is very important Albert Speer later claimed that Hitler would not have gone to war without the ability of the Germans to make effective synthetic fuel but leaded or not petrol was just one of the many resources that Germany was running out of as the war grew to a close as raw materials become increasingly scarce they really are forced to improvise to keep the production lines going things got so bad that Opel was reduced to making the body work of its track it's out of Timber and compressed Cod rather than steel now these cardboard cabs were jokingly called erzats cabs but it was no joke despite these problems Opel continued making the blitz for the Nazis until August 1944 when the Brandenburg Factory was bombed to a standstill by the allies production is shifted to the Daimler Ben's works at Manheim but it never reaches pre-bombing levels ever again all told between 1937 and 1944 Opel turned out more than 70 000 Opel blitzes including at least 25 000 4x4s used by the German army but those numbers pale in comparison to the work being done by GM on the other side of the Atlantic ultimately for all the effort the Germans put into making trucks they simply cannot compete with the United States that's just three days work standing there while its German subsidiary is making tens of thousands of trucks for the Nazis GM's American factories are churning out trucks by the hundreds of thousands for the Allied war effort December 41 all the way through to April 45 GM alone produces 854 000 trucks of different shapes and sizes for the allies many of the trucks the Russians used to push the Germans back are actually GMA trucks supplied under lendlies on top of that they're making aircraft engines they're making fighter planes they're making tax they're making talent and they're making somewhat like five million Small Arms of different types which we use not only by the Americans by the British the Russians and even the Chinese so in the final Reckoning GM supplied far more to the Allies than it ever did to the Nazis and many times in the second world war you will have trucks made by Ford and GM fighting each other on the back of it it's another clear example of how factories and mass production can win modern Wars whatever you're gonna think of Opel providing trucks to the Nazis it was just a drop in the ocean compared to the industrial might of GM and the whole of the USA quite frankly Adolf Hitler should have bit Mooney's hand off when he offered the Nazis a peace deal what does he do instead he declares war on America well the result of that was all but inevitable after the fall of the Nazis the post-war American Administration returned control of opal to GM and GM actually benefits from Opel many years after the war in 1967 they're actually awarded more than 33 million dollars in compensation to make up for the war prophets that they lose because opal is basically run by the Nazi State during the war now in more than half of that was deducted because of tax breaks that the company had received during the war but nevertheless that meant that it had 10 million dollars in compensation for lost earnings this prompted a backlash in the last quarter of the century when a slew of books and other Publications accused GM of collaborating with the Nazis through Opel GM responds to this by opening its archives to an eminent second world war economic historian and he looks at it for five years after which he publishes a book in which he concludes that GM had yes successfully camouflaged the company in other words it concealed the fact that it was far enough it had dealt very poorly with the German employees allowed them to be intimidated by the German government it had placed a very very hard Nazi on the board so that the company would succeed as well as it possibly could with the German leadership and also it had protected the American corporation's ownership while sustaining opel's profitability but the report concluded they had not collaborated with the Nazis Opel itself did not start operating again until a full year after the war had ended opal's russelheim plant reopened on the 15th of July 1946 and it was a momentous occasion General Keys who was the commander of the U.S third Army was there in person to cut the ribbon himself and the first vehicle to roll off that assembly line was an Opel Blitz [Music]

Channel: Free Documentary - History

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Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full Documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), History, History Documentaries, Free Documentary History, War Factories, Secret History of World War 2, World War II, WWII, WW 2, Second World War, War Production, War Industry, History of World War 2, Military Production, War Factories Complete Series, War Factories Season 3, War Factories Full Episodes, History Documentary, Blitzkrieg, Opel Documentary, Opel Blitz, Blitz Truck

Id: 85Yu7RrwIxE

Length: 43min 30sec (2610 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 26 2023