Ford Foundation Founded with the Capital of a Man Who Inspired Hitler

additions 1-22 & 2-23-2014 at bottom

Edsel Ford, Henry Ford's son, founded the Ford Foundation in 1936 with his family's money. Both Edsel and Henry bequeathed valuable, high-yielding [non-voting] stock to the foundation upon their deaths in 1943 and 1947 respectively. This made the foundation "the largest philanthropy in the world . . . a national and international philanthropy dedicated to the advancement of human welfare." Human welfare no less!! Therefore, let's look at Henry Ford's motives for concocting and publishing The International Jew:

When asked in 1921 why he had chosen to publish the series, Ford explained that he was "only trying to awake the Gentile world to an understanding of what is going on. The Jew is a huckster, a trader who doesn't want to produce but to make something out of what somebody else produces." He also blamed them for subversively instigating war behind the scenes for their own profit.  [Alex Grobman, License to Murder: The Enduring Threat of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Noble OK: Balfour  Books 2011), p53]

Ford himself was a producer of course. He produced automobiles, just by the way working his employees to death or near to it. Still, he was a producer. But he was also a huckster. After all, he wanted to sell the cars that his factories produced. And for that purpose, he hired advertising agencies to produce suitably persuasive sales messages and bought space in newspapers and other publications to reach the public. His The International Jew series published in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, was also meant to persuade, to persuade people to believe in an ugly, false message.

Ford's readers included "college professors, Christian clergy and the uneducated." His readers "sent him money, praised him for assailing the Jews, and clamored for more information." [Grobman, p 53]

One of Ford's readers was a very special person or shall we say that he was  a unique creature. This was none other than Adolf Hitler.

Adolph Hitler acknowledged that Henry Ford's The International Jew  influenced him in writing Mein Kampf, and had a picture of Ford hung on the wall in his Munich office. "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration," Hitler told a reporter for the Detroit News. In 1938, Hitler sent his personal greetings to Ford on the occasion of his 75th birthday, and conferred upon him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest honor that could be bestowed on a foreign national. [Grobman, ibid.]

Hitler was not the only Nazi inspired by Ford's The International Jew. Another was

. . . Baldur von Schirach, Reich leader of the Nazi Students' Federation and future leader of the Hitler Youth. After reading Der international jude [German translation of The International Jew] in 1924 at the age of 17, a year prior to hearing Hitler speak for the first time, von Schirach remarked that "The younger generation looked with envy to the symbols of success and prosperity like Henry Ford. And if  Ford said that the Jews were to blame, why, naturally we believed him." [Grobman, p 54]

So Ford's prestige as a leading manufacturer and a very wealthy man helped to persuade people to believe in his ugly message. Von Schirach in turn persuaded young Germans to willingly join Hitler's army and take part in his wars and mass murders.

To be sure, Ford's The International Jew did not meet with universal approval.

"Despite the acclaim garnered by The International Jew . . . and its translation into a number of languages . . .  Prominent periodicals of the time, including Current Opinion, the Outlook, The Century, Harper's Weekly, and the Independent condemned the Protocols, The International Jew, and Ford himself." [Ibid, p 54]

The Nation [much different from the Nation of today] observed the significant increase of anti-Semitism engulfing the world in 1920 and concluded that "the chief responsibility for the survival of this hoary shame among us in America attaches to Henry Ford." Historian Norman Cohn believed that The International Jew  "probably did more than any other work to make the Protocols more famous." On the eve of World War II, the Protocols were more popular than they had been even in 1920 before being exposed as a forgery. [Grobman, ibid.]

Grobman's last sentence reminds us that today, as in the past, big lies like the Protocols are used to make deadly --indeed genocidal-- propaganda against the Jewish people. One of the recent big lies was the Muhammad al-Durah hoax. But that is a story for another time. Let us just bear in mind that the capital of the Ford Foundation was provided by a cruel employer and bigoted anti-Jewish propagandist, Henry Ford.

In the 21st century, nearly 100 years after Ford published his version of the Protocols, the Ford Foundation provides millions to the New Israel Fund which in turn funds many so-called  "non-governmental organizations" in Israel which engage in activities meant to undermine Israel in world public opinion and weaken Israel in the face of Israel's Arab and other enemies.
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ADDED 1-29-2014 Unbeknownst to me when I wrote the above blog post, Edwin Black had published a book that goes into the Ford Foundation's funding of the New Israel Fund as well as a number of Arab anti-Israel NGOs [see review here]

2-23-2014 Scholarly article on Henry Ford's Judeophobia [here]
3-20-2014  Contemporary press report by the JTA on the libel suit against Henry Ford [here]