The View from Thayne’s Corner:

BAILING OUT INDUSTRY
   Past sins, involving at least one of America’s corporate giants now pleading for taxpayer assistance, come to light in a rare book, “Dancing under the Red Star”, by Karl Tobien.  While cruising the internet recently this 1996 publication surfaced.

   Apparently, the Ford Motor Company sent 450 employees with their families to Gorky, Russia in 1932 to train local workers in Ford’s Autos troy assembly plant.  An untold number of them died as political prisoners in Siberian labor camps (the GULAG) during Joseph Stalin’s purges. Tobien’s story is about his mother, Margaret Werner, an American citizen who spent nine years of her young life in Siberian camps, then escaped with family members to West Germany in 1959. Her father, Carl Werner, died in a Soviet prison in 1942 (when the Soviets were allied with the US and Great Britain in World War II). Margaret’s crime was seeking information through the US Embassy about her father’s arrest, the reason for it, and where he was being held.

   Author Tobien, born in Siberia in 1956, escaped to West Berlin with his mother, his father Gunter and his grandmother, Elizabeth Werner. Margaret Werner Tobien died April 7, 1997 in Cincinnati, Ohio fifty years to the day after the death of Henry Ford.

   His book contains the following quote: “Though Ford Motor Company insists its American workers in Gorky returned to the United States in 1932, Carl Werner was still living there in 1938 and working at the plant Ford built to manufacture the trucks essential to Stalin’s Five-Year plan.”

   Another member of those families, Victor Herman, whose parents both died in Russia, survived the Soviet Gulag and published “Coming Out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life”, in 1979. When seeking compensation for his losses from the Ford Motor Company after his return to the US, Tobien writes, Herman was told “The former employment of Sam Herman could not be verified or confirmed.” Also among these Ford employees, though not imprisoned, were former CIO President and founder of the United Auto Workers union, the late Walter Reuther, a friend of the Werner family. 
 
  It would be unfair, of course, to blame these affairs of 70 years past on current owners and managers of the Ford Company. Considering the record of American industrial wartime profiteering, however, there exists the urge, except for repercussions among the many who had nothing to do with such decisions, to let them hang themselves.
 
  Much has been written about the profits gleaned by prominent American families before, during and after World War I. Ford, as an example, was doing business with Hitler’s Germany through Ford-Werke A.G.  A quote surfacing through Internet research, in a document supposedly attested to by a government probe, reads: “. . . there is evidence that European plants owned by Wall Street interests were not bombed by the US Air Force in World War II.” 
  
*Along with this information was the added comment that the British apparently failed to get the message in 1942. The document reads:” . . the Royal Air Force bombed the Ford plant at Poissy, France. A subsequent letter from Edsel ford to Ford General Manager Sorenson about this RAF raid commented, ‘Photographs’ of the plant on fire were published in American newspapers but fortunately no reference was made to the Ford Motor Company.”*
  
Hopefully, in this bailout mess, considerable attention will be given to the plight of those who suffers most from unrestricted banking and business excesses ---the Boom-Bust-Bail cycles; although we can’t absolve ourselves altogether. We belong to the vast group that feeds this beast, not less because of unrestricted have-it-all-now desires and lack of personal financial discipline. But aren’t we, descendants of the “Great Depression” survivors, capable of learning from the past?

   **From generals in Grey Suits, by Josiah D. Dubois, Jr., publishes in 1958.