When Henry Ford Received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from Nazi Officials, 1938
- Johnny Bee
- 9 hours ago
- 8 min read
On 30 July 1938, in a quiet ceremony in Dearborn, Michigan, one of America’s most famous industrialists was handed an award designed by Adolf Hitler himself. It was Henry Ford’s seventy-fifth birthday, and two German diplomats, Karl Kapp and Fritz Heller, arrived bearing a velvet-lined box containing a crimson-and-gold Maltese cross. It was the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, the highest honour Nazi Germany could bestow upon a foreigner.
Ford, the man who had revolutionised American industry with the Model T and the moving assembly line, was the first American ever to receive it.
“My acceptance of a medal from the German people does not, as some people seem to think, involve any sympathy on my part with Nazism,” Ford told the New York Times later that summer. But by then, the damage was done.
The story of Henry Ford’s Nazi medal, and the beliefs that led to it, remains one of the most unsettling episodes in the history of American business. It’s a reminder that progress and prejudice often coexisted uncomfortably in the industrial age.
A Medal from Hitler
By the late 1930s, Ford was already a global icon. His innovations in mass production had made cars affordable to ordinary people, and his name was synonymous with the modern age. But across the Atlantic, in the offices of Berlin’s Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler saw something more in Ford: a kindred spirit.
Hitler admired Ford’s anti-union stance, his disdain for financiers, and above all, his antisemitic world view. He kept a life-size portrait of the American automaker behind his desk, and in Mein Kampf he wrote admiringly, “Only a single great man, Ford, to [the Jews’] fury, still maintains full independence…” Ford was the only American mentioned positively in Hitler’s autobiography.
By 1938, the Nazi regime had created an order of merit, the Order of the German Eagle, for foreigners who, in their view, “rendered service to the Reich.” The design of the medal was no accident: red enamel, white rays, and a black swastika at its centre. It was as much a symbol of propaganda as it was of gratitude.
The presentation took place not in Berlin, but at Ford’s headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. It was a convenient arrangement, Ford didn’t have to travel, and Nazi diplomats could present the honour in person. Ford smiled for photographs, looking more like a genial old engineer than a man being thanked by one of history’s most murderous regimes.
Why Hitler Admired Ford
Henry Ford’s influence on Nazi Germany ran deeper than most Americans realised at the time. Long before the medal, Ford had already inspired Hitler’s ideas about mass production, the power of the automobile, and the creation of a “people’s car”, what would become the Volkswagen.
In a 1931 interview with The Detroit News, Hitler called Ford his “inspiration” and said he had tried to put Ford’s theories “into practice in Germany.” He even modelled the Volkswagen factory on Ford’s River Rouge plant, hiring American engineers trained by Ford to implement assembly-line techniques.
But admiration for Ford went far beyond car manufacturing. In the early 1920s, Ford had published The Dearborn Independent, a weekly newspaper that ran for eight years and became a platform for his antisemitic theories. Under Ford’s ownership, it published 91 articles accusing Jews of orchestrating global conspiracies, controlling banks, corrupting culture, and manipulating the media.
Those articles were later compiled into four volumes titled The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, a book that would travel far beyond Michigan.
‘The International Jew’: Ford’s Influence on Antisemitism
The International Jew became a bestseller among far-right groups in the United States and was translated into multiple languages. In Germany, it was published by Theodor Fritsch, one of the founders of early antisemitic parties and later a Reichstag member.
Heinrich Himmler, who would go on to oversee the SS and orchestrate the Holocaust, called Ford “one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters.”
The influence of Ford’s writing was immense. Hitler distributed Ford’s book among Nazi circles, and Baldur von Schirach, the future leader of the Hitler Youth, would later testify at Nuremberg that The International Jew was the book that first made him antisemitic. “The decisive anti-Semitic book I was reading… was that book by Henry Ford,” Schirach said under oath.
Ford had also funded the printing and distribution of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious fabricated text that claimed to reveal a Jewish plot for world domination. His own dealerships were required to stock and distribute his paper, meaning that by the mid-1920s, millions of Americans had read Ford’s conspiracy theories alongside adverts for the Model T.
By 1927, public outrage had grown. Jewish organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) denounced the paper’s content, and a libel suit brought by lawyer Aaron Sapiro finally forced Ford’s hand. The Dearborn Independent was shut down that December, and Ford issued what was presented as an apology.
In an open letter to the ADL, Ford claimed to be “shocked” by the contents of his own newspaper, insisting he hadn’t realised what was being published under his name. The apology was widely welcomed, but insiders suspected it was a forgery. His longtime aide Harry Bennett reportedly signed Ford’s name himself.
Even if genuine, Ford’s remorse didn’t last. In 1940, he was quoted as saying, “I hope to republish The International Jew again some time.”
Ford’s Contradictions: Anti-War but Deeply Prejudiced
Ford’s worldview was a tangle of contradictions. He considered himself anti-war, but blamed Jewish people for World War I. He claimed to despise hatred, yet spent years publishing material that promoted it. He championed the “common man” but funded social engineering campaigns based on racism and traditionalism.
A particularly odd footnote to his legacy is that Ford financed square dancing in American schools, not out of love for folk traditions, but because he detested jazz music, which he associated with Jewish and Black culture. He hoped to “purify” American entertainment by returning to what he considered wholesome white rural customs.
Ford’s antisemitism wasn’t an isolated quirk; it was a consistent part of his worldview. He once declared, “If fans wish to know the trouble with American baseball, they have it in three words — too much Jew.”
For a man whose company prided itself on efficiency and rationalism, his beliefs were mired in conspiracy and superstition.
The Dearborn Connection and the Nazi Network
Ford’s connection to German nationalists wasn’t limited to ideology. In February 1924, Kurt Ludecke, a personal envoy of Hitler, visited Ford in Dearborn. Ludecke had been introduced by Siegfried and Winifred Wagner, both Nazi sympathisers and the son and daughter-in-law of composer Richard Wagner, whom Hitler idolised.
Ludecke asked Ford for financial support for the Nazi cause. Ford reportedly refused, but he did give money to Boris Brasol, a Russian émigré and member of the Aufbau Vereinigung, a network linking White Russian monarchists and early Nazi activists. That money would ultimately help fund the fledgling Nazi Party.
By the time Ford received his medal in 1938, the relationship between American industry and Nazi Germany had become uncomfortably close. Executives from General Motors and Standard Oil were also receiving awards and attending receptions in Berlin. Ford’s own German subsidiary, Ford Werke, played a role in German armament production during the war years, though Ford himself claimed ignorance of this.
A Symbol Too Late to Revoke
When Ford was presented with the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, Europe was already bracing for war. Germany had annexed Austria earlier that year and was preparing to invade Czechoslovakia. The Nuremberg Laws were in full effect, stripping Jewish citizens of rights. Kristallnacht, the violent pogrom that signalled the beginning of the Holocaust, would occur only a few months later.
Yet Ford accepted the honour.
He didn’t travel to Germany to receive it; the medal came to him. But he also didn’t send it back. In photographs, the medal glimmers across his suit jacket, a symbol of both his fame and his folly.
It’s worth remembering that Ford was not alone among industrialists who flirted with fascism. Charles Lindbergh, the aviator hero, also received a similar German medal and gave speeches warning Americans against entering a war to defend “foreign interests.” But Ford’s influence ran deeper because of his immense wealth and his ability to shape public opinion.
Aftermath: Regret and Decline
When the Second World War broke out, Ford found himself scrambling to distance his company from the Nazis. In 1942, he wrote again to the Anti-Defamation League, disavowing any connection to “agitation which would promote antagonism toward my Jewish fellow citizens.” He ended the letter with a hopeful line: “My sincere hope is that when the war is finished, hatred of the Jews and hatred against any other racial or religious groups shall cease for all time.”
But by then, it was too late. His writings had already been used as propaganda by the Third Reich, influencing generations of antisemitic thought. In Germany, The International Jew remained banned after the war, yet copies still circulate among extremist groups to this day.
When newsreel footage of the concentration camps was shown to Ford after the war, witnesses say he collapsed, suffering a final stroke. “He was confronted with the atrocities which finally and unanswerably laid bare the bestiality of the prejudice to which he contributed,” wrote biographer Robert Lacey. “He collapsed with a stroke, his last and most serious.”
Henry Ford died in 1947 at the age of 83.
Legacy: The Industrial Genius and His Shadow
Today, Henry Ford’s name remains synonymous with innovation. He built one of the world’s largest car companies, transformed industrial labour, and helped create the modern middle class. Yet his darker legacy lingers, a reminder of how easily progress can coexist with prejudice.
Historians still debate how to interpret the Ford–Nazi connection. Some see it as an example of what’s been called “reactionary modernism”, the paradoxical fusion of technological progress and regressive ideology. Others see it as part of a broader trend in which early twentieth-century capitalism often aligned with authoritarian regimes for profit or stability.
Whatever the explanation, Ford’s medal stands as a symbol of moral blindness. It’s a strange image: the man who built the people’s car being honoured by the regime that would later murder millions of people he had helped to demonise.
In that sense, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle isn’t just a piece of Nazi memorabilia. It’s a mirror reflecting one of the most uncomfortable truths of modern history, that progress, patriotism, and prejudice can all share the same workshop floor.
Sources
The New York Times, July 1938 – “Ford Accepts Nazi Medal on 75th Birthday”
Watts, Steven. The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Knopf, 2005)
Lacey, Robert. Ford: The Men and the Machines (Heinemann, 1986)
Baldwin, Neil. Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (PublicAffairs, 2001)
Wallace, Max. The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich (St. Martin’s Press, 2003)
Testimony of Baldur von Schirach, Nuremberg Trials, 1946
Anti-Defamation League archives – Henry Ford and The International Jew
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – Ford and Nazi Germany Industrial Relations
