Ford Germany

The earliest presence of the Ford Motor Company in Germany was a parts operation set up in Hamburg in 1912.[2]

At the end of 1924 the US Ford Motor Company established a sales office in Berlin which at the start of 1925 received a permit to import 1,000 tractors. In 1920 the government had imposed a tariff so high that it amounted to a prohibition against importing foreign automobiles, but this was reversed in October 1925. The move had evidently been anticipated by Ford, since on 18 August 1925 the Ford Motor Company Aktiengesellschaft had been entered in the Berlin Companies Register.[3]

During 1925 an assembly plant was constructed in a rented warehouse in the Westhafen (western port) district of Berlin, which was well located for receiving deliveries of kits and components via the country's canal network. On 1 April 1926 the first German assembled Model T was produced, using imported parts.[4] The Berlin assembly operation produced 1,177 Model Ts in 1926 and a further 2,594 during 1927 which was the Model T's final year: in August 1927 Model T production in Berlin ended, and it was nearly a year before, on 20 August 1928, Ford auto-production in Berlin recommenced, now of the Ford Model A.[3]

Ford Rheinland 1932

In March 1929 General Motors purchased a controlling 80% holding in Opel. Henry Ford's reaction was a prompt decision to build a complete Ford auto-factory in Germany, and before the end of 1929 a site at Cologne (Niehl) made available by the mayor of the city, Konrad Adenauer[4] was acquired by Ford.[5] The 170,000 m² site was originally intended to support an annual production of 250,000 cars, suggesting a continuation of the spirit of boundless economic optimism that seized western industry in the months preceding the 1929 Wall Street crash. Locating the plant directly beside the Rhine ensured that, as with Ford's other principal European manufacturing locations in Manchester, Dagenham and Berlin, excellent access existed to the water transport network. On 2 October 1930 Henry Ford, then age 67, together with Adenauer, age 55, laid the foundation stone for the Cologne Ford Plant: construction, which cost 12 Million Marks, progressed rapidly. The assembly operation in Berlin came to an end on 15 April 1931, and on 4 May 1931 the first Cologne produced Ford rolled off the production line.[6] The first vehicle produced was a Ford Model A based truck which, whether by coincidence or by design would also be the first vehicle produced by Ford's new plant at Dagenham, England in October 1931. From that time an increasing proportion of the Ford vehicles sold in Germany were also made in Germany rather than being imported. The Model A was joined at Cologne in 1932 by the Model B.

Small car manufacture started in 1933 with the Ford Köln, a year after its British launch as the Model Y. With 2,453 produced in 1933 alone, the Köln propelled Ford to eighth place in the German passenger car sales charts for that year,[7] but it did not have the same impact in Germany as it did in Britain, and was undercut in price by the small Opel.[8]

The Ford Rheinland was a unique model for the German market made by fitting a four-cylinder 3285 cc engine into a Model B V-8 chassis but most products continued to be Detroit designs albeit with local names.

The Eifel was the German version of the 10 hp which was sold in Britain as the Model C. 61,495 Eifels were produced by Ford Germany between 1935 and 1940, which was well over half of all the German Ford produced in the period, enabling Ford's German sales to overtake those of Adler in 1938, making Ford Germany's fourth largest automaker, behind Opel, Mercedes-Benz and DKW.[7] The Eifel was joined in 1939 by the first of the long running Taunus range.

A Luftwaffe Ford V3000 truck, Italy, 1943

The company was re-organised in 1939 and changed its name to Ford-Werke.[4] With the outbreak of the War, car production continued at first with the Taunus being made until 1942 but increasingly military production took over. Ford-Werke built both conventional trucks and Maultier half-tracks for the German armed forces. Most notably, Ford-Werke manufactured the turbines used in the V-2 rockets.[9] In spite of the heavy bombing of Cologne, the factory got off relatively lightly and after the war production was able to restart in May 1945 with truck manufacture, the US government having paid $1.1 million in consideration of bombing damage.[4]

... had much in common with the British Ford products.

Ford factory in Saarlouis

Car making restarted in late 1948 with the Taunus. Henry Ford II visited the factory in 1948 during his visit to Germany when he was considering a purchase of Volkswagen, with which he did not ultimately proceed.[4]

In 1952 a new Taunus appeared and this had much in common with the British Ford products and was a great success enabling record production figures to be reached. The company was now being run by Ehrhart Vitger and he spent time recruiting new dealers to replace those lost in East Germany but the company continued to rank third in sales in Germany behind VW and Opel.[4]

Ford began to integrate the operations of its European subsidiaries in the 1960s with the launch of the 1965 Ford Transit panel van, which was a joint development between Ford of Britain and Ford-Werke, however it was the Ford Escort in 1968 that truly marked the end of unique models in European countries and followed the creation of Ford Europe in 1967 from the assets of the British and German operations but the corporate entities continue.

General Motors would later follow Ford's lead in the 1970s by integrating its Opel and Vauxhall subsidiaries into GM Europe.

Until 27 January 1950 all Ford's European operations other than in the USSR were run from Dagenham and owned by Ford Motor Company Limited, Dearborn's 55% owned subsidiary. In Ford Motor Company Limited's published reports to their British shareholders Germany and the other Ford European interests were referred to as 'the associated companies'.[13] These associate companies had been established in order to allow for substantial holdings by local shareholders.[note 1] On the outbreak of the second world war those shares in Ford Motor Company AG not belonging to German shareholders were placed under the control of the German Commissioner for dealing with enemy property.

In October 2004, when Aston Martin was a wholly owned subsidiary of Ford, the company set up a dedicated 12,500 square metres (135,000 sq ft) engine production plant within the Ford Niehl plant, with capacity to produce up to 5000 engines a year by 100 specially trained personnel. Like traditional Aston Martin engine production in Newport Pagnell, assembly of each unit is entrusted to a single technician from a pool of 30, with V8 and V12 variants assembled in under 20 hours. By bringing engine production back to within the company, the promise was that Aston Martin would be able to produce small runs of higher performance variants engines.[14]

Ford Research and Advanced Engineering Center in Aachen

• Henry Ford
• Ford of Europe
• Ford Motor Company
• Ford of Britain
• List of German cars
• Merkur

• Oswald, Werner (2001). Deutsche Autos 1920-1945, Band (vol) 2 (in German). Motorbuch Verlag. ISBN 3-613-02170-6.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ford Deutschland.

• Website (in German)
• Documents and clippings about Ford Germany in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW