Did Founder of Ford Foundation Help Finance Germany's Nazi Party?

Ford Foundation Founder Henry Ford accepting medal from German Nazi Government officials

In the 21st-century, the tax-exempt Ford Foundation (that Billionaire Industrialist Henry Ford apparently set up as a tax-dodge near the middle of the 20th century) redistributes some of the investment income that it obtains from its multi-billion dollar stock and hedge fund portfolio to wealthy tax-exempt universities/real estate development institutions such as Columbia University, in the form of tax-exempt “charitable grants.” In December 2011, for example, the Ford Foundation’s International Fellowship Program division apparently gave a self-serving $1 million “charitable grant” to the Trustees of Columbia University’s private library system “to archive and provide access to” the Ford Foundation’s own International Fellowship Program’s “paper and electronic records.”

Coincidentally, during the 1920s the founder of the Ford Foundation, Henry Ford, apparently helped fund the Nazi Party in Germany. As a muckraking journalist named George Seldes observed in his 1943 book Facts and Fascism:

“Henry Ford’s picture for years hung over Hitler’s desk in the Brown House in Munich. The Nazis in their early days boasted that they had the moral and financial support of the richest man in America…

“To many persons Ford has always been our No. 1 Fascist. (Newspapermen usually give that spot to William Randolph Hearst, and there is an unending argument as to which of the two has done more harm to the mind of America, but no one doubts that both have spread more fascist poison in this country than any other pair of prominent men…)

“It was general knowledge in the early 1920s, when it was not treason to aid Hitler, that Henry Ford was one of his spiritual and economic backers…

“The most credible evidence regarding Ford’s financing of early Nazism was given in the treason trial of Herr Hitler himself…On February 7, 1924, Herr Auer, vice-president of the Bavarian Diet, testified in the Hitler trial as follows:

“`The Bavarian Diet has long had the information that the Hitler movement was partly financed by an American anti-Semitic chief, who is Henry Ford. Mr. Ford’s interest in the Bavarian anti-Semitic movement began a year ago…Herr Hitler openly boasts of Mr. Ford’s support…A photograph of Mr. Ford hangs in Herr Hitler’s quarters..’”