The image of the Ford Motor Company began to change when the grandson of Henry Ford, Henry Ford II, took over control of the company in 1945. One of his first acts as president was to fire Ford’s sketchy ‘muscle’ and head of the Ford Service Department, Harry Bennett. He then set out to surround himself with experienced executives who assisted him in taking the company from the emotional brainchild of one man to a well-respected and long-lasting corporate entity. In 1956, the Ford Motor Company became a publicly traded corporation under the leadership of Henry Ford II.
The Ford Motor Company is a very different company today than it was a century ago. In one glaring example of this, the President and Chief Executive Officer of the company (at the time of writing this book) is a Jewish businessman named Mark Fields. The dark shadows of Henry Ford’s legacy have been left far behind and instead the memory of his technological innovations remain. It would be hard to blame the modern day Ford Motor Company for wanting to brush the history of its founder under the rug in lieu of a legacy of hatred and bigotry.
Chapter Four
Adidas & Puma: Cogs in the Nazi War Machine
The shoe has become its own fashion statement. Consumers often pay big bucks for limited edition or fun new shoes. Sneakerheads, a name given to shoe collectors, will even wait hours or even days in line for limited edition new release ‘kicks’. There are several popular names in shoes, but none carry the nefarious history of Adidas and Puma. The history behind these two companies is riddled with a bitter sibling rivalry between two brothers who founded their fortunes while loyally serving the Nazis.
The Dassler brothers were born two years apart in their quaint hometown of Herzogenaurach, Germany. Nestled quietly in the Middle Franconia region of Bavaria, Herzogenaurach is located right on the Aurach River. Historically, there was little reason to mention the sleepy town, not until it was made famous by the Dassler brothers as the home base of their respective footwear brand giants, Adidas and Puma. Rudolf, the founder of Puma, was the older of the two brothers, born on 26 March 1898. The younger of the two, Adolf, was born on 3 November 1900. Adolf was the founder and namesake for his company, Adidas – a clever mixture of his nickname of ‘Adi’ and his last name ‘Dassler’. The brothers were two of the four children of Christoph Von Wilhelm and Pauline Dassler. They also had another brother named Fritz and a sister named Marie.
The industrious Adi would be the first brother to make a big move towards the future. In the year 1920 he constructed a makeshift shoe production studio in a shed that his mother had previously used for laundry. Adi had only just returned from serving the German military in the First World War and was already looking towards building a future for himself at home. Christoph Dassler worked in a shoe factory to support his family, so the move towards developing footwear was a natural one. Herzogenaurach was, after all, a hotspot in Bavaria for shoemaking, boasting over one hundred individual shoemakers in 1922. Christoph supported his son’s endeavours as Adi teamed with the Zehlein brothers, who were producing spikes for track shoes in their own blacksmithing workshop.
Rudolf eventually joined forces with his brother on 1 July 1924, when he and Adi established the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory (translated from the German Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik). Their goal was to create high-quality footwear for athletes of all kinds. It was a brave venture that the brothers undertook to open their own business in post First World War Germany. On the surface the brothers appeared to be a perfect match. Adi was the soft-spoken and thoughtful craftsman, a master of the workbench, while his brother Rudolf was a gregarious and outgoing salesman. Rudolf was very personable and easily mastered the commercial aspects of the business.
The Dassler brothers had a lot in common and got on quite well, although Rudolf had the assertive and dominant personality of an older sibling. As boys, Rudolf and Adi spent their spare time outdoors playing various sports, where there was always a healthy rivalry and sense of competition between them. Adi had the drive of a younger brother who wanted to outdo Rudolf in some realm and that realm was sports. No matter how hard Rudolf tried, he couldn’t match Adi’s natural talent and athleticism. Adi seemed to understand sport in a more organic way, which would end up translating into his ability to create and craft innovative sporting shoe designs.
Rudolf may not have been a master at sports and the physical, but he did consider himself to be a man of the world. In the early days of the business he was already a young father, husband and businessman. Rudolf married Friedl Strasser on 6 May 1928 and the couple had two sons, Armin and Gerd. Always seen carrying his pipe, he was quite popular with the ladies; his dapper, smooth confidence earned him a lot of affections outside of his marriage. He was well known as a lady-killer and it didn’t amuse his wife Friedl one bit. Although she was well aware of his dalliances, he would usually hide them from her and engage in them while on holiday, sparing her embarrassment and pain. He didn’t always keep to this way of doing things however; he once had an affair while she was pregnant, which destroyed her emotionally.
Rudolf may have been a ladies’ man, but by contrast Adi was a bachelor through and through, that is until he met Käthe, the woman who would become his wife. The two married on 17 March 1934 and went on to have five children together; one son and four daughters. The two families of the Dassler brothers would become quite wealthy and well-to-do within their town, and their two families got along well for a time. The brothers found so much success under the Nazi regime that they soon needed larger factories to cope with the rapid growth. Rudolf’s wife Friedl began to play a very active role in running the family business as a bookkeeper, but Adi’s wife Käthe was less interested in the day-to-day operations.
Käthe was expected to participate and work, but she had only been 17 when she married Adi, and when their first child was born she refused to go to work. She lacked a work ethic, but had plenty of vision for what Adolf’s role in the company should be. Käthe would eventually be the inspiration behind Adolf growing bold enough to move on his own. The two families moved into a joint house next to the factory, despite their personal differences. The families rarely got along and the Dassler brothers became increasingly bitter towards each other, though the subject of many of their early feuds is pure speculation. Adolf and his family resided on the ground floor; Rudolf and his family were on the next floor up and their parents above that. The close living quarters and stresses at work began to culminate in fighting and family disputes.
During the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam the Dassler brothers equipped German athlete Lina Radke with her running shoes. Radke went on to be the very first athlete to win an Olympic gold medal for Germany. This accomplishment would reflect well on the Dassler brothers and brought some notoriety to their burgeoning company.
Fate would intervene in the lives of the Dasslers when Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist party assumed power of Germany in 1933. Adi and Rudolf both became members of the Nazi party, a practice that was not uncommon amongst German business owners, at least the ones that wanted to stay in business. It is also likely that Adi, as a veteran of the First World War, would have had strong feelings about the promises being touted by Adolf Hitler for rebuilding German society and the economy. The Dassler brothers, ever industrious, saw the opportunities that could come along with the new era of Aryan dominance sweeping through Germany. It wasn’t long before the Swastika was all over their hometown of Herzogenaurach and the brothers weren’t about to be left out of progress. In May 1933, focussing on what was best for the company at that time, the brothers officially joined the Nazi Party; it was a decision they would later come to regret. As party members however, the brothers were able to obtain a lot of benefits from the government and the Nazis were anxious to get young Germans involved in Nazi-approved sports to showcase their perceived physical superiority and Aryan prestige.