In the late spring of 1933, concentration camps such as Dachau were generating headlines reporting great brutality. Nonetheless, GM and Germany began a strategic business relationship. General Motors World, the company house organ, covered [a 1934] May Day event glowingly in a several-page cover story, stressing Hitler's boundless affinity for children. The next day, May 2, 1934, after practicing his sieg heil in front of a mirror, [President of GM Overseas Corp. James] Mooney ... went to meet Hitler. As Mooney traversed the long approach to Hitler's desk, he began to pump his arm in a stern-faced sieg heil. This was ... one of many contacts between the Nazis and GM officials that are spotlighted in thousands of pages of little-known and restricted Nazi-era and New Deal-era documents. The biggest automotive manufacturer in Germany -- indeed in all of Europe -- was General Motors, which since 1929 had owned and operated the longtime German company Opel. A few weeks after the [Hitler meeting], General Motors World effusively recounted ... Hitler is a strong man, well fitted to lead the German people. He is leading them, not by force or fear, but by intelligent planning." In 1937, almost 17 percent of Opel's Blitz trucks were sold directly to the Nazi military. That military sales figure was increased to 29 percent in 1938. In 1938, just months after the Nazi annexation of Austria, Mooney, head of GM's overseas operations, received the German Eagle with Cross, the highest medal Hitler awarded to foreign commercial collaborators and supporters.

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