Newly released Nazi documents show the Ford Motor Company was one of 500 firms which had links with Auschwitz, Polish officials said yesterday, delivering a setback to Ford's attempts to extricate itself from allegations that it profited from wartime slave labour.
Although it was unclear how deep or extensive Ford's contacts with the camp administration were, the documents are likely to provide ammunition for former slave labourers who are suing the company in a US court over claims that they were forced to work in the Cologne plant run by Ford's German subsidiary.
The list of industries linked to Auschwitz was among Nazi-era documents recently handed over by Moscow, where the camp archive has been kept since the end of the war.
A total of 1.1m people, 90% of them Jews, are thought to have died in the camp in the southern Polish town of Oswiecim.
The papers discovered include construction plans, orders for raw materials and reports. They also name the German industrial giants Krupp, Siemens and IG Farben.
Jacek Turczynski, the head of a foundation representing Nazi-era slave labourers, said: "The list includes Ford, but we do not have any other details."
He added that some of the companies listed used slave labour, while others only inquired about the possibility of using Auschwitz inmates as workers. It has not emerged how far each of the named companies was implicated.
"It could have been just correspondence, they could have supplied some equipment," Barbara Jarosz, the head of the Auschwitz museum, said.
Ford has previously acknowledged that its German subsidiary, Ford Werke AG, used slave labour at its Cologne plant, and is fighting a class action lawsuit by former labourers in a New Jersey court.
The car firm's lawyers argue that the Michigan-based parent company lost control of its German operations when the war broke out and the Cologne plant was seized as "enemy property".
Jim Vella, Ford's global news director, issued a statement saying: "Whatever occurred at the Cologne plant during world war two was and is the responsibility of the German government, as successor to the Nazi regime.
"Wartime reparations claims historically have been resolved by government-to-government agreements and that is how this matter should be resolved, too."
Ford has also argued that the statute of limitations on the victims' claims had expired.
But Burt Neuborne, a New York University law professor representing the slave labourers and their families, said: "Time can never shield a war criminal, either criminally or civilly."
One of the former slave labourers suing Ford is Elsa Iwanowa, 74, who has testified that she was abducted as a teenager along with 2,000 other children from a Russian village and forced to build military vehicles at the Nazi-run Ford plant.
The lawsuit, the first of its kind against a US company, was inspired by the success of Nazi victims in securing reparations from Swiss banks which had profited from Nazi wartime deposits.
It claims Ford's German plant "became an eager, aggressive and successful bidder for forced labourers", and alleges that senior Ford executives knew that thousands of workers were being abused.
The US district judge in the case, Joseph Greenaway, is due to rule next month on Ford's motion to dismiss the case.
The firm has called the former US secretary of state Warren Christopher as a witness to testify that former US administrations have upheld the principle that governments should decide war reparations rather than the courts.
However, if the newly unearthed documents show that Ford Werke AG was deeply involved in the operations of the death camp, a dismissal is less likely.
Ms Jarosz said archivists were still reviewing the Auschwitz documents to establish the names of slave labourers used by some of the companies involved.
Victims' organisations say there are detailed files with the names of 100,000 workers still in the Moscow archives, which have yet to be released.