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

[citation needed][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.

[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.

[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.

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.

After the war ended, production could restart in May 1945 with truck manufacture, the US government having paid $1.1 million in consideration of bombing damage.

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

[12] However, a three-year study which was published by the Ford Motor Company in December 2001 maintained that the U.S. headquarters had no control over what happened at the German Ford-Werke when the Nazi forced labour policy went into effect.

Elsa Iwanowa, who was 16 years old at the time, and many other Russians were transported in cattle cars to Wuppertal in the western part of Germany, where they were exhibited to visiting businessmen.

[15] In 1999, the court dismissed Elsa Iwanowa's suit; however, a number of German companies, including GM subsidiary Opel, agreed to contribute $5.1 billion to a fund that would compensate the surviving slave laborers.

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.