Ford Germany

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

At the end of 1924 the Ford Motor Company of the U.S. 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. The move had evidently been anticipated by Ford, since on 18 August 1925 the Ford Motor Company Aktiengesellschaft had been entered in the Berlin Companies Register.

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. On 1 April 1926 the first German assembled Model T was produced, using imported parts. The Berlin assembly operation produced 1,177 Model Ts in 1926 and a further 2,594 during 1927 which was the Model T's final year: in August 1927 Model T production in Berlin ended, and it was nearly a year until, on 20 August 1928, Ford auto-production in Berlin recommenced, now of the Ford Model A.

Relocation to Cologne

In March 1929 General Motors purchased a controlling 80% holding in Opel. Henry Ford's reaction was a prompt decision to build a complete Ford auto-factory in Germany, and before the end of 1929 a site at Cologne made available by the mayor of the city, Konrad Adenauer, was acquired by Ford. 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. Locating the plant directly beside the Rhine ensured that, as with Ford's other principal European manufacturing locations in Manchester, Dagenham and Berlin, there was excellent access to the water transport network. On 2 October 1930, Henry Ford, then aged 67, together with Adenauer, aged 55, laid the foundation stone for the Cologne Ford Plant: construction, which cost 12 million marks, progressed rapidly. The assembly operation in Berlin came to an end on 15 April 1931, and on 4 May 1931 the first Cologne-produced Ford rolled off the production line. The first vehicle produced was a Ford Model A based truck which, whether by coincidence or by design, would also be the first vehicle produced by Ford's new plant at Dagenham, England in October 1931. From that time, an increasing proportion of the Ford vehicles sold in Germany were also made locally, rather than being imported. The Model A was joined at Cologne in 1932 by the Model B.

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, but it did not have the same impact in Germany as it did in Britain, and was undercut in price by the small Opel.

The Ford Rheinland was a unique model for the German market, made by fitting a four-cylinder 3285 cc engine into a Model B V-8 chassis; but most products continued to be Detroit designs albeit with local names.

The Eifel was the German version of the 10 HP model which was sold in Britain as the Model C. 61,495 Eifels were produced by Ford Germany between 1935 and 1940, which was well over half of all the German Fords produced in the period. This enabled Ford's German sales to overtake those of Adler in 1938, making Ford Germany's fourth largest automaker, behind Opel, Mercedes-Benz and DKW. The Eifel was joined in 1939 by the first of the long-running Taunus range.