Ford Germany
automotive manufacturing subsidiary of Ford Motor Company
Ford-Werke GmbH is a German-based car manufacturing company headquartered in Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia. It is a fully owned subsidiary of American Ford Motor Company. It operates two large manufacturing facilities in Germany, a plant in Cologne and a plant in Saarlouis, and serves as a major hub for Ford's presence in the European markets.
Berlin origins
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.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Ford Germany” is automotive manufacturing subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Ford, Germany and automotive, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q571943. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1912, 1924, 1925 and 1920.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ford Germany” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.