Imhotep Evil

Not exactly.

[quote]
Gregor's major finding is that Daimler-Benz pursued its own corporate self-interest throughout the period of Nazi rule. He shows clearly that, except for the period from the failure of Operation Barbarossa (the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union) in December 1941, to the defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, the company consistently anticipated a short war. Consequently, it attempted to retain a core of consumer products to facilitate the transition to a peacetime economy. It struggled to continue production of passenger automobiles even after the war began so as to maintain the production lines devoted to them. It especially fought to protect its cadre of skilled workers who were needed to produce cars at the level of quality that management thought necessary to preserve the aura of the Mercedes-Benz name. When the company consented to build the three liter Opel Blitz truck in 1944, it did so to position itself for the post-war market. Already, the management of DBAG expected that the war would be over in the foreseeable future and that Germany would lose. It anticipated a large market for trucks due to the need to rebuild Germany's heavily bombed cities. It also agreed to build the product of one of its competitors in order to learn about Opel's manufacturing procedures.

Gregor demonstrates that DBAG was reluctant to invest in additional plant to fill military contracts due to its fear of being left with excess capacity after the end of the war. He contends that the company used labor, including slave labor, as a substitute for capital investment. This reduced the burden on its balance sheet and lead to the barbaric exploitation of its employees, especially those from Eastern Europe who worked for the company against their will. Put differently, Daimler-Benz used slave labor only to survive in the short-term. It could rid itself of these laborers easily after the war and it could use them to produce military aircraft engines and other war related products while conserving its skilled German workforce, concentrated in its plants in western Germany, for the resumption of peacetime production. Gregor demonstrates that the failure of the German armed forces before Moscow in December 1941 marked an increase in the brutalization of DBAG's workers. At this point, the company concluded that a long war was in the offing and resolved to increase military output, without, however, burdening itself with capital that would be superfluous to peacetime needs. It increased output by driving its employees harder and demanding more foreigners and slaves from the government. Gregor is careful to point out that the influx of foreigners did not alter the company's basic reliance on skilled labor . As a corollary to this, Gregor shows that Daimler-Benz never developed a strategy for seizing factories in the areas conquered by the Wehrmacht. Rather, it was interested in the skilled labor available from its competitors in occupied France and took responsibility for factories in Austria and the East, in large measure, to keep them out of the hands of competitors like BMW. In short, the DBAG was not a co-conspirator in a grand imperialist enterprise.

In his introduction, Gregor raises a number of issues that he hopes to illuminate by looking at Daimler-Benz during the war. He attempts to shed light on why the West German economy recovered so strongly after the war. He deprecates the Zero Hour (Stunde Null) myth, contending that the same companies that dominated German manufacturing before the war dominated it afterwards. He claims that Daimler-Benz came out of the war with comparatively little damage. Consequently, it was well positioned to resume operations in the peacetime market. Based on his description of the rationalization of production processes during the 1920's and again during the 1930's, combined with the additional changes required by the war, he concludes that the rapid post-war recovery was due to these earlier advances, not to a post- war miracle. The key, for Gregor, was continuity.

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So you see:
snatcing and protecting skilled worker + litlle damage to its factories + comercial vehicle division + slave workers, so as not to use capital + continuity = MB succes recepy after WW2 = decades of lead over misfortunate competitors (BMW & Auto Union)