According to Robert Lacey's Ford:The Men and the Machine, Ford was genuinely horrified when he saw a newsreel with footage of the the concentration camps and had a serious stroke soon after. He had been declining for some time , his behavior getting more erratic, so it is perhaps hard to say if this caused Ford's stroke; he could have had smaller strokes and this was only the last. But Lacey's source believed it did.

Although Ford's antisemitism is the most famous thing about him today it was not consistent, not what you'd call rabid. He employed Jews in his factories and had a Jewish architect design them. He even advocated for letting Jewish refugees into the country when they were trying to flee Nazi persecution. But he did indeed seem to think there was an international Jewish financial conspiracy. It was perhaps not an uncommon belief among rural Americans (Charles Lindbergh, also from Michigan, protested that he also was not antisemitic, thought there were good Jews, but apparently still thought there was some sort of pernicious Jewish influence in the world. ) The result was that Ford was both puzzled by people denouncing him as an antisemite and also never really seems to have renounced publishing The International Jew. But Ford has been a complex subject for a lot of biographers.

Steven Watts :The People's Tycoon