The company was now being run by Ehrhart Vitger and he spent time recruiting new dealers to replace those lost in East Germany but the company continued to rank third in sales in Germany behind VW and Opel. Ford began to integrate the operations of its European subsidiaries in the 1960s with the launch of the 1965 Ford Transit panel van, which was a joint development between Ford of Britain and "Ford-Werke", however it was the Ford Escort in 1968 that truly marked the end of unique models in European countries and followed the creation of Ford Europe in 1967 from the assets of the British and German operations but the corporate entities continue. General Motors would later follow Ford's lead in the 1970s by integrating its Opel and Vauxhall subsidiaries into GM Europe. During the Second World War, "Ford Werke" employed slave laborers although not required by the Nazi regime. The deployment of slave labor began before the "Ford-Werke" was separated from the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, while America had not yet entered the War. Robert Hans Schmidt presided over "Ford-Werke" during the Second World War, and engaged slave labor and the illegal manufacture of munitions, including such manufacturing during the period before the U.S. entry into the War. Once the War was over, "notwithstanding all his carefully publicized efforts to erase the stain of the company's past, no evidence emerged that either Henry Ford II or any other top-level Ford Motor Company executive ever raised any moral objects to rehiring [Schmidt], who had presided over one of the company's darkest chapters. In 1942, German soldiers swept into the city of Rostov in the Soviet Union, moving among the homes of Rostov families, forcing them to register at a labor registration center. 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. From there Elsa Iwanowa and others were forced to become slave laborers for "Ford-Werke". "On March 4, 1998, fifty-three years after she was liberated from the German Ford plant, Elsa Iwanowa demanded justice, filing a class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the Ford Motor Company." In court, Ford acknowledged that Elsa Iwanowa and many others like her were "forced to endure a sad and terrible experience" at "Ford-Werke"; Ford, however, maintained that cases like that of Elsa Iwanowa are best redressed on "a nation-to-nation, government-to-government" basis.