Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle

by Andrea Hiott

  Hummingbird was the code name for the purge. Now, it’s often referred to as the Night of the Long Knives. The Reichstag fire had helped precipitate Germany’s change into a one-party state and had given Hitler more power, but there was still a great deal of resistance and threat to that power, most of it found in the chaos of the NSDAP itself. In 1934, a part of Hitler’s own party had gotten out of hand, and its leader, the restless Ernst Roehm—one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party—had become a threat. In the early years, the NSDAP had been an assimilation of many anti-Weimar forces: the SA had emerged from the Freikorps, a nationalistic organization that carried machine guns and targeted Communists in particular with their wrath. The Nazis had used this army to their own benefit—the hundreds of street battles and deaths that the SA caused in 1932 had contributed greatly to the sentiment that had ushered Hitler into power—but now its volatile leader had become too much for him, and the two men were at odds about what role the SA should play.

  Roehm’s storm troopers had minds of their own, getting drunk and attacking citizens, and making it obvious that Hitler did not have complete control. Rather than the SA, Hitler had named the SS to be his personal military. But Roehm was still ready for a German revolution, and his SA was full of men with guns who were ready for it too. There were many calling for Hitler to rein in the SA, so it was not hard for him to bend the story and events of that night into what today is still sometimes referred to as the Roehm Coup: In short, it was made to seem that Roehm and his SA were planning to take over the government. And for such behavior, the only answer was death. The Roehm putsch, combined with the Reichstag fire and another manufactured event called the Blomberg-Fritsche affair, gave Hitler full control of both the police and the army, and thus complete dictatorial control. It was also a chance for the Nazis to do away not only with members of the SA, but also with any Communists, Social Democrats, or others Hitler wanted out of the way. Many prominent Germans were executed. In this final move, what Goebbels called a “chess match for power,”1 Hitler broke loose of all restraints. And he got away with it. The nation helped him make it look like a legitimate legal move.

  The Night of the Long Knives started on June 30, 1934, and ended two days later. On July 3, the German cabinet issued an official statement saying that the killings had been necessary matters of the state. Hindenburg, Germany’s well-respected war hero, even wrote a letter expressing his gratitude to Hitler for getting rid of such treacherous influences. The brutality and lies and secrecy, the focus on traitors and punishment, set a tone for the country and for Hitler’s reign, as did the fact that all this was done under a rational guise, another “emergency situation” that required “emergency measures.” With usual ideas of morality now being stretched and warped, it was hard to know where one might safely stand: The truly “safe” bet was to do as Hitler wished. His governing maxim was “Whatever is best for the Reich.” The catch was: He was the only person who could decide what was best.

  Things were no different when it came to matters concerning the automobile. And Ferdinand Porsche would have been naïve to think he was the only man Hitler was turning to for plans of a People’s Car. Numerous other German auto companies were also being courted. Back at Opel, for instance, managers had reconsidered their initial dismissal of Hitler’s Volkswagen plan and were discussing ideas with his advisors. The Nazis did not like the fact that Opel was owned by an American company, but Opel had the factory, the infrastructure, and the workforce to build such a car (and of course, the Nazis felt sure that Opel would not remain American-owned). Porsche was a designer. His shop was not made for building or producing cars. Hitler was well aware of this, and he sent his advisors out to explore the issue from every angle. Hitler also went so far as to meet with the head of General Motors’ overseas operations, the American James Mooney, about a possible deal. Mooney immediately went back to the United States with the thought that the German Volkswagen would surely be produced and designed by GM. In the company’s monthly publication, Mooney wrote a piece gushing over Hitler and talking excitedly about the possibilities of partnership. It was in the midst of all of this that Ferdinand Porsche, his son, Ferry, and the rest of their team finished the Exposé and sent it in. Hitler was flirting with everyone.

  On March 3, at the Berlin Auto Show of 1934, two months after Porsche sent in his plans, and just a few months before the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler spoke to all the gathered auto men once again. This time he talked about the Volkswagen, being very clear about the importance he attached to it. Porsche was at the Auto Show that day, and he recognized his own words in Hitler’s speech: Hitler was speaking of things the two of them had discussed at the Kaiserhof and using ideas and specifications that Porsche had written about in his Exposé. It seemed like a good sign.

  Opel thought they saw good signs too. At that same Auto Show, Hitler made a point of stopping by Opel’s rented stage and paying particular attention to their “Opel-Volkswagen.” Word had gotten out about Porsche’s Exposé by then, but one of Hitler’s advisors had also “leaked” information that Hitler was unimpressed with Porsche’s design, which put the engine in the rear. If the members of Germany’s Automobile Association, known in Germany as the RDA, had made bets in the summer of 1934 about who would be working with Hitler on his car, they’d surely have put their money on General Motors and Opel, not Porsche. And they would have been very wrong.

  Behind the scenes, there was a very different story brewing. In actuality, Hitler had been deeply offended and annoyed by the article that Mooney, the American representative for GM, had written; it infuriated him that Mooney talked with such arrogance, as if the whole account had already gone to GM. At the Auto Show, Hitler had also been deeply disturbed to see Opel calling their car the German “Volkswagen”: Hitler now felt that the word “Volkswagen,” “People’s Car,” or any such variation of the term, was a word that belonged to him. By the spring of 1934, Opel and GM had in truth moved even further away from getting the project, though they imagined things were just the opposite. In typical Hitler fashion, he allowed people to believe one thing in order to give himself more time to act in exactly the opposite way.

  Finally, eight weeks after Porsche had sent the Exposé to Berlin, Jakob Werlin called the Porsche firm. Karl Rabe took the call because Porsche was away in another city testing one of their cars. Werlin explained that he would be coming to Stuttgart the very next day: Could Porsche see him? Rabe, knowing how much the project meant to Porsche, answered Yes, of course. As soon as he hung up the phone with Werlin, Rabe began trying to reach Porsche, who was hundreds of miles away and difficult to track down. Once Porsche got the news, he left for Stuttgart, breathlessly arriving just hours before Werlin appeared.

  It had been worth the rush: Werlin told Porsche that he had been chosen to design the German Volkswagen—the Porsche firm would get the job. There was just one small catch: Hitler was still unhappy about Porsche’s price and he’d come to the conclusion that the best way to get it down to where he wanted it was to get the German Automobile Association involved. The RDA could provide materials and tools, Hitler thought, and this would reduce the overall cost. In having to work with the RDA, Ferdinand would be working with representatives from all the main car companies in Germany, some of whom were old enemies of his. Werlin and Hitler kept this decision as cloaked as possible, while Hitler continued his dance with the other auto companies, but by the following Berlin Auto Show, word was out. In February of 1935, Hitler gave his third Auto Show speech, announcing that a “designer genius” had been chosen to create the German Volkswagen and that the RDA was expected to work with this genius to produce the German People’s Car. Even before Hitler spoke his name, everyone, including Nordhoff and the other Opel executives, knew exactly what that meant: The contract would go to Porsche.

  There was no time to waste. Hitler wanted Porsche and the members of the RDA to have a prototype ready for production within the year. By 1938, Hitler wanted o
ne million cars produced. This, of course, sounded insane. Nevertheless, the members of the RDA were ordered to assist Porsche in every way possible, and to keep tabs and reports of his progress that were to be sent regularly to the government offices in Berlin. All the major car companies had members in the RDA, but only Opel tried to rebel against Hitler’s order, still feeling sure enough about their position and power in the country to be able to do such a thing. They were so close to having a small car ready for production themselves that they did not want to give it up. Opel executives tried to win the other members of the RDA to their side. Heinrich Nordhoff, being Opel’s primary representative in the RDA, argued for his company, reiterating how impractical Hitler’s ideas were. Nordhoff did not think that the government had the engineering and technical skills to be able to decide what kind of car should get built, and upon looking at Porsche’s engine designs later, he said it was “built for an airplane, not a car.” To him, the entire project seemed a waste of resources, and while the idea of a People’s Car was not a bad one, this was simply no way to go about building such an automobile. But Hitler’s word was now the word of the land. On August 19, 1934, a German plebiscite, a direct government vote, had vested sole executive power in Adolf Hitler. He was officially the führer now.

  Ferdinand Porsche had a British-born nephew named Ghislaine. Young Ghislaine was thin and fine, chiseled and prim. He’d moved from London to Stuttgart to work for his favorite uncle, acting as Porsche’s personal secretary. On December 17, 1934, as his uncle and the other men were in the garage working on the first prototypes of the coming People’s Car, Ghislaine opened a letter from the Nazi authorities that was addressed to his uncle Ferdinand and marked urgent. The letter strongly suggested that Ferdinand Porsche immediately apply to become a German citizen. It must have given Ghislaine’s young heart a shock to read such words, for he too carried a foreign passport. In fact, most of the men in Porsche’s shop were not German citizens, nearly all of them having come from Austria or Czechoslovakia to work for Porsche.

  In the months since Hitler had given the People’s Car project to Porsche, he and the other Nazis had been tirelessly praising Porsche as the “great German engineer,” but in reality, Porsche was not even German; in the new nations that had developed with the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was now considered Czech. Since his early years, Hitler had always claimed to hate the Czechs, seeing them as one of the main menaces in the empire of his youth. And now his great engineer held the passport of a Czech, and in fact, many of the ideas that went into the People’s Car had come from Czech companies like Tatra and from Czech members of Porsche’s team. This little fact about Porsche’s Czech citizenship had been discovered by a jealous member of the RDA and brought to Hitler’s attention. Perhaps the informer hoped to get in the führer’s good graces with the revelation, or perhaps he imagined such news would change Hitler’s mind about Porsche. It didn’t work out that way, though. Hitler knew all too well how difficult it was to get German citizenship; he’d tried for nearly ten years to do so himself, having succeeded only a year before he was elected chancellor.

  When Ghislaine told his uncle about the letter, Porsche looked it over and hesitated only a moment: “Well, I suppose there’s nothing1 we can do about it. Go ahead and proceed,” he said. A few months later, Ferdinand Porsche was a German citizen. Problem solved. It was yet another sign that when it came to race and citizenship, there was no solid Nazi policy aside from the dictates of their own imaginations and moods. The Nazis persecuted the Jews, but “Jew” was never completely definable by Nazi terms: Some Nazis reportedly had Jewish relatives; others had Jewish friends. In the co-opted words of Goering, “Who is a Jew?2 That is a question I alone decide.” Even so, one devastating thing would soon become clear: Those whom the Nazis did consider Jewish were people they did not feel deserved to live.

  Sometimes Ferdinand’s son, Ferry, would try to talk to his father about Hitler and the direction Germany was heading, but Porsche only wanted to talk about two things: family and cars. If he said anything about the political situation, it was only to tell his son that there was no way Herr Hitler—Porsche was perhaps the only man in Germany not to call Hitler “Führer” but rather “Herr Hitler” and get away with it—was planning to lead the country into war; how would they possibly produce a People’s Car in the midst of a war? And wasn’t Hitler serious about this People’s Car? To Ferdinand, whose life revolved around automobiles, this seemed a foolproof argument, an obvious point.

  Remarkably, many people in both Europe and America felt the same in the early thirties: They saw signs of progress in Germany, of increased work and a new stability. The country seemed to be emerging from the misery of the twenties, and business was picking up. Porsche’s firm was no different: They’d gotten two large new contracts for the things Porsche cared about most—the race car and the Volkswagen. For the first time, Porsche had the freedom and the money to do exactly what he had always wanted to do. Almost. In truth, he had the promise of freedom and money, but in reality, he and his team were still barely getting by, beholden to the impossible time schedules and conflicting demands now being imposed on them by the German automotive men who comprised the RDA. Porsche was once again working for all the men he’d once been unable to work for, and it would be no easier this time around.

  A bank account called “Volkswagen” had been opened for Porsche; 200,000 RM was to be allocated for the building of the car, and small deposits of that amount were given as the RDA saw fit. In an attempt to keep the project in private hands, they had met with Hitler and decided the German auto companies should pay for the car, thus Porsche’s funds were monitored and given by them, not by the government. In the contract signed between Porsche and the RDA on June 22, 1934, Porsche was given ten months to produce his first car with 25,000 RM. Everyone knew it was an impossibly small fund, an impossible deadline, and that it would basically be a miracle if Porsche’s team managed to achieve a working design for a whole new car under such conditions. Especially without a factory: None of the car companies offered to help or to lend factories or facilities. Because they had no other choice, Porsche and his team decided to use Ferdinand’s own garage to build the first cars, and they quickly installed a milling machine, power drills, and two lathes in the tiny space.

  The price of the car remained a problem as well. The contract with the RDA had stipulated that Porsche’s car should cost 990 marks. Not only was this practically impossible from an engineering point of view, it was also unlikely that even if Porsche could make a car to sell at such a low price, there would be anyone to buy it. At 990 marks, one People’s Car would still equal about 800 working hours for the normal citizen. If one compares those numbers to the Model T, the German citizen would be giving three times the amount of his or her wage to get a People’s Car than the average American had given to pay for theirs. The impossibility of it all didn’t seem to matter, though; Porsche’s obsession pushed like a steam engine through anything that got in its way.

  Even after the RDA signed their contract with Porsche, Heinrich Nordhoff and the others at Opel persisted in making their own small car, increasingly distancing themselves from the other auto companies that made up the RDA. They would eventually create a model called the P4, which could run at 200 RM and be sold at the price of 1,450 RM. That meant the price was 50 RM less than the one Porsche originally proposed in his Exposé, and Opel had the facilities for it to be mass produced. This Opel car was still a scaled-down version of a luxury car, but it was the most impressive effort toward a Volkswagen that anyone had come up with yet. Hitler did not appreciate Opel’s attempt. Bringing his fist down hard against the table in front of him at another Berlin Auto Show, Hitler would tell them: “Gentleman! There can be only one Volkswagen3, not ten!” And that meant his Volkswagen, the one being designed by Porsche. Opel would have to give up its idea of the small car. The P4 would never be produced.

  Meanwhile, more than a dozen men wor
ked together in Porsche’s small garage, laboring day after day on the first three Volkswagen cars. They changed the engine type numerous times, going from a two-cylinder, two-cycle, water-cooled engine to an air-cooled, four-cycle, two-cylinder engine. The first did poorly when tested over long distances; the latter didn’t have adequate power in the lower ranges. They tried all sorts of bodies: The three early cars were made of different materials—one wood, one a thin metal, and finally one that was all steel. Eighteen months after signing the contract with the RDA, Porsche had a drivable handmade prototype ready to show, and Porsche and his team took the car to Munich to let Hitler have a look. Hitler was deeply impressed and told Porsche that it was an amazing piece of work. The RDA men were furious that they were neither informed nor invited when Porsche showed Hitler the cars.

  A full year of tests now commenced. Porsche and his engineers drove the V3 all over Germany, day and night, in inclement weather and in sun. (A little explanation about the term “V3”: “V” stands for Versuch, which means something like test model in this context. There had been one car that was the V1 model and one car that was the V2 model, but because the V3 model showed the most promise, three V3 models were eventually tested, the third, fourth, and fifth prototypes ever made.)