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

by Andrea Hiott

  An early VW prototype coming out of the gate of Porsche’s home. In the background is the garage where the first Beetle was made, and connected to it is the beloved “Porsche villa,” the family’s home. (photo credit 17.1)

  Prototypes being tested to their limits in the Alps. (photo credit 17.2)

  The cars were always kept outside in the cold air rather than in garages so their start-up could be tested in all kinds of humidity and cold. (Most Germans did not have garages, so Hitler wanted the cars to be able to start in even the coldest of weather.) A member of the RDA often rode in the cars during these tests, taking careful notes. Sometimes the drivers did as much as 500 miles a day. Headlights went out, gearshifts and crankshafts cracked and broke, front wheels wobbled too much, shock absorbers dissolved, the brakes kept giving out. There were crashes with motorcycles and deer; there were times when they could hardly get the cars back home. People worked overnight to repair them just so they could be subjected to ever more testing the next day. The V3 covered over 30,000 miles and kept on going until December 23, 1936, the team trying to get the kinks out before the RDA issued its official report. Exhausted, Porsche and his team rested and relaxed with their families over Christmas into the new year of 1937 and the RDA compiled its report. Porsche wasn’t too worried about the report by that time though. He knew the RDA was losing control. Once again, there was much more going on behind the scenes than most people realized.

  In 1936, Hitler had sent his “designer genius” off on his first trip to the United States. Porsche had long wanted to go on such a trip, curious to see the factories and machines of America for himself. Ferdinand could not speak English, and he did not want to be alone for the trip, so he took his nephew Ghislaine with him as translator and secretary. The two men took a boat from Cherbourg and arrived in New York City on October 8, just as the autumn light was hitting the buildings, contrasts of dark and light allowing every angle to stand out against the sky. Porsche bubbled over with observations, bombarding Ghislaine with thoughts to record. His notebooks of those first days are awed sketches of the buildings as they frame the long straight roads, compliments about how nice and patient American drivers are, notes about Radio City Music Hall and the cleanliness and regality of the Hotel Commodore where Porsche and Ghislaine shared a room, and observations about the Roosevelt Raceway out on Long Island. (Porsche had Ghislaine take notes on the cars and the track, and Porsche himself sent a car to win the entire race the next year.)

  From New York, Porsche and his nephew took a train to the crown jewel of America’s automotive world, Detroit. Every moment was scheduled to the hilt with tours of the automotive plants, but it was the tour of the Ford plant that mattered most to Porsche. Work on Ford’s River Rouge plant had begun just before 1917 and was completed in 1928. By the time Porsche was to visit, the place had become famous around the world. An issue of Vanity Fair from February 1938 gives a good idea of how it was perceived, calling River Rouge “the most significant public monument in America4, throwing its shadows across the land probably more widely and more intimately than the United States Senate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, [or] the Statue of Liberty.… In a landscape where size, quantity, and speed are the cardinal virtues, it is natural that the largest factory turning out the most cars in the least time should come to have the quality of America’s Mecca toward which the pious journey for prayer.”

  Porsche sailing into New York City, gazing at the Statue of Liberty. (photo credit 17.3)

  Porsche and his team were now making that “religious” journey, and Porsche prepared a list of questions for Ghislaine to ask: How much money did the workers make? What kind of hours did they work? How much vacation time did they get? How did the people there buy their homes? What was this new idea of credit, or installment plans, that they’d been hearing about? From where did they get their materials and supplies? Did they all have automobiles? What kinds of appliances were popular in their homes? According to Ghislaine’s notes, they were both amazed at how prosperous everyone seemed, and also at how clean they kept the workplaces.

  Ghislaine, Porsche’s loyal nephew, while traveling with his uncle in the States. (photo credit 17.4)

  They wanted an American car to take back with them on the ship. At Ford, they tried to buy a car, but the model Porsche requested wasn’t ready and he ended up paying one thousand dollars for a Packard instead. The car was a six-cylinder and he and Ghislaine drove back to New York City in it, stopping in Chicago en route. In his photo album from this trip, which is now in the Porsche archives in Stuttgart, there is one photo Ghislaine snapped of a sign in Chicago that reads: “Some of life’s keenest satisfaction comes from doing things we thought we could not do.”

  Their last stop before New York was to take a moment to stand and gaze at Niagara Falls. Porsche felt energized there, standing and looking out at the water, feeling the tickle of mist. It had been a long trip, but he still wasn’t tired. In fact, he was already pestering Ghislaine to find a way to get him on the Queen Mary that was soon to sail out of New York City. At the time, the Queen Mary was all the rage; the most modern ship of its time, and Porsche refused to take the ship they’d originally been booked on, once he’d heard the Queen Mary set sail that same day. On board, Porsche excitedly toured the ship’s engine room, but the rest of the journey proved more difficult for him. There was a violent storm, and one regal passenger actually jumped to his death. Porsche was distressed by the suicide, and once they reached Britain, he was less enthusiastic about their plans to visit the factories there; after a morose tour through the Austin factory, Ghislaine packed Porsche away on the next train home.

  A photo from Ghislaine’s photo album: “Some of life’s keenest satisfaction comes from doing things we thought we could not do.” (photo credit 17.5)

  But there was little time to rest. As soon as Porsche was back, Hitler wanted to hear from him. There was something important they needed to discuss. Hitler had recently met with the other auto executives of the RDA and asked them what price they would charge to mass-produce Porsche’s Volkswagen design at one of their own plants. The RDA had come back saying there would be a 200-mark subsidy for each car built. The more Hitler thought about it, the more he realized that if the government was going to pay an extra 200 marks for every car produced, it might make just as much sense to use that money and build the car in its own plant instead. Hitler asked Porsche if he thought it might be possible to build a factory based on the American model: Now that he’d seen the machines and moving assembly lines in America, did he think he might be able to organize such a thing himself? Ferdinand Porsche showed no hesitation in saying yes. But when Hitler suggested they call the new factory “the Porsche plant,”5 Porsche declined. The factory was for the car, not for him; he insisted it should be known as “the Volkswagen factory” instead.

  Jesse Owens was a black man from America, and he was riding the public subway in Berlin. Had he been in the Southern United States in 1936, the Olympic track star would not have been allowed to ride with white passengers—public facilities such as buses and trains were legally segregated according to race—but in Berlin, he mingled with white faces and was met with expressions of awe and appreciation, not disgust. Berlin was a bleeding sore of another sort of racism, of course, but for the Berlin Olympics, all of that had been tucked neatly out of sight. The decision to hold the 1936 Olympics in Berlin had been made in 1931, before Hitler had come to power. By 1935 Hitler was an admired man, sometimes spoken of as “Germany’s savior.” Hysterical women waited for him outside his mountain retreat, treating him like a pop star, taking away the stones on which he tread. After all those years of practice, his voice and manners had become as sharp as the blade of a knife. But the precipice was nearing.

  Alongside Hitler’s rise to full control, everything in Germany had become a mass event. It was a mood that Joachim Fest would later describe as “a psychological balance1 between fear and the fairground.” It was the peak of the Nazi
powers of propaganda, and it was the moment where propaganda was becoming an ugly word. Hitler and his party had realized that the best way to start a war was to convince everyone that they had no plans of starting one; to whip everyone into a state of wartime effort and emergency, but to talk to them only of peace. In fact, Hitler was busy signing peace treaties all over the Western world. “We will not lie and we will not cheat,”2 he said. He talked to the British about Germany’s navy, promising them he had no desire to challenge the British. He told Poland he did not want to take its land. To Austria, he said “Germany needs and desires peace”3 and “neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria, to annex Austria, or to conclude an Anschluss.” To the British, he reiterated: “We respect the national rights also of other peoples” and we “wish from the innermost heart to live with them in peace and friendship.” Even as he said all of these things, however, plans were under way toward doing exactly the opposite.

  In retrospect, it is odd to imagine the international world coming to Berlin to celebrate the Olympic Games. For Germany at the time, though, having the games held in Berlin felt like a crowning award to the success and growth Hitler’s government had brought. Which isn’t to say there weren’t already doubts and rumors spreading; there were. So much so that an American delegation was sent to Germany to find out if there was any Jewish persecution there. Unfortunately, the delegation came back saying all was clear.

  In truth, by the mid-1930s, it was getting harder to avoid issues of discrimination and race no matter where one lived. In the United States, for instance, race relations were experiencing a dramatic turn. President Roosevelt’s New Deal, and especially the work program known as the WPA, had given many African Americans relief from the Depression. This, alongside Roosevelt’s anti-lynching stance, his appointments of black men and women to councils like the National Youth Administration, and his wife Eleanor’s open support of civil rights—had turned 75 percent of black voters away from Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party and toward voting Democrat instead. Still, President Roosevelt had also bowed to discrimination. In order to pass much of his New Deal programs, he’d compromised for the sake of votes, agreeing to separate and lower pay scales for blacks, and he’d bowed out of the lynching issue when things got too hot. The country, especially the southern part of the country, had been boiling over race issues for the past hundred years, and in 1936, mobs were still known to form and hunt down black men and lynch them for presumed crimes.

  These lynchings were violent, ugly affairs of torture and disgrace, and senators in Congress were trying desperately to pass an anti-lynching bill to make such acts a federal crime. Congress fought dramatically and intensely and the event garnered a lot of press. Still, after a long filibuster by southern senators, the bill was eventually blocked. It was a bleak picture, one hard to swallow from the perspective of today, but even then awareness of the ugliness and despicability in such things was beginning to grow, largely due to new forms of mass communication. People were seeing themselves and their actions reflected in a wider and deeper way—shown to them in newspapers, magazines, spoken out through radio waves. Thus, even though the anti-lynching bill did not pass, it had an effect on the public consciousness, and the number of lynchings fell by two-thirds the following year. The angry mass found it was no longer an anonymous one. Being reflected in the media made the ugliness of such crimes more visible. And people did not want their faces spread across the newspapers as culprits of such horrifying crimes.

  In the Porsche garage, no one was keeping up with Olympic scores. Ferry and Rabe spent most of 1936 relentlessly testing Volkswagen prototypes until they were ready for a full report by the RDA that was officially submitted at the beginning of 1937. Looking at the photos from this time, there’s no question about it: The Beetle has arrived. Oddly enough though, it looks older and more weathered in those years than it would fifty years down the road, as if it were born an old man and would grow younger as time passed on. And if a car could feel, in those days, it probably would have said it felt exhausted: The wear and tear the model experienced in those months was unprecedented for any other automobile of its time. And yet Porsche and his team were still finding all kinds of problems and kinks that needed to be worked out before the car could run well. The RDA demanded that the car needed more time and more tests. Hitler was not pleased, feeling it was them, not Porsche, who were responsible for the delay. At the Berlin Auto Show of 1937, Hitler’s consecutive fifth, he scolded the RDA for their behavior. His voice was so loud that those in the first rows visibly straightened their backs a bit. With his left fist clenched, his stubbed mustache pumping along with his upper lip, and his eyes flaring, Hitler shouted: “Let there be no doubt:4 Private companies are either capable of solving this problem or they are not capable of continuing at all!” The little car had become personal for him. It was his lieblingskind, or favorite child, as Jakob Werlin now called it. He scolded them that day, but in truth, Hitler must have known that he was already finished with the RDA; they’d played their part. Nevertheless, the scolding did its job. Daimler-Benz scrambled to build thirty Volkswagen prototypes to be sent out for thousands of miles of further tests, and Heinrich Himmler sent 60 of his SS men to serve as test drivers for the cars. Now even those who tested the car had to be directly connected to the Nazi machine.

  Heinrich Nordhoff, now the technical representative for Opel’s sales line, gave a talk at that same Auto Show where he reiterated Opel’s deep concern with quality products, saying it was the unregulated market that had allowed for the constant improvement of their cars. But his words sounded like an obituary for the free market. With the implementation of The Four Year Plan and with all of Germany’s industry now effectively under the Nazi leadership of Goering, rational concerns for the future of German industry seemed to fall on deaf ears. The centralization of the auto industry was in full swing, and the members of the RDA must have known they were losing control, even as Hitler professed to be on their side.

  Thus it was no surprise when shortly after scolding them at the Auto Show, Hitler took the RDA off the Volkswagen project altogether. On May 28, 1937, the Company for the Preparation of the German Volkswagen, Ltd. was formed to step in as the head of the project. Less than a year later, the name would be shortened to simply Volkswagen. Ferdinand Porsche and Jakob Werlin were at the new company’s head. Rather than being funded by the private automobile companies that comprised the RDA, the money and structure would now come from the Nazi government’s German Labor Front.

  The German Labor Front was a financial empire headed by the importunate Robert Ley, and his organization was the most corrupt in all of Germany. Upon its creation in 1933, Ley had confiscated all labor union assets and liquidated all union funds. He’d also imposed monthly fees on German workers and made membership mandatory. It was supposed to work like a giant union—replacing the traditional workers’ councils that had risen up as elected worker bodies within businesses—but instead of representing the workers it became the opposite: an oppressive and monopolizing threat. Because all workers had no choice but to join, Ley’s Labor Front boasted the largest membership of any Nazi organization and generated copious amounts of cash, often raking in as much as $200 million a year. All that money was basically free money for the Nazis to use as they wished: Ley’s accounting was private and did not have to be reported to anyone. Ten percent of those funds would now be set aside for the People’s Car. The German Labor Front would be its official sponsor and owner, which meant the Volkswagen had truly become an enterprise of the Nazi government, and Ferdinand Porsche an official employee. The next step was to build their own factory, and the research for this project intensified.

  Backed by Nazi funds, in the summer of 1937, Porsche, Ghislaine, Werlin, Ferry, and Porsche’s son-in-law, Anton, all got to go on another extended learning trip to the United States.5 Now that they were building a factory of their own, they wanted another look at American plants, and
they also used this time to recruit American workers to come back to Germany and work for them. Ferry liked America. He told his dad it was a wonderful feeling to be in a country where a man could act and work “without having to be supervised6 all the time.” He even contemplated moving there, but as he’d later write, “the success of the Volkswagen at that stage, after all the work we had put into it, meant a great deal to us.” He wanted to see the car finally come to life.

  Ferry Porsche on a ship to the United States in 1937. (photo credit 18.1)

  One thing Ferry and his dad were especially looking forward to was an appointment they had set up with Henry Ford. He was still their hero, and on this trip they got the chance to meet with him personally. It was just before lunch when Werlin and the male members of the Porsche family, all of them in suits, filed into Ford’s office, some sitting, others standing nervously; Porsche (with Ghislaine trying to keep up and translate) excitedly began to tell Ford all about the plans for a People’s Car. He went on and on about its design and the tests it had been through and the hopes he had for it: Perhaps Ford might even like to work with him somehow? Ford came right out and said that no car designed by European standards would ever take hold in the United States; Porsche’s People’s Car was of no use to him. But Porsche didn’t seem to be listening. Instead, he invited Ford to come over and see the car and the factory once it was built. Porsche would personally show him around. Ford declined: A visit to Germany simply would not be possible, he said, because Europe was heading into war. War? Porsche stared at Ford with a kind of frustrated disbelief: Why did everyone think there was going to be a war? (Among many Germans, this seemed to be a common reaction, and an honest one. Closed from the world to a large extent, they were shocked at how different their own country looked from afar. Even as late as May of 1939, for example, an elite German banker visiting the City of London was reportedly mystified at the preparations being made there for war.7)