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

by Andrea Hiott

  Even from its earliest days, this factory had been a mix of nationality. Before the outbreak of war, more than a thousand French boys had been coerced into coming to the plant to work. Young Dutch boys came too. And when the war began, many of those French and Dutch boys found themselves stuck. They had “higher racial status” than those from the east and thus received better treatment and compensation when it came to housing, wages, and food. But they were by no means free. When the Dutch boys tried to have a musical evening with the French, for instance, the SS came with guns strapped to their backs and took people away to the reeducation camps. Letters were also monitored. One Dutch boy named Marinus Kop was sentenced to death and shot by the Nazis on the grounds that his letters home “betrayed” the Nazi Party in some inexplicable way.

  Concentration camp prisoners were used at the Volkswagen factory too. As early as 1941, Heinrich Himmler suggested using Jewish forced labor to finish building the still-incomplete town, but Hitler did not want Jewish people in the town, so the idea was put on hold. Eventually Robert Ley established a Jewish camp that was to be a light metals foundry toward the creation of Strength through Joy Cars. But as it became clear that no Strength through Joy Cars were going to get made, the camp quickly closed and the prisoners were sent elsewhere. By 1944, however, it looked as though Germany was losing the war, and as nearly every German man and boy was being sent to fight, the push for workers for the factories became even more desperate, and Albert Speer, who had become head of the Nazi Armaments Division, gave official authorization for the use of concentration camp inmates in producing vehicles at German automotive plants. Thus in 1944, skilled Hungarian Jewish metalworkers were plucked out of Auschwitz to come to The Town of the Strength through Joy Car and build V1 bombs. These prisoners had access to the shower facilities that were inside the factory, and they each had their own bed, which was, some wrote in their letters, an unheard of joy after having been at Auschwitz. After they’d worked on the V1, however, most of these men were sent to concentration camp Dora and many of them died just months before the end of the war. Hungarian Jewish women were brought to the factory from Auschwitz too, as were Jewish women from Bergen-Belsen. The women later testified that this time felt like an escape from the usual “Vernichtung durch Arbeit” or “death through labor” that was common in the other camps during these last, and worst, years of the war.

  It is amazing that the times were so grim in Germany that escaping Vernichtung durch Arbeit was considered a lucky break. Perhaps one of the most astonishing things, however, is how strong these people were in the face of so much darkness and suffering, and the ways they found to stay connected to creativity and a sense of life. In fact, there was a whole underground world of close relationships forming between prisoners as they got to know each other. In letters and stories from this time, it becomes clear they had formed strong bonds with one another. In their camps at night, they told stories, recited plays, sang songs. Some of them prayed together. They met late at night to discuss their former lives. They drew and painted and wrote letters to one another as they were shifted from camp to camp, devising all kinds of ways to deliver them. They used old clothes to make new dresses and little items, like purses, to give each other as gifts. In one story, a man tells of smuggling in a radio and of all the prisoners crowding around it to hear the news. Another laborer remembers seeing that a Frenchman from another camp had written graffiti on the side of a train: Le jour de gloire va arriver … The day of victory is coming. Dire as their conditions were, many still dared to dream, and many still had hope.

  Throughout 1944 and 1945, the focus at the factory was less about production and more about trying to save the machines and equipment there. As the bombings of the German countryside increased, steps were taken to move many operations to more areas off-site. As the grounds around the factory had been cleared in order to build the city, the massive building was completely out in the open and an easy target for bombs. As early as 1943, when it was still believed the Germans might be able to win, workers in The Town of the Strength through Joy Car began moving equipment to remote areas in nearby forests and caves. In one large-scale project, the equipment was relocated to an iron mine and reassembled so the workers could continue producing war armaments under cover. The mine was converted into an underground factory within six months. At other sites, as they moved equipment, the laborers were forced to live in tents until they’d built their own housing by hand. Inside the factory itself, bales of straw and giant sandbags were piled up around all the best machines to try to reduce the effects of the bombs when they hit. Air-raid shelters were separated according to nationality, and prisoners often woke two or three times a night and hustled to the bunkers for safety. As the days and months passed and the bombing grew more frequent, the air became more electric, and minds more preoccupied with wondering “what might come.” Some laborers took comfort in the old saying that it always gets worse right before the end.

  When Ferry was a little boy, Porsche would usually arrive home from a long day of work just as Aloisia was putting their son to bed, and he would always plead with her to allow Ferry to stay up just a few minutes longer. But as Ferry grew, and as he developed his own taste for cars, the father and son found they had a great deal of time together. Ferry had followed in his father’s footsteps, and his father’s obsession for automobiles was now also his. It wasn’t an easy relationship, as relationships between fathers and sons rarely are, but it was certainly a crucial one in both their lives, and it would forever remain inseparable from their work. Ferry, who was much softer and more emotional than Porsche, and who thought of himself as “a mother’s boy,” nevertheless wanted his father’s approval and struggled to make his mark in a world where his father was the “designer genius” whose name and reputation would follow Ferry like a shadow for the rest of his life. As Porsche’s only son, Ferry was both privileged and at a disadvantage: His father was harder on him than on anyone (and that was saying a lot), but he was also very concerned about Ferry and focused on him in a way he did not focus on any of the other men in his life. The closeness between the two men was especially apparent, even if Ferry’s position was not always an enviable one.

  Ferry’s cousin, Ghislaine, however, who was Porsche’s personal secretary for much of his life, would probably have done just about anything to be able to switch places with Ferry and be Porsche’s son. Whereas Ferry came into the world with a clear and solid idea of a very particular world—the automotive one—Ghislaine’s life was less certain. He often occupied a rather gray place in the daily Porsche automotive world—important to his uncle on one level, and yet never having access in full. Ghislaine also inhabited a gray middle ground when it came to his nationality: Having been born in Britain, he carried a British passport even during his time in Germany. In the years after Hitler came to power, surely he felt he was in a precarious position.

  Ferry as a child in the car his father made for him. His cousin Ghislaine is trying to get into the car with him. There seemed to always be a part of Ghislaine that wished he was Porsche’s son. (photo credit 24.1)

  Ferdinand and his nephew did not discuss Ghislaine’s British citizenship. When Ghislaine listened to the BBC (an illegal thing to do by Nazi rules), Porsche saw no problem with it and at times even asked him to translate what he’d heard. But once war began, and the tide began to turn against Germany, Ghislaine’s connection to “the enemy” could not go overlooked. Despite Porsche’s high standing with Hitler, once the Nazi military became starved for soldiers, Ghislaine was targeted and deported to a German punishment battalion on the eastern front where he was forced to fight. In one gruesome battle against the Soviets, he was wounded and eventually sent to a Nazi wartime medical facility in Copenhagen. Denmark was still under German control, but it was 1944 and it was clear to most that Germany had already lost. When Ghislaine saw a British flag flying over the city, he rushed to the British embassy to ask them for help. They didn’t believe that
he was a British citizen, however, and he was handed over to local resistance fighters who threatened to kill him, shoving the end of a pistol into the back of his neck. His execution was thwarted at the last moment by a Dutch officer who had another look at Ghislaine’s British passport and thought it best if they sent him to jail instead. He would eventually convince the Allies of his British birth, though he was made to stand trial in a British court for treason because he had fought for the Germans. The exact details of this time in his life are rather hard to trace now. Certainly, his loyalties must have been conflicted ones, and it was probably difficult for him to explain his actions or intentions in those years, even to himself.

  In fact, things were becoming difficult for all the Porsches in 1944. Germany was being bombed heavily, and Albert Speer ordered Porsche to leave the country and to move his offices to a safe place. In the autumn of that year, Porsche began relocating his entire workshop to Gmünd, a place near his summer home at Zell am See in Austria. The place they chose was a former woodworking factory. According to Ferry, Speer had first ordered them to Czechoslovakia but they’d found this place instead and had been given permission to go. Gmünd was a village in Carinthia, nestled between the mountains of the southern province of Austria. Karl Rabe and the other Porsche engineers and workers left Stuttgart, along with the rest of the Porsche family, including Ferry’s wife and sons. But Ferry and his father stayed back at the Stuttgart villa a bit longer, finding it difficult to say goodbye.

  As they were preparing to close down their beloved home and leave, bomb sirens rang out over Stuttgart, and Ferry and Porsche had to stay in the city bomb shelter until it was safe to come out. Afterward, they walked up the hill to their home, not saying a word, both silently fearing it had been destroyed. When they arrived, they found that the garage where the first VWs had been built was still standing, untouched. And though the house had shattered windows, and part of the roof was missing, it was still there. Neither Porsche nor his son went inside; instead they leaned together against the front wall and tried to take it all in. Ferry would later say that his father’s face was frozen in a state of “anguish and disbelief and bewilderment,”1 a man “finally overwhelmed by the futility and madness of the Wagnerian roller coaster the country had been on.”

  Ferry knew it was the wrong time to bring it up, but being his father’s son he couldn’t help but remind Porsche of earlier times when he’d tried to talk to him about Hitler2 and the war. Porsche hated to be contradicted, especially by his son. In the past, if Ferry ever dared to question his father in public, he would cruelly shut him down, even if (or especially if) what he was saying was correct. But in this case, Porsche nodded and withdrew; it was perhaps the first time he had ever conceded to his son. Ferry had been correct back in 1939, Porsche said, and he now admitted that there was no way anything good could come of this.

  A tired Ferdinand Porsche sitting in his Volkswagen at the Wörthersee in 1940; war has broken out, and it looks like the little car will not get produced after all. (photo credit 24.2)

  In the following months, Porsche seemed to grow visibly smaller and weaker, and by the end of the year there were some days when he did not get out of bed once they’d returned to the farm at Zell am See. Since none of his family was still in Wolfsburg, no one knew what was happening at the VW factory, but the outlook was not good. Even if by some chance the factory managed to escape being bombed or destroyed, it was very unlikely that Porsche would ever get a chance to build his car there after the war: The entire place, after all, had been a project of the very man who had caused this war, and there was no reason to think the Allies would allow any remnant of his rule to persist. In fact, the Porsches themselves must have realized they were complicit with the Nazi Party to some degree, and with the fall of Germany, it was unclear what would become of them. They were safe and they were together for now, and reading Ferry’s account of those days, it seems they tried to make the best of it. Their farm was overflowing with all the friends and workers who had come with them from Stuttgart, twenty-five people staying over and working and living off the Porsche farm. They baked their own bread and smoked their own meat, waiting for the war to end and wondering what was going to happen to them.

  No one is really sure exactly how many people died in the war, but there are estimates of up to 60 million, with 40 million civilian deaths. That means one-third of the victims were soldiers and two-thirds were people who had nothing directly to do with the war, a shocking number the likes of which had never been seen before (or after). This extreme amount of civilian casualties came in part because of the use of airplanes and air bombings. Before the Second World War, no one had made cities the indiscriminate3 targets of strategic bombing to such an extent. With Hitler’s first blitz campaigns, the Allies watched in horror as innocent civilians were killed, so shocked by Hitler’s actions that they believed they would never be able to retaliate in kind. But it was a slippery slope. By the end of the war, the Allies would have bombed Germany to such an extent that some cities were more than 80 percent destroyed. The decimation caused by the war was so extensive as to seem almost unbelievable and in many ways it still is: It’s very difficult to imagine so many cities, streets, and homes reduced to rubble and ash. But they were. And it had all started with the desires and ideas of one man. It was a situation that had seemed impossible, until it was real.

  In retrospect, there are many signs that things had gotten out of control very early on in Germany and that its leaders were living in an unsustainable world of personal myth. It’s probably safe to say, for instance, that when a political party passes a law to make their current active leader’s birthday into a national holiday, that’s a sure sign that something has gone wrong. Hitler’s birthday was a Nazi national holiday, and stamps were often issued to commemorate the event. It was a matter of perpetuating the mythic feeling of immortality that Hitler cultivated around himself: By doing things that were usually only done for someone after their death, such events made him seem larger than life. But the image of Hitler as savior and hero was not something he’d created on his own. People had been looking for a hero and he’d stepped into that role, believing it himself so sincerely that others around him got caught up in that belief as it took on a life of its own. Goebbels above everyone seemed ready to talk of Hitler with religious fervor. Every year on Hitler’s birthday, Goebbels gave speeches praising him, usually just before the Philharmonie played a tribute concert in Berlin.

  However, in 1943, on Hitler’s fifty-fourth birthday, the mood of the country was hardly celebratory. Hitler avoided the masses. He’d become too worried about his safety and too embarrassed by German losses to be seen much in public anymore. Instead, he celebrated with his “chauffeurska” on a lonely section of the autobahn. German roads were still white elephants, empty because most people in the country still did not have cars. Standing together there on the distant slice of concrete surrounded by a rolling and empty landscape, it was difficult even for Hitler’s entourage to rally their spirits. Hitler himself had lost that determined and confident gleam he’d once had. He was not the same man who had shoveled dirt nine years ago to commemorate the first autobahn.

  That same year, even Goebbels began Hitler’s birthday speech in Berlin with the words: “The German people celebrate the Führer’s birthday4 this year in a particularly somber manner.” As Hitler and his crew stood on the empty autobahn, Goebbels continued on to say: “Confidence is5 the best moral weapon of war … When it begins to fail, the beginning of the end has arrived. No matter where we look, we see no cause for such concern. It exists only in the propaganda dreams of our enemy. The more hopes they put in the moral weakness of the German people, the greater will be their disappointment.” Now that the war was going wrong for Germany, Goebbels said it was not Germany but “the wicked forces” of the Allies that had wanted and waged this war, a statement impossible to prove in any way. While the Allies were confronting reality, Hitler was avoiding it. The G
erman people wrote him letters daily asking him to come out and see the destruction of their towns, but he ignored them. Not once did he reach out to comfort any of the citizens or the families of those who had been killed. Goebbels lamented this turn more than anyone, and as propaganda minister, was constantly trying to get Hitler to talk to the masses, knowing that his ability to speak had been his only real strength. But Hitler could not talk because he no longer had the confidence or the energy to present “a strong will”: He waited on a miracle instead, hoping against the very clear (to others, at least) odds that things would turn in Germany’s favor again. He would only talk to the people, Hitler said, once that miracle had occurred.

  In 1945, the atmosphere of The Town of the Strength through Joy Car suddenly changed. It could be felt in the camps. The SS was on edge. The guards were jittery. For the foreign laborers, 1944 had been a year of bombing and constant sirens, of being herded into bomb shelters in the middle of the night, of less food than usual, of days of picking through debris, and of that hysterical middle ground between the fear of death and the dream of being rescued. Over half the factory had been damaged to some extent, but wartime production crawled on. No one was getting much sleep. Everyone scanned the skies for planes.

  Just before 9:00 on the morning of April 10, the factory sirens blasted once more, this time with a Panzer alert meaning enemy tanks were near. The Allies had come. German workers were ordered to go to their houses. Prisoners were sent to their camps. People whispered that the Americans were coming. Or was it the Soviets? Good news spread, but an equal number of horror stories were told. Tensions were high. Everything was overcrowded. The trains carrying concentration camp prisoners and foreign laborers—the town had become a crossroads of sorts—stalled and backed up. The telephone services had been disconnected days before; there was no way of getting outside news. Communication and transportation were breaking down, and Nazi authority was breaking down too.