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

by Andrea Hiott

  Twelve hours after the first alert, at 9:00 p.m., another shrill alarm broke through town. German workers barricaded themselves indoors. Some Nazi officials began to destroy documents, trying to erase their existence and their names. Nazi uniforms were burned; official photos of Hitler were quickly hidden or annihilated; SS leaders fled. Those still loyal to the Nazi government talked of destroying the factory, of burning it to the ground. All the highest officials knew about the NSDAP’s policy of “scorched earth”: If the Third Reich was to go down, all was to be set afire. At one point, Hitler told Albert Speer: “If the war is lost, the nation will also perish.1 This fate is inevitable. There’s no reason to take into consideration what the people will need to continue a most primitive existence. On the contrary, it will be better to destroy these things ourselves because the nation will have proven itself to be the weaker one.…” As Speer later recalled, the list of things that were to be destroyed included “all industrial plants, all important electrical facilities, water works and gas works; all stocks of food and clothing, all bridges, all railways and communications installations,2 all waterways, all shipping, inland as well as oceanic, all freight cars and all locomotives.”

  At the close of the war, the Germans began carrying out such plans not only in their own country—which was already to a great degree destroyed—but in the countries they occupied. As they retreated, they burned or destroyed as much as they could along the way. In cities of great culture such as Florence, bridges and sacred works of art were burned or blown up. In Russia, the original scores of Tchaikovsky were thrown out into the yard, and Leo Tolstoy’s house was wrecked. The mood was one of total war, and the climax of destruction had begun. There was no reason to think it would be any different for The Town of the Strength through Joy Car.

  But those who had been given orders were hesitant to follow through. Two such officers went to the mayor of the town and told him they’d been instructed to blow up the factory’s power station, the Kraftwerk, and the canal bridges connecting the factory to the rest of town. The mayor pleaded with them to reconsider their orders: The factory’s generators were the lifeblood of electricity and services for the entire town. And the Nazi Party hardly had the power to punish the two officers for disobeying now, the mayor pointed out. Many were already on the run.

  Outside the camps and around the factory, the group of SS guards continued to thin. Men left their posts and slipped off into the night. A feeling of freedom blew through the barracks and camps, but few had any clear direction of where to actually go once they were free. After these past five years, what was home, and how could they travel when the infrastructure of their countries was being destroyed? Stories circulated among the Russian prisoners that it wasn’t safe to cross into the Soviet-occupied areas of Germany: So much time among the enemy meant they were likely to be seen as “contaminated” and thus would be locked away or killed. The next day, a few last battles raged on. Soon, word came that the nearby village of Fallersleben had been taken by American troops. But no one showed up in the Volkswagen town: They didn’t know it was there. The city was too young to have made it onto any of the American army’s official land maps. (The factory had only made it onto aerial maps by then.)

  The chaos increased around the factory; more Nazi officials and SS troopers escaped into the night. As morning broke on April 11, the camps of the forced laborers could no longer be guarded and the prisoners—some starving, aggressive, seething with pent-up rage—broke free and moved like gangs through the town in search of retribution, attention, food. Other prisoners stayed huddled in the camps and met among themselves, sending search parties through the factory for vittles; the more clearheaded realized that to flee would be even more dangerous than staying: The only thing to do was wait.

  Still, those prisoners intent on revenge were of a large enough number to send a new wave of fear through the still-unoccupied town. German families boarded up their windows and went up to the attics to hide, watching from the highest windows as groups of prisoners celebrated and shouted on the streets. The grocery stores were looted, a local butcher was shot, there was sporadic violence and a few hand grenades were thrown. Some discovered stores of alcohol and their drunkenness added a further layer of release. Some drank industrial alcohol and methanol in the pharmacy and died from it. Another group of laborers broke into a pharmacy storage closet and found a large bag of rice. Starving, they cooked it into a pudding, unaware that the rice was laced with poison and had been used to kill rats.

  The rioting continued the entire day, escalating to a near frenzy in some places before the initial euphoria began to wear off and things quieted down. Remarkably, in all the looting and destruction, no one destroyed the factory’s machinery, and the power station remained unharmed.

  The Americans were so close, but unless someone told them that the town needed help, it was doubtful they would seek out the factory themselves. A French Franciscan friar who had been a laborer in the camp—the SS men had been particularly cruel to him because of his religious ties—spoke a bit of English and offered to help; a German priest who had helped the French friar as much as he could over the past years came to him, and together, the two decided to take a Red Cross jeep over to the nearby village to talk to the Americans. A German-born American citizen, an autoworker who had moved to Wolfsburg from Detroit in 1937, volunteered to go with the priests and help too.

  The first American they found was a red-haired army soldier who was kind but cautious, not sure what to make of a German factory worker who spoke English with an American accent. That same man also claimed there were American children—sons and daughters of those who had been recruited by Volkswagen before the onset of war—living in Wolfsburg who needed help. The priests nodded in confirmation. Eventually the Americans loaded up their jeeps and gear and moved into The Town of the Strength through Joy Car.

  U.S. troops first entered the Volkswagen city late in the afternoon on April 12. American officers and tanks patrolled the streets and broke up what rowdy groups were left, arresting Nazi soldiers and collecting weapons. The noise decreased; the town grew quieter. Germans began to take the boards off their windows and came out to watch the American tanks. Soon, various officials and other citizens of the city created a small local patrol to help keep order and to try to decide what else could be done to assist.

  Three days after entering the town, American officers set up a U.S. Army post at the factory and another one by the old Castle Wolfsburg, which had existed since the Middle Ages. For the next weeks, the army tried to find food and supplies for the town. The factory was in good enough shape for the Americans to set up a repair shop for their own vehicles. Urging from the factory staff also led the Americans to consider restarting production of vehicles, a very significant decision at the time and one that may have saved the plant. Compared to the rest of Germany, the Volkswagen factory survived the war surprisingly unscathed. A study done by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey Team shows that there were large gaping holes throughout the buildings, but that overall, the main infrastructure was still strong. More than 2,000 bombs had been dropped in the area, but only 263 had actually hit the factory. Legend has it that during the inspection, a dud bomb was found sitting snug between the two main turbines of the power plant. It would have been the end of the factory and town’s power and electricity source had it gone off.

  A heavily damaged area of the factory. One Volkwagen can be seen parked in the wreckage. (photo credit 25.1)

  In the official report, the team concluded that half of the factory was damaged to some extent—missing roofs, busted windows, gaping holes—but that only about 20 percent had been completely destroyed. Much of the machinery—expensive new technologies brought over from the United States—had been protected by the heavily reinforced walls of the factory and by steps taken from workers to pack sandbags and bales of hay around them. The press shop, which is the part of the plant where the metals are shaped, was miraculously st
ill operable, meaning production could be started again, though at a limp.

  The U.S. officers appointed a plant manager from the remaining German staff and the factory was ordered to continue building the jeeplike vehicles for Allied troops. At the end of April 1945 production started up again, and in the next two months the Volkswagen factory pieced together 133 Bucket Seat Cars for the U.S. forces stationed there, many of the same German and foreign workers working together as they had before the war. The Americans also took another crucial step in ensuring the future of the plant: They had a map made, compiling the knowledge of the workers and the German staff that remained, showing where many of the parts and machines that had been taken away could be found.

  As the town tried to take stock, one of the first orders of business by the community was to change the city’s name. No one wanted it to be called The Town of the Strength through Joy Car anymore. On the 25th of May, the city decided to name itself after the castle that had been there long before the Nazis, and would remain long after they had left. The town would be called Wolfsburg from that day forward.

  Around the same time that the Volkswagen town was being occupied by American troops, Erich Kempka, Hitler’s private driver and friend, got a phone call from the führer’s bunker. It was the 30th of April and the call was an urgent order for 200 liters of petrol. Kempka could not believe the request. Berlin was in the midst of being taken by the Russians and the need for such a large amount of gasoline made little sense. The only stores of gasoline were in a bunker near Berlin’s central Zoologischer Garten train station, a place being heavily fired upon and bombed. It was impossible to send men there in the middle of the day under such heavy fire, but his commander refused to listen. Do whatever it takes, just get the gasoline and come to the Führer immediately.

  The years had not been good for Hitler. He looked like an old man, and the rapid aging and deterioration that the last two years had caused were striking to those who saw him. Long before the war’s end, he’d developed a condition like Parkinson’s, trembling constantly. In the last year, there were some days he did not get out of bed. He was totally reliant on his doctor for medications. Methamphetamines were now being given out to the German military, and it is speculated that Hitler was ingesting those as well. At the time Kempka was called for the gasoline, it was just days after Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday: There had been no speeches from Goebbels, and little celebration. The entire country was being overrun by the Allies; it was just a matter of time before the Russians would make their way to the bunker too.

  In the heat of battle, Kempka refused to send his men to the Zoologischer Garten. Instead, he had them spread out and find parked or damaged vehicles and siphon gasoline from those. Collecting as much petrol from the cars as he could, Kempka rushed to the bunker, still fuming over being made to take such a risk. When he arrived, however, all that anger dissolved. The Führer was dead, he was told. The petrol he’d just gathered would be used to burn the body before the Russians arrived.

  Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich had lasted twelve years. And the Volkswagen factory he’d promised would build millions of passenger cars had produced 66,285 military vehicles for the war. By the time Wolfsburg was taken by the Americans, it was clear that Germany’s once all-power and all-knowing head, the man many had believed was ordained by Providence to save Germany, had been deeply wrong. The power of his propaganda had crumbled, shown itself an empty shell, with nothing of lasting substance behind it, nothing true.

  What was known as the Stunde Null, the Zero Hour, fell over the country soon after Hitler’s death and the army’s surrender, a kind of motionless hour where the whole world seemed either to end or restart, or both. In the calm of the postwar air, visions of the rubble and debris weighed heavily. Nearly three tons of bombs had been dropped on Germany and almost three-fourths of that amount had come within the last year. After such destruction and noise, the silence was almost impossible to endure. Some German families locked themselves in rooms and committed suicide together. Others began trying to remove the wreckage and start again, even though it felt like an impossible feat. And the truth about the numerous concentration camps, where so many innocent lives had been taken through the most horrific means, could no longer be hidden or denied.

  As production resumed at the factory he had helped to design and build, Ferdinand Porsche was in Austria, unable to get any news about what was happening there. Over the past year and a half, communication with the factory had become more and more difficult, until it finally had simply ceased. His large staff of laborers, and his twelve original men (with Karl Rabe at the head) were now in Gmünd, in the new workshop they’d set up, where they were busy building things for the local farmers like wheelbarrows, tractors, and carts.

  In the early spring of 1945, in the heat of the war’s slow end, an Allied CIOS (Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee) technical commission sought Ferdinand Porsche out and questioned him about his wartime work, taking him back to Zell am See and placing armed guards in front of his house for a few weeks. Two and a half months later, just before Porsche’s seventieth birthday, he was summoned by the Americans to Frankfurt for a trial. He was allowed to drive there himself, but he was aging now—the kind of aging that did not necessarily have to do with years. Not sure he could make the drive alone, he took his long-standing family chauffeur (and friend) with him. Soon, the men arrived in the American Zone for Porsche’s trial, joining Albert Speer and a host of others who’d been singled out as prominent members of the Third Reich.

  The trials were called “Operation Dustbin,” and the men were kept in a large castle and questioned one by one. The process took nearly three months. From all the reports, Porsche seemed to exude a kind of simple innocence while he was there. He was quieter than usual. He seemed lost. Some commented that it felt strange to see him there. Even Albert Speer was upset by Porsche’s presence, feeling it was wrong that he’d been called to trial. Speer told the Americans that it was pointless to continue interrogating Porsche over political matters; the engineer had never been privy to such things, nor would he be able to discuss them. The Americans eventually released Porsche uncharged and allowed him to go directly to his home at Zell am See.

  Porsche did not seem to understand what a close call he’d just had: Many of the prominent Nazis he’d just been with would eventually be sent to Nuremberg and get the death penalty for what they’d done. Porsche was free, but was given explicit instructions to leave the country at once. Yet, he couldn’t help going by Stuttgart, wanting to know if his old home and workshop were still intact. He was happy to see that they were both still there, and he hoped the Americans occupying it would let him come inside for a quick look. But the generals in charge of the estate refused to come out and talk to him, and he was reprimanded and warned to return to Austria at once. Porsche did as he was told this time. Ferry and Louise and the rest of the family were happy to have him back at Zell am See. But their joy was short-lived. Porsche was home now, but the Allies would come for him again soon.

  People who were there often comment on how bright the sun was the summer when Germany fell.1 The color footage of Berlin at the time does indeed paint a striking picture: The intense blue sky seems a profane backdrop for the piles of rubble, skeletons of buildings, and lines of people—mostly women—emerging from the wreckage and venturing into the open air. People formed chains, passing bricks or pails of rubble to one another, starting what seemed an impossible task. An aerial view of Berlin is even more striking: Every building is a shell, streets are unrecognizable, it doesn’t look as if anything could still be alive down there at all. And for those who were still alive, what was next?

  There were many differing policy ideas about what measures would be best once the war ended, but the one overwhelmingly supported by Roosevelt in 1944 and 1945 was the Morgenthau Plan. This plan would destroy Germany’s capacity of waging war by turning the country into an agricultural nation, eliminating all its h
eavy industry and ensuring much of its machinery was dismantled and destroyed. This meant that the automotive industries (alongside others) were to be crippled. Germany’s economic and industrial heart—the Ruhr area, a powerhouse of coal and steel—was to be taken over by the Allies, and much of the mining was to be shut down. In the heat of battle, with so much unnecessary loss, these measures seemed to Roosevelt, and many others, as the only way to ensure that Germany was no longer a threat. Hitler had used industry to rearm and revive his country, and that dependency was now the glowing red target that many wanted destroyed.

  Not all the Allied countries were so gung ho about the Morgenthau Plan. Being so close (geographically) to Germany and thus more economically invested, and having seen what happened with the punitive measures taken after the First World War, many in Europe sensed that turning the country into a pastoral land would do more damage than good. Winston Churchill, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, was especially hard to convince. He was shocked upon hearing Roosevelt’s call for “unconditional surrender” and he did not agree with the Morgenthau Plan: “England would be chained to a dead body,”2 he said.

  One thing the Second World War had proved, however, was that the United States was in a new position of power in the world. After the First World War, the United States had wobbled; this time, it would not. As Harry Truman, then a senator gaining his reputation with the Truman Committee’s investigation into wartime business concerns, said: “History has bestowed on us a solemn responsibility.… We failed before to give a genuine peace—we dare not fail this time … We must not repeat the blunders of the past.” And the blunders were not only ideological ones, they were also economic. By the end of the First World War, the Weimar government paid about $7 billion in reparations, but not a dime of it went to the United States. Instead, according to Edwin Hartrich, an American historian and journalist who was working in Germany during this time, “the German government floated one big bond issue after another in the U.S., to which the Americans subscribed approximately $7 billion of their own wealth,” exactly the amount the Germans were paying to the other Allies, as it turned out. Needless to say, when the Depression hit, the Germans defaulted on all those bonds, in essence going bankrupt, unable to get any more monetary help from the United States, but also inadvertently causing Germany’s $7 billion of reparation bills to be paid by American investors. Having learned that lesson the hard way, no one in the American government wanted to end up footing the entire bill for the Second World War as well.