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

by Andrea Hiott

  Roosevelt and his staff got Churchill to at least nod in agreement to their terms, and the Morgenthau Plan, though never officially implemented, had the strongest influence on the occupying armies’ stance toward Germany as the war came to an end. While there was bitter arguing among those in charge about how best to deal with Germany, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Policy 1067 was passed, directing occupying forces to “take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany.” It called for Germany’s “excessive concentrations of economic power” to be broken apart. In this plan, automotive plants were referred to as “surplus,” meaning they could be destroyed because they did not provide a basic need. Automotive production in Germany was to be scaled back so that it would be operating at just 10 percent of what it had been before the start of the war. At least, that was the American idea of the plan.

  Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 7, 1945, and the Allies came together at the Potsdam Conference to determine the terms. In the end, it was decided that Germany would be divided equally among the Soviets, French, American, and British troops for an indefinite occupation. The United States took control of the southeast fourth of Germany and the British were given the northwest. The Soviets got the northeast, and the French the southwest. East Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia were taken from Germany and broken up, to be annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union. This move would send refugees flooding into Germany, many moving through Wolfsburg on their way. Lower Saxony, the area that contains the city of Wolfsburg, became part of the British Zone. Under Control Council Act Number 52, in June of 1945 the Volkswagen factory came under official British control.

  While the Americans had a very big economic voice and a very big stick, they did not have control of the areas of Germany with the highest concentration of industry and industrial supplies (the Ruhrgebiet was with the British, the Saar with the French, and the Silesian industrial basin had been given to the Soviets for occupation). All this made for a very interesting Allied tug-of-war; but one item all of the zones agreed on was the need to uncover any technological secrets Germany was housing, because they knew that all the money Hitler and the Nazi Party had put into industrial innovation had produced some strong results. In that spirit, the Allies harvested copious amounts of technology from German factories, offices, and think tanks, rooting it out from underground hiding places and questioning the country’s scientific elite. As a result, the formulas and plans for innovations in electric condensers, jet propulsion, guided missiles, milk storage, and the production of colored dye (just to name a few) were sent back to all the Allied countries.

  Together, the United States and Britain set up a special committee, the CIOS, to deal with this technological harvesting. Its specific aim was to find and use any information of an industrial or scientific nature to help the Allies win the ongoing war with Japan. CIOS was eventually split into two divisions: The British side took the name BIOS while the Americans continued using CIOS. Even after all fighting ceased, these organizations would continue collecting information that could advance civil industry. The technological secrets were written up as reports and sent to universities, research centers, libraries, and journals. Sometimes, the actual technical objects that were found were collected and displayed on traveling shows throughout Allied countries. Through its Office of Technical Services, the United States made all German technological secrets available in the public domain. According to a Harper’s Magazine article from 1946, “a certain American aircraft company”3 used one such secret to save “at least a hundred thousand dollars.” And another businessman at the OTS offices claimed that the information he found there was worth at least a half a million dollars in business for him.

  In the American sector, it had been just this group, the CIOS, that had first sought out and questioned Ferdinand Porsche. Then, Porsche’s recently orphaned Volkswagen project had been entrusted to British soldiers for foster care, and once it was in the British sector, one of the missions of BIOS was to evaluate its technology and create a report. The first British reports were positive; they thought the original car design showed promise, and they were also fairly impressed with the modern machinery in the factory. They even said that the VW might offer “with a few modifications,4 a possible solution of the cheap utility vehicle which would be acceptable to [Britain] and in overseas markets.” When the British had a Volkswagen sent to Britain for tests by the Reparations Assessment Team, the people there did not agree with BIOS’s first reports. The officials in Britain said the car was “uncomfortable,” “noisy,” and “backward,” claiming British designers had nothing to learn from Germany when it came to automobiles. It sounds bad, but those negative reports might actually have helped the VW survive: Because of them, few believed the Volkswagen posed a threat to their own country’s automotive business, and no one was in a rush to carry away its machines or harvest its secrets and close it down. Even so, the VW plant existed in a perpetual state of perhaps, a gray area where no one knew how long it would last. But the plant had an advantage as well: the British.

  Had it fallen into any other Allied zone, it’s hard to say the VW would have had the same support, though it’s true the American soldiers did seem to see a bright future for the car, even in those very early days. The Soviets, had they gotten the plant, would probably have done what they did to the other industry in their area: take it all down and ship the parts to Russia to be reassembled, leaving a trail of machines and mess along the roads between. And though the French were certainly interested in the Volkswagen, they did not want it to continue as a German-based company.

  But the plant was with the British, and they were less keen on turning Germany into a pastoral, deindustrialized country, and more concerned with figuring out a way for the Volkswagen to play a role in helping to revitalize Germany. Without the British, it is doubtful the world would have ever known the Bug.

  Just weeks into his presidency, following the shock of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death from a cerebral hemorrhage, Harry Truman was confronted with the decision of whether or not to proceed with the Manhattan Project, dropping a new kind of weapon into worldwide consciousness; one of the most important and devastating single decisions in history. FDR, who had not lived long enought to see the Germans surrender (missing it by only a matter of weeks) had overseen the secret creation of the nuclear weapon. But it was President Truman who would have to decide whether or not to use that bomb. With George Marshall and the other Joint Chiefs of Staff, Truman weighed the matter heavily; ultimately, they chose to proceed, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to Japan’s surrender on August 5, 1945.

  It was in this same violent and historic week that British REME (Royal Electric and Mechanical Engineers) soldier Ivan Hirst1 came to the former Town of the Strength through Joy Car. He came alone, though he was newly married. He was twenty-nine years old and he was tall; too tall, he’d often thought. He wore glasses: black perfect-circle frames. His wife had to stay in Britain because living conditions in the town were not adequate, so Hirst came prepared to give all his attention to the factory for now.

  The day Hirst first laid eyes on the Volkswagen factory was warm and sunny. He would later say that Wolfsburg did indeed look like an abandoned construction site. There were 25,000 people living there, and many of them were displaced persons (often known as DP’s, and including former forced laborers) or refugees. The streets were overgrown with weeds. Most of the German men were missing. Because there was little material for clothes, the girls wore red skirts that had been made from old Nazi flags. The giant brick factory seemed out of place in that landscape so full of holes but nevertheless a clear survivor of the war, almost majestic compared to the shacks and camps that made up the majority of the town. No matter though, Hirst was optimistic; surely this place could be set right again.

  British officer Ivan Hirst, the first man to champion the Beetle and help bring it to life after the war. (photo credit 27.1)

 
Ivan Hirst’s optimism was characteristic of the British soldiers who came to occupy the plant. A high emphasis was placed on finding ways to cooperate with the foreign staff, and with dividing labor and decentralizing authority, though this would prove a difficult task. While the British were much less idealistic about democratization, they did feel it was their job to provide a new template, a new example and a new start for the German workers. In his first days at the factory, Hirst made a point of meeting and talking with the workers at the Volkswagen plant face-to-face, a practice he would continue throughout his time there, hoping to give the workers a sense of independence and a chance to make decisions for themselves. This was a hard balance to achieve, however, because some of the Germans and members of the strange, transitory town still felt a desire to be extreme and right-wing, sometimes “smearing the walls with swastikas and National Socialist slogans,” a trend that would continue throughout the British rule, more than two years after the end of the war. In finding a balance between democratization and occupation—two things that are in many ways inherently at odds—the British often found themselves struggling. When the workers came to Hirst and wanted to start a workers’ council, for example, he supported this initiative, but nevertheless kept them under strict watch, being sure he approved all of their agendas, and giving them only the opportunity to deal with internal social relations, not with any big decisions about the plant itself. In essence, the workers were allowed to form their own council, but the council was not allowed to influence any real decisions. This is what the British thought of as a policy of “constructive pragmatism”;2 they had one eye on democracy for Germany, but as occupiers, they readied themselves for the long haul.

  Ivan Hirst was only one of many who had a hand in the day-to-day operations in Wolfsburg. At the head of the factory, there was a kindly walruslike colonel named Charles Radclyffe: In January 1946, he had become the head of the Mechanical Engineering Branch of the Industry Division in the headquarters of the British Zone, which made him the main authority in matters regarding the Volkswagen plant. Ivan Hirst was just below Radclyffe in the hierarchy, with the official title of senior residence officer, but he was the man who had the most direct contact with the factory itself.

  Walking through Wolfsburg his first day, Hirst heard languages from all over Europe, a Babellian brew of Russian, French, Polish, Danish, Serbo-Croatian, South African, Mexican, Iranian, Cuban, Turkish, Australian, Swedish, Mexican, Hungarian, and English. There were also the numerous German dialects—so different that sometimes even Germans claimed to find other Germans impossible to understand. Everyone seemed shell-shocked, Hirst thought, as he handed out cigarettes to the workers; they appeared unable to do anything unless directly told. But Hirst, as he himself would later say, knew he’d need the help of just about every person there in order to set the plant right.

  According to Hirst, some parts of the factory looked as though they’d not seen a human in years, and the worst thing about the place was the smell. All the plumbing and drainage systems had been damaged in the bombing and were in desperate need of repair. It was a mess, and there was little time to clean it up because the VW factory already had quotas to fill. Thanks to British labor officials like Leslie Barber (the British Labour representative responsible for the financial and proprietary matters of the Volkswagen plant for a time), the factory had been told to build 20,000 Volkswagens for the British military and basic German transportation needs. The cars produced at the time were still the jeeplike military model, because that was what the lines were set to make. But Hirst didn’t like the idea of producing a military car in a time of peace. The British occupation was to be a civilian administration, he thought, not a further act of war. Hirst had discovered an old original VW on the factory premises, and he felt that it was the car that should be produced, Porsche’s original design. Hirst liked it so much that he had one of these early models fixed up and painted green, and he sent it over to the British headquarters to see what they thought. The military government liked the car too; they told Hirst if that was what he wanted to build, he had their blessing.

  But in practice, it was not so simple. Every decision about the car was entangled in hesitation and debate, with pressures coming not only from the British, but from the other Allies as well. Labor officials made it clear to Hirst that the car was only temporary; under no conditions was it to be mass-produced. On the other hand, some army representatives and British officials were making the argument that the VW case was special: If they took out this factory, they’d be taking out an entire town. The factory should be allowed to rebuild itself, they argued, and that would mean allowing it to sell and export cars. But British authorities in London reacted strongly, reiterating that the VW factory was being retained only in order to serve the basic needs of the city and to furnish what the occupying powers needed while they were there. Exports were out of the question.

  Just simply getting permission to build the original People’s Car was a victory, though. It meant all the wartime assembly lines would be taken down and the jigs and machines and tools would now be set up according to their original plans. Things remained ambiguous, however, as the Level of Industry Plan in March 1946 stipulated only 20,000 cars and 21,000 trucks for the total zone were to be produced. Many felt these vehicles should be produced not by VW but by the Ford plant in Cologne. VW’s factory was listed as “surplus.” And once again, it looked like the factory would not survive. For his part, however, Hirst decided to more or less ignore all this bureaucratic back-and-forth and just get busy making cars.

  Sensing his dedication, the workers tried to do their best for him. The town itself was in terrible shape, though: Old labor camps were being used as housing, some of which were little more than breezy wooden shacks, with between two and four beds in each room. The old lodgings of the SS were also being used. And most of those still a part of VW management had homes in the only fully finished neighborhood in Wolfsburg, the Steimker Berg. For the majority of workers, accommodations felt temporary and inadequate. Many families had to separate in order to be housed. The idea in many workers’ minds was not how to make a life there, but how to move on.

  It didn’t help that the factory work was grueling and that food was extremely scarce. In the spring of 1946, workers were on an allowance of 1,014 calories a day, less than half of what doctors determined an adequate provision for heavy laborers. Much of the workforce had to attend to things like rubble removal, filling craters that bombs had made, and restoring tooling and factory halls. In addition, there was no catalog or inventory of tools, so it was easy for things to be lost, taken, or simply overlooked. Because of the lack of housing and food, workforce was in constant turnover. The town served as a kind of crossroads. Workers rarely gave notice before leaving: They would be there one day and the next day they’d disappear. By the end of 1946, more than half the employees who had been on register at the beginning of the year were gone.

  In the midst of all this chaos, it was difficult to train workers or to be sure people with the right skills were performing the right jobs. The Works Council3 and the German executives and British officers at the plant did their best to sort out the multitude of problems that presented themselves, but it was rarely quick or neat. The British soldiers—while waiting for official policies between the Allies to be solved in terms of the factory—decided to allow the workers to produce 4,000 cars per month (for the military), but that number began to look comical with time. It was all the workers could do4, in fact, to produce just over 1,000 of them in March 1946, one full year after Germany’s surrender. Still, they were doing better than most companies in Germany. Being a publicly owned British undertaking, a Regiebetrieb, was an advantage for the factory: In a country experiencing a dearth of supplies, the VW factory’s status as an Allied undertaking gave it first dibs in acquiring resources.

  The British staff there also made some crucial decisions about VW service and sales, changes that would profoundly affect
the following years. One of the first orders of business, for example, was to initiate a service department staffed with experts to train the other workers. The British also worked on setting up an organization of dealerships and distributors for the car—something the Nazis had wanted to avoid in their policy to “cut out the middleman.” An old colleague, friend, and sometimes rival of Porsche’s named Karl Feuereissen was at the VW factory during this time too, and he worked with the British to develop a philosophy for the company that would later evolve into “the Volkswagen way.” Feuereissen’s central tenet was that service must always come before sales. In other words, the entire factory must be geared toward the customer, not toward what would produce the most money in the short-term. Their goal was that any dealership that sold a Volkswagen should be equipped to service it too, or at least be in proximity to a station that could. A service school was set up to train the staff. Classes were taught in both English and German, and bilingual service bulletins were published as well. In these classes, workers discussed possible problems with the car and brainstormed ways to fix them. In such chaotic and unstable conditions, it’s amazing that Feuereissen and the British were able to focus on the bigger picture in such a direct way.