by Unknown
To complement his magnificent racetrack Dr Creutz built an equally magnificent pits/paddock/grandstand complex, the latter overlooking 50 pits and the three-storey Continental Tyres building, which housed the timekeepers and officials. Built into the grandstand was the Sport-Hotel, with 30 bedrooms and a restaurant. Many drivers stayed there, rather than have to drive into Adenau or one of the other nearby towns.
Beside the grandstand was a vast, square paddock with 70 lock-up garages and, eventually, a concrete surface. Access to the pits was via a tunnel under the track. The entire circuit was 22 ft/6.7 m wide, broadening out to 66 ft/20 m at the start/finish area, and was linked by 16 main telephone posts and 72 smaller ones, so accidents and incidents could be reported and dealt with immediately. The total cost of this colossal undertaking was 14.1 million Marks.
It is truly remarkable that this 17.6-mile/28.3km circuit was built in just two years and, although not entirely finished, the Nurburg-Ring was officially opened over the weekend of June 17, 18 and 19, 1927. The first race meeting was known as the Eifelrennen and the ADAC assembled a huge entry, which included no fewer than 99 motorcycles (to run in six classes); 17 sidecar combinations (two classes) and 65 cars, all of which were to race over the Grosse Rundstrecke (both circuits combined). In order to give competitors a chance to get to grips with the 17.6 mile/28.3 km lap there were two-hour practice sessions for motorcycles and then cars every day from Tuesday, June 14 to Friday the 17th and a 90-minute session for each on the Saturday, starting at 6 am.
Naturally, the newly-formed company of Daimler-Benz was well represented, the entry organised by Dr Ferdinand Porsche. Their Technical Director was Ing. Alfred Neubauer and in charge of Press, Propaganda and Photography was Dr Richard Voelter. Three cars were entered, two supercharged, 6.2-litre S class Mercedes-Benz sportscars for Rudolf Caracciola and Adolf Rosenberger and an 8-cylinder, 2-litre racing car for Christian Werner. On Monday, June 13 the party set out from Stuttgart to the Nurburg-Ring in five vehicles: a Sportwagen for Werner, Rosenberger and Hemminger; another for Otto Merz and Caracciola; a 2-litre racing car; a truck and a car for Herr Neubauer. Everyone was to stay at the Hotel Pauly in Nurburg.
The festivities began on the Friday, with an evening party for special guests in Koblenz and several functions in Adenau. On Saturday the Guests of Honour arrived from Koblenz at 10 am, followed shortly by the official opening of the circuit by Dr Otto Creutz, now known as the Father of the Nurburg-Ring. He and his wife, Hedwig, then led a parade of cars carrying the guests around the test road, which comprised the start/finish area, the South and North Turns and back to the start again. Lunch was taken in the grandstand restaurant at 1.30 pm and an hour later the very first race at the Nurburg-Ring - a five-lap event for motorcycles - got under way. The whole afternoon was taken up with motorcycles, the cars being held back for Sunday. At 7pm on Saturday there was a dinner for the Guests of Honour in the Hotel Eifeler-Hof in Adenau and the day ended with a firework display.
Sunday began with a church service in Adenau and at 10 am the 12-lap race for sports and racing cars got under way. The 65 entries ranged from the 6,240 cc Mercedes-Benz of R. Caracciola of Berlin to the 500 cc Hanomag of H.Butenuth of Hannover. Caracciola was the overall winner, covering the 211 mile/340 km in 3hr 33 mins 21.0 secs at 59.96 mph/96.5 kph. Poor Butenuth took 5 hrs 36 mins 19.4 secs to cover the same distance at 37.7 mph/60.6 kph. At 5pm the official results were announced and at 5.30 a souvenir of the NurburgRing was given to every entrant. That evening the prizegiving dinner took place in the town of Bad Neuenahr. The whole weekend was pronounced a great success and now everyone looked forward to the German Grand Prix, to be held a month later.
DR OTTO CREUTZ: THE FATHER OF THE NURBURG – RING
That inaugural meeting was the beginning of Rudolf Caracciola’s remarkable reign as King of the Nurburg-Ring. In the entire history of motor racing you would be hard-pressed to find another racing driver who dominated a circuit for so long yet, in his autobiography, A Racing Driver’s World, he has absolutely nothing to say about that meeting, his victory, the circuit or the man who built it, Dr Otto Creutz.
This is all the more surprising because Rudi and his first wife, Charly, became close friends of Dr Creutz and his wife, Hedwig. In June, 1931, the Caracciolas were staying at the Eifeler Hof for the Eifel GP (which Caracciola won, on the Sudschleife) and two days before the race they were guests at the Landrat’s official residence (now the Adenau Post Office) just down the road from the hotel. Rudi wrote this poem (which he and Charly signed, opposite) in the Creutz Guest Book, which is now owned by their daughter, Gisela: 'Unfortunately, the sky is not always blue in Adenau but call in on Landrat Creutz and his wife and one will quickly forget practice on the Nurburgring and be merry and cheerful until raceday begins.’
The poem loses something in the translation, to be sure, but nevertheless it is a charming token of the friendship that existed between the two couples. Gisela was only a child at the time but she recalls that her parents and the Caracciolas were indeed close, and that her own friendship with Rudi’s sister, Herta, continued until the latter’s death in the early 1960s. So why does Caracciola completely ignore the man whose monumental achievement, the Nurburg-Ring, played such an important part in his career? Perhaps the answer is to be found in the misfortune that befell Dr Creutz in 1935. The Father of the Nurburg-Ring was born in Cologne in June, 1889, the son of an eye specialist. He studied law in Freiburg in the Black Forest and Bonn and became a Doctor of Law. He was made Landrat of the Eifel district in 1924. After Major Dohmer had taken over the running of the Nurburg-Ring in 1927, Dr Creutz involved himself in several other projects, including a silver fox farm and a company building wooden houses in the depressed area of Adenau. For some reason questions were raised in Berlin about his handling of their financial affairs and, more importantly, those of the Nurburg-Ring. However, no charges were made and the matter was dropped.
In 1932 the borough of Adenau was dissolved.
For financial reasons some 15 smaller boroughs were merged into larger ones, Adenau being absorbed into the borough of Ahrweiler. This meant that Dr Creutz was out of a job and at the end of the year he and his famly moved to Berlin, where he worked as a civil servant. Early in 1933 Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power. Dr Creutz was a member of the Zentrum Partei, a Christian organisation despised by the Nazis, who decided to revive all the old, unsubstantiated charges against him. He was so upset by this that he asked to be allowed to retire, although he was only 44 years old and would be left without a pension. In 1934 the family moved to Dusseldorf and Gisela remembers him listening to the races on the radio. “He thought of the Nurburg-Ring as his child, a part of himself.”
The next year the Nazis stepped up their campaign against him, in particular accusing him of stealing money from the Nurburg-Ring when he was Landrat. He was put on trial and, being very short of money, could not afford a lawyer and so had to have legal aid.
The Nazis went out of their way to try and prove that he had spent the Nurburg-Ring’s money unnecessarily. Dr Creutz had done a brilliant PR job by inviting many foreign journalists to Adenau to see the new circuit and just what it was doing to improve conditions for the very poor people in the area. To cite one ludicrous example of the Nazi’s methods, they accused him of fiddling his expenses when entertaining the press by buying six cutlets when he only had four guests to lunch.
They also claimed that he had made unauthorised trips to Italy and France to talk with officials at Monza and Montlhery. Roland Freisler, a lawyer in the Nazi Party’s Ministry of Justice, wrote to the judge presiding over Dr Creutz’s trial saying that he must be found guilty. The judge did as he was told and Dr Creutz was sentenced to one year in prison in Dusseldorf, with no family visits allowed. (He was lucky: in 1942 Freisler was appointed President of Hitler’s notorious Peoples’ Court in which he frequently humiliated the accused and found some 90% of them guilty. Most were executed within 24 hours).
Dr Creutz had a good friend in Siegfried Doerschlag, one of Germany’s top journalists who had covered the building of the Nurburg-Ring. He wrote a regular newsletter for the German motor industry called Doerschlagdienst, and in this he defended Dr Creutz and pointed out that although he was entitled to a pension from the Nurburg-Ring he had not received it and his family was very short of money. This persuaded people in the German motor industry to provide them with something to live on. Professor Ferdinand Porsche personally tried to persuade Adolf Hitler to release Dr Creutz, but without success. Luckily, however, he was freed after completing his one-year sentence.
After the war the AvD held its first International race meeting at the Nurburgring in 1950, but Dr Creutz was not invited. He was convinced that this was because of the accusations made against him by the Nazis. A year later, aged only 62 but completely exhausted by all that had happened to him, he committed suicide in a hospital in Freiburg, in the Black Forest. He was buried there, but the townspeople of Adenau and the Adenau Automobil Club paid for his reburial in Adenau in March, 1951. A newspaper report stated that ‘a huge crowd of mourners came from the Eifel and the Ahr valley, including most of his former staff, a delegation from the Nurburgring company, many racing drivers, people from the motor industry, automobile clubs and tourist offices... On all official buildings flags flew at half-mast as the funeral procession went through the streets of Adenau, passing the Landratsamt (the official residence) on its way to the cemetery.
The Mayor of Adenau praised Dr Creutz, saying, “It is thanks to his great energy and strong will that the world’s biggest race and test track was built. Apart from that, during his period of office he was always willing to listen, was good-hearted and supported people in their difficult times. Nobody asked for help in vain.”
Ludwig Kramer of the ADAC remembered Dr Creutz as “always being a happy and carefree Landrat who, with the Nurburg-Ring, produced a unique achievement for German automobile sport and the automobile industry.”
The people of Adenau produced a Book of Remembrance, with more than 200 signatures, to thank him for all he had done for them. Dr Creutz’s persecution and imprisonment by the Nazis may well be the reason why Caracciola ignored him in his autobiography, which was first published as Mein Leben als Rennfahrer in Germany in 1939. Although he was a long-time resident of Switzerland he (and, more to the point, his publisher) probably felt it wiser to omit any mention of Dr Creutz, rather than incur the wrath of the Nazi Party by writing of their friendship and praising Dr Creutz’s astonishing achievement in the Eifel Mountains. However, in 1955 G.T. Foulis published the book in English as Caracciola, Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ace and it was republished in 1963 by Cassell’s Motoraces Book Club as A Racing Driver’s World, having been revised and expanded by Caracciola himself, shortly before his death in 1959.
With the world now free of Nazi tyranny, Caracciola had a splendid opportunity to sing the praises of the friend who had built the circuit which formed the bedrock of his remarkable career. Sadly, he did no such thing. Dr Creutz was still ignored and Rudi made no mention of the Nurburg-Ring until his account of the 1931 German Grand Prix, which he won - and that was his fourth victory there! It is a sad and incomprehensible omission.
The very first German GP had been held in 1926 at AVUS, the 12.2 mile/19.6 km circuit on an autobahn near Berlin. It had been a tragic affair; an Italian driver died in a practice crash and then, during the race, after only a few laps in pouring rain Adolf Rosenberger crashed, his Mercedes demolishing a timekeeper’s hut and killing the three people inside. Several other cars skidded off the road and a number of spectators was injured. Rudolf Caracciola eventually won the 20-lap race, earning himself the title Regenmeister (rainmaster) in the process. However, the deaths and injuries caused a public outcry and motor racing came close to being banned in Germany.
So for 1927 the German Grand Prix was moved to the Nurburg-Ring and the inaugural Eifelrennen was used as a dress rehearsal. Held on July 17 the Grand Prix was run over 18 laps of the Grosse Rundstrecke, a distance of 316.54 miles/509.4 km. Otto Merz led Christian Werner and Willy Walb home in a Mercedes-Benz 1,2,3, but perhaps the outstanding performance of the day was that of 27 year-old Elizabeth Junek, who finished third in her Bugatti and won her class. Sadly, her husband, Cenek, was killed during the 1928 Grand Prix, whereupon Madame Junek gave up racing, but by then she had established herself as the foremost lady driver in the world.
The Grand Prix continued to be run over 18 laps of the Grosse Rundstrecke for the next two years, but the Wall Street Crash of 1929 affected Germany very badly and there was no race in 1930. The following year the GP was back and now confined (which is hardly the right word) to the Nordschleife, where it remained, with the exception of 1933, when the economic situation again meant that there was no race. In 1931 the distance was 22 laps, increased to 25 in ‘32. In 1934 it was 25 again, but for 1935 this was reduced to 22 laps, where it stayed until the outbreak of war, late in 1939.
The Eifel Grand Prix meeting was moved to the Sudschleife in 1928, where it remained until 1932 when it, too, went back to the Nordschleife and was run over 14 laps. This was increased to 15 in 1933 and ‘34, but for 1935 it was reduced to 11 laps and then 10 for 1936, ‘37 and ‘39 (there was no race in 1938).
As we have seen, the circuit was finally brought properly to the attention of British motor racing enthusiasts in 1931, when the scribes from The Motor and The Autocar were clearly bowled over by what they found in the Eifel mountains (which, strictly speaking, are nothing more than hills).
‘When the Nurburg-Ring was planned, an intoxicated giant must have been sent out to trace the road.’ wrote W.F.Bradley, Continental Correspondent of The Autocar. ‘To drive around it is thrilling. To be whirled around by a Varzi, a Chiron, or a Caracciola is a sensation never to be forgotten.’
And in his preview of the race in The Motor, Humphrey Symons also waxed lyrical: ‘Built in the heart of the densely-wooded Eifel mountains, it winds up and down like a snake in and out of the forest, up hill and down dale, abounds in hairpin bends and sharp turns and has many quite formidable gradients.
‘One can picture the cars, in imagination, hurtling round the S-bends amidst the pinewoods, the blare of their exhausts echoing up the mountain sides. One can see them skidding downhill corners at break-neck speeds, slowing, with squealing tyres and quivering wheels, for a hairpin bend, changing down, changing up again, accelerating furiously up hill...
‘For six long hours the air will shake to the bellow of exhausts and vibrate to the whining shriek of superchargers. Big and little cars will flash past the grandstand, along the wonderful double road, disappearing down the mountain-side, vibrant splashes of colour against the sombre pines. Violet and yellow flames from the white-hot pipes; blue smoke; the heady scent of castor oil... Everything that stands for speed, skill and dash!’
By now the German Grand Prix at the Nurburg-Ring was vying with the French Grand Prix at Montlhery as the Race of the Year. Despite the Depression brought about by the Wall Street Crash, both The Motor and The Autocar reported that more than 100,000 spectators made their way from all parts of Germany to watch the race, which was won by Rudolf Caracciola in his 7-litre MercedesBenz SSKL.
By this time the German economy was in such a parlous state that the impoverished nation was fertile gound for Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party, which swept to power in January, 1933. A couple of years earlier, Hitler had met with racing driver Hans Stuck, who was very unhappy because the financial crisis had forced both Mercedes-Benz and Austro-Daimler to give up racing and he did not want to drive a foreign car. Hitler promised that when he achieved power he would make sure Stuck had a German racing car with which to compete.
He became Chancellor of Germany in January, 1933 and in March he opened the Berlin Motor Show. In his speech he made it clear that he wanted a German manufacturer to fill the void and go motor racing in 1934, when the new Grand Prix Formula, with its 750 kg maximum
weight limit, would come into being. In May the new Chancellor went to see the AVUS GP, which Mercedes-Benz had won the previous two years, but this time the Grand Prix was won by foreign cars and drivers, two Bugattis and an Alfa Romeo filling the first three places.
Hitler never attended a race at the Nurburg-Ring, but a couple of weeks after AVUS he made his presence felt there in no uncertain manner, the eyes that mesmerised a nation staring out from a page in the programme for the Eifel GP Notable for its Nazi propaganda-style language and a forest of exclamation marks, Hitler’s message was nothing less than an order to the nation - get Germany moving again!
‘Remember the admonition of the Fuhrer!’, was the headline. ‘Work is an honour!’ ‘Creating jobs is a German duty!’ ‘Everyone must help get the wheels of the economy in motion again!’ ‘The job-creation scheme is the self-help of the united German people!’
The New Order had arrived and, just to press the point home, Reichsminister Hermann Goring was Guest of Honour at the meeting. There were the red, white and black flags of the Reich and swastikas everywhere, with SS troops on hand to sing the Horst-Wessel to spectators over the loudspeakers.
In common with Hitler at AVUS, Goring had to watch foreign cars and drivers - Tazio Nuvolari (Alfa Romeo); Earl Howe (Delage) and Hugh Hamilton (MG) - take the honours. He then made a speech, but there was no polite “Ladies and Gentlemen” as a greeting - instead he barked, “German men and German women!” However, he was on his best behaviour, congratulating the foreign drivers on their success and telling them and the foreign spectators present that they had seen how the new Germany was so hospitable compared to the old, disreputable one. “Today’s event was a valuable one,” he said, “because the new Germany was able to show that what people say about the old Germany is no longer true and that those Germans who slander Germany from outside have not the right to speak in the name of Germany.”