Life of Automobile, The
Page 14
During the 1920s and 30s, Britain and France dithered over the provision of improved multi-lane highways for the new, democratic phenomenon of the car (from 1918 until 1927 Britain built only 127 miles of new road), whereas the new totalitarian states of Germany and Italy enthusiastically embraced the potential of the automobile. In 1926 Mussolini’s Italian government hosted the fifth International Road Congress, and prominent civil servants and journalists from Britain, France and America were very impressed by fascist Italy’s new autostrade. Mussolini touted these impressive multi-lane superhighways as a fitting symbol of the technological advance and energy of fascist Italy (while ignoring the fact that the autostrade system had been begun in 1921, a year before came to power). And after having seized power in 1933, Hitler was quick to follow Mussolini’s lead. The new German Führer authorized the construction of 4,300 miles of Autobahnen along with three thousand new bridges, an Italian-style network that served several purposes at once. Not only did the project closely associate the Nazi regime with the speed and strength of the automobile, delivering valuable symbols of technological progress to promote Germany’s image abroad (in 1938 Nazi labour chief Dr Fritz Todt asserted that ‘the great importance of the Reich motor roads has long since been recognized in foreign countries’), but construction of the Autobahnen also created thousands of new jobs. The rapid motorization of Germany under the Nazis was, automotive historians such as R. J. Overy and James J. Flink have suggested, just as important as military rearmament in stimulating Germany’s economic recovery after 1933. Most crucially, the road network provided Hitler’s armed forces with broad new routes for fast and easy deployment.
Hitler’s ministers made much of their new Autobahnen. In 1934 Nazi Germany hosted the seventh International Road Congress, and in 1936 the second International Congress for Bridges and Overground Structures. A government propaganda magazine extolling the virtues of the Nazis’ highways, Die Straße (‘The Road’), was launched. And in April 1936 Reichsminister Göring opened the new Autobahn out of Berlin by racing down it at high speed in his massive duck-egg blue Mercedes 540K Special Roadster – on the wrong side of the highway. (A misty-eyed Hitler later reminisced that Göring always ‘made a point of always driving on the left-hand side of the road. In moments of danger, he used to blow his horn. His confidence was unfailing …’)
The following year the German government persuaded a large delegation of experts from Britain’s Automobile Association, Royal Automobile Club, British Road Federation and, crucially, the parliamentary road group to come and admire Germany’s motorways, a trip that climaxed with a brief meeting with both Hitler and Mussolini. The starryeyed British delegation’s report of January 1938, which relied heavily on skewed statistics provided by Todt’s Deutsche Arbeitsfront, naively lauded German achievements and declared its ‘firm opinion that a national scheme should be framed without delay for a series of motorways’ along German lines. But some observers were not deceived by the Nazis’ utopian rhetoric. While postwar historians have tended to downplay the military role of Germany’s Autobahnen, some Western commentators of the late 1930s believed that Hitler’s motorways were primarily designed to carry military traffic. As early as 1938, the editor of Britain’s Geographical Magazine noted that: ‘Dictatorship expresses itself naturally in grandiose public works, of which the German Autobahnen afford a striking example. Democratic governments, subject to critical opposition and accountable for every item of expenditure, cannot afford to burden the exchequer from motives of self-advertisement, still less for the sake of unavowed aims.’
Hitler was eager to build automobiles that would match the technology of his impressive new Autobahnen and the social aspirations of his classless National Socialist state. From 1914 until 1938 Germany had made few viable everyday cars; German automobiles were built largely for the luxury and performance car markets, and the country relied on foreign manufacturers such as Austin (whose Seven was, as we have seen, built under licence in Germany) to provide more modest personal transport. Hitler aimed to change all that. One strand of his government’s motor manufacturing policy was to subsidize a new big car programme, using the factories and expertise of Mercedes and Auto Union to create impressively grand cars for the hohe Tiere (the ‘big cheeses’) of the Nazi regime, as well as sportier derivatives to dominate the international Grand Prix circuit. The other strand was to make a car for all classes, a Model T for Germany. A ‘people’s car’ would, Hitler insisted, prove ‘the instrument for uniting the different classes, just as it has done in America, thanks to Mr Ford’s genius’. The Führer saw such a car as the embodiment of the egalitarian Nazi ideal, an automobile that would sweep away old social and political divisions and help create a harmonized, obedient National Socialist Germany. It would be built ‘for the broad masses’; its purpose would be ‘to answer their transport needs and it is intended to give them joy’.
The first of Hitler’s automotive ambitions was swiftly realized. By 1935 Germany’s ‘silver arrow’ cars, as they were known,1 were dominating the Grand Prix and European championship circuits, beating Bugattis, Bentleys and Alfas almost every time, as vehicles such as Mercedes’ superlative W125 of 1937 carried all before them. On the roads, too, voluptuously finished products of the Daimler-Benz and Auto Union factories, such as the giant Grösser Mercedes series, were utilized as symbols of power and virility by Hitler and his henchmen. Hitler’s own armour-plated Mercedes 770K W50 II of 1939 weighed more than five tons and, with its supercharged eight-cylinder engine, could reach 112 mph. Daimler-Benz did not even attempt to sell their automobiles to the Nazi leaders, but loaned the party all the Mercedes cars it needed. Bolstered by the Nazi hierarchs’ ostentatious support, these luxurious and bulletproof behemoths were also sold to dictators and monarchs across the globe, from King Zog of Albania to General Franco of Spain and Emperor Hirohito of Japan, who ordered seven of the vast Grösser Mercedes models.
Fast, virile German sports cars were soon also being made in Bavaria. Founded in 1916 to make aircraft engines, after the First World War the Bayerische Motoren Werke had originally concentrated on making motorcycles. Until 1932 those saloon cars that BMW did manufacture were generally made under licence from Austin. After Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, however, BMW began to make home-grown models and by the late 1930s had become renowned for its streamlined coupés. The BMW 328 of 1937 was particularly admired, and was copied by British sports car manufacturers such as Frazer-Nash and Bristol. Yet as Hitler expanded Germany’s war machine, the production of aero engines once again took precedence, and BMW built a series of fine aircraft engines for the Luftwaffe along with a heavy, 2-litre, jeep-type military transport, the BMW 325, for the Wehrmacht.
Hitler’s second goal was more complex. The Nazi government initially sought to pursue their objective of creating a ‘people’s car’ by gaining control of Germany’s existing volume car manufacturer, GM-owned Adam Opel. After Hitler gained power in 1933, his new administration substantially cut the profits GM was able to take out of the firm, gained control of the factory council at Opel’s main plant, in Rüsselsheim, and launched their own National Socialist in-house magazine, Der Opel Geist (‘The Opel Spirit’, later renamed Der Opel-Kamerad, ‘The Opel Comrade’). Wilhelm von Opel, the son and heir of the firm’s founder, saw which way the wind was blowing and joined the Nazi party. All Jewish Opel dealers and employees were purged by 1938, and a brutal SS officer was appointed to head the firm’s internal security service. Yet Opel’s willing subservience to the Nazi regime failed to earn the company the commission to build the new ‘people’s car’. Ferdinand Porsche was far closer to Hitler than Wilhem von Opel and effortlessly secured the contract. And Opel’s candidate for the classless auto, their conventional P4, looked positively antiquated when compared with Porsche’s revolutionary new design. However, GM’s Opel subsidiary continued to operate at the Nazis’ whim. The closeness of this relationship was amply demonstrated in October 1940 when Göring attemp
ted to use GM officials, led by the automotive giant’s astonishingly naive head of overseas operations, James D. Mooney, as intermediaries in a peace bid to Britain. The overture was swiftly rejected, and Mooney hurriedly disowned by his Detroit masters.
Thanks to Hitler’s promotion of the automobile, car ownership doubled in Germany between 1934 and 1938. In 1936 Daimler-Benz produced the world’s first civilian car to use diesel fuel, the 260D. (Citroën had produced their Rosalie diesel car three years earlier, but had been forbidden from manufacturing it because of the French government’s fears about the volatility of the fuel.1) But the first ‘people’s car’ did not go on sale until shortly before the German invasion of Poland in 1939 triggered the outbreak of the Second World War.
In May 1934, Austrian engineer Ferdinand Porsche met Hitler to discuss his plans for the classless auto.2 The two got on famously; Hitler enjoyed talking about cars with his fellow Austrian and they chatted for hours over sausages and beer. It was eventually agreed that the new ‘people’s car’ would be capable of 60 mph and 40 mpg, have four seats and be air-cooled. Most important of all, despite this racy specification it would only cost a modest 1,000 Reichsmarks – then the equivalent of about £50.
Ferdinand Porsche had been born in 1875 in a German-speaking enclave of Bohemia, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now the Czech Republic). He joined the imperial coach-makers Jakob Lohner & Co. in Vienna in 1898, and helped to create Lohner’s first car – rather optimistically named the Toujours-Contente – in the same year. Drafted into the Austrian army in 1902, he served for a time as chauffeur to the emperor of Austria’s heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but returned to civilian life two years later, and thus was not at the wheel of the 1911 Gräf & Stift Double Phaeton in which the archduke and his wife were assassinated on 28 June 1914.
In 1906 Porsche was recruited by Daimler subsidiary Austro-Daimler as their chief designer. By 1916 he was managing director, and the following year was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Technical University of Vienna. After the war he designed a successful series of racing cars for Austro-Daimler before leaving the company in 1923 to join the main Daimler company in Stuttgart. Impatient as ever, he left for the Austrian car maker Steyr in 1929. However, like most of Germany’s car makers, Steyr was soon laid low by the Great Depression (in 1934 it was finally absorbed into the empire of Porsche’s old employers, Daimler-Benz), and in April 1931 Porsche founded his own firm back in Stuttgart. The new Porsche company not only made its own small racing cars but also acted as consultant for larger firms. In this capacity, Porsche became Hitler’s favourite automotive designer, working not just on the prototype ‘people’s car’ but, from 1937, on Germany’s new monster tank designs.
In June 1934 Porsche received a contract from Hitler to build three prototypes of the ‘people’s car’ from designs he had already been working on, such as his Type 12 car of 1931. In October 1936 three prototypes of the KdF-Wagen (‘strength through joy car’) were revealed to Nazi bosses and their media acolytes. However, the design Porsche unveiled – which had actually been worked up from his master’s concept by Franz Reimspiess, one of the few employees who was prepared to stand up to the autocratic Porsche – appeared to owe a lot to the ideas of Porsche’s fellow Austrian, Hans Ledwinka, who worked for the Czech car maker Tatra. Ledwinka’s Tatra T97, which had been introduced earlier that same year, was also cheap, simple, streamlined and provided with a rearmounted engine. Indeed, from the front it looked strikingly similar to Porsche’s KdF-Wagen. Hitler is known to have admired the Tatra – ‘it’s the kind of car I want for my highways,’ he had announced – and it has been alleged that the Führer personally provided Porsche with a detailed drawing of the T97 with which Ledwinka had presented him. Inevitably, Ledwinka and Tatra were furious at the obvious plagiarism and attempted to sue Porsche for damages. Hitler said he would settle the matter – which he did somewhat dramatically, in March 1939, when units of the German army (which had already occupied the German-speaking Sudetenland in October 1938, following the conclusion of the Munich agreement) rolled their tanks over the undefended Czech border, annexed the rump of Czechoslovakia and closed the Tatra factory.
After 1945 the Tatra plant, now controlled by the Russians, restarted production of the T97 and disinterred Ledwinka’s 1937 lawsuit. Porsche himself sheepishly admitted to having ‘looked over Ledwinka’s shoulders’ while designing the ‘people’s car’, and in 1961 Volkswagen finally paid 3 million Deutschmarks in settlement to Tatra’s successor. However, although Porsche spent twenty months in a French jail at the end of the war, on his release, with his reputation restored, he returned to car manufacture. Ledwinka, in contrast, was jailed for five years by the Czech authorities for collaboration with the Germans (he had made powerful staff cars and munitions for them after 1939) and, after his release in 1951, refused to work for any car maker at all up until his death, an embittered and angry man, in 1967. Ledwinka was only posthumously rehabilitated by the Czech government in 1992, after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Ledwinka was not the only car designer whose work influenced Hitler and Porsche. The low-cost Standard Superior, which Hitler admired at the 1933 Berlin Motor Show, and which was designed by German-Hungarian engineer Josef Ganz, not only looked suspiciously like Porsche’s later design for the KdF-Wagen (particularly in its more curvaceous, production form), but Standard Fahrzeugfabrik of Berlin subsequently promoted it as the ‘Deutsche Volkswagen’, the ‘people’s car’. As a Jew, however, Ganz was easily sidelined; he was arrested in 1933 and fled to Switzerland the following year.1
Having appropriated Ledwinka’s and Ganz’s ideas, the wily Austrian engineer was lauded with Nazi honours. Herr Porsche was, indeed, the ideal National Socialist. Abstemious and obedient, he swiftly complied with the Nazi interdiction on church attendance, though he had formerly been a devout Catholic. Strict and austere, he rarely bestowed praise on his employees and he ran his plants with a rod of iron, brooking no criticism or contradiction. Already designated Reichsautokonstruktor (state car designer) by Hitler, in 1938 he was awarded the Nazi equivalent of the Nobel Prize, alongside aircraft manufacturers Heinkel and Messerschmitt and labour chief Fritz Todt. At the awards ceremony Porsche smiled beatifically while Goebbels conjured a motorized future and Hitler delivered one of his customary anti-Semitic rants.
In 1938, too, Hitler finally unveiled the first production ‘people’s car’, the Volkswagen, at the Berlin Motor Show. A new city, the unimaginatively named Stadt des KdF-Wagens, had been built to produce the new car at Fallersleben, near Brunswick in Lower Saxony. The car plant was financed by confiscated union funds and run by a company created by the German Labour Front. Initially, its workforce comprised Italian ‘guest workers’, although after 1941 this was to change. Hitler himself laid the foundation stone for the factory, which was consciously modelled on Ford’s giant Rouge River plant which Porsche had visited the previous year. Porsche not only built the car; his firm was even given the contract to plan the new city, although he quickly contracted out this task. After the war, the city was hastily renamed Wolfsburg, and still serves as the world headquarters of Volkswagen.
Even before the first Volkswagen appeared, the Reich’s citizens had been encouraged to make down payments towards a new VW. By 1939 a staggering 336,668 had done so – although very few of those had actually received their completed cars. Instead, the KdF factory produced war materiel using slave labour – mainly, after 1941, captured Russian soldiers. Most of the credulous investors never saw their money again. In 1945, 280 million marks belonging to VW depositors were discovered in the Bank of German Labour in Berlin, and were promptly seized by the occupying Russians. And in 1954 the compliant West German authorities absolved Volkswagen from any responsibility for the pre-war KdF-Wagen contracts. However, the public outrage of the gulled KdF-Wagen investors forced the West German government to back-pedal, and in 1961 they offered investors either 600 Deutschmarks towards a new VW or 100 Deutschmarks i
n cash.
Hitler’s Volkswagen was destined to transport millions of Ayran Volk across their expanded homeland. Yet large-scale production of the KdF-Wagen had not even begun when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. A few civilian examples were made in 1940, but they were mostly given to senior Nazi officials. The flexible Porsche, meanwhile, adapted the KdF-Wagen for military use as a staff car, the Kübelwagen, and, more ambitiously, as the Type 166 Schwimmwagen, an amphibian four-seater.1 The former was a great success and performed with distinction on all fronts. Rommel used one as his staff car in North Africa and in 1942 personally thanked Porsche for saving his life: ‘Your VW Kübelwagen which I use in Africa crossed a minefield without setting anything off.’2 In 1944 the American army even issued a manual, The German Jeep, describing how to use a Kübelwagen if it was captured. (It is worth noting, though, that whereas America produced 660,000 Jeeps during 1941–5, the KdF-Wagen plant only managed to make just over fifty thousand Kübelwagens.) Some historians even suggest that the creation of the military Kübelwagen was the original purpose of the KdF-Wagen project, with the civilian Volkswagen as merely a useful peacetime front – and the duped civilian investors a useful source of cash.