by Andrea Hiott
Hitler had wanted a coup that night, a putsch. He’d planned to take over the government by force, but in the end, his brazen declarations fell flat. The coup didn’t work. Embarrassed, he fled the scene. He was eventually captured and placed in jail for his stunt. Once there, he fell into a deep depression, forced to confront the fact that his fantasy had not become reality, as he’d been so sure that it would. Once again, he thought about taking his own life. In the prison where he was being held until the trial, he reportedly told the psychologist on hand, “I’m finished. If I had a revolver, I would take it.”7
But then, an unlikely thing happened: The court decided to try him for treason. And just that one word—“treason”—was (in his eyes) the best thing that could have happened to him. The government was taking his attempted coup seriously. He had a voice. Many in the country, alongside Hitler, would now reinterpret the putsch: With the public’s help, he could rewrite the story exactly as he wished. And, in another unexpected twist, he pleaded guilty to the charges of treason, and did so with pride. He gave the court a loud and clear speech about how the real betrayal in the country had come from the government, not from him. The German people had been betrayed by the First World War, and now he was merely trying to stand up for them, to put their country into more capable hands, he said.
These words might sound dubious today, but at the time, in a country with many disillusioned people who were angry and confused, it resonated. There were those in Germany who knew this man was not to be trusted, but there were also many who were looking for someone with such boldness, someone they could believe in, someone to lift them out of their depression and spiritual doubt. The courtroom was electrified by Hitler’s prolonged and passionate speeches: The place became a sensationalized stage. And thanks to modern media of the time, that stage was surrounded by men and women from the press. Hitler, a nobody before the trial began, was a known and controversial voice in Germany by the time it ended. People wanted to hear from him; and the number of Nazi sympathizers began to grow.
Hitler was learning how to whip people up into a state of frenzy. As his biographer Ian Kershaw would later write, “Crisis was Hitler’s oxygen.”8 He was developing a philosophy that everything good was based on struggle and on the feeling of struggling toward a common cause. At the time of the trial, he still thought of himself as “the drummer,” the person who would use propaganda to set that struggle’s mood and tone; at that point, he did not see himself as an eventual dictator of Germany, though he did feel such a figure would have to rise. “The man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled; he wills it,”9 Hitler told the court. “He is not driven forward, but drives himself.” And remarkably, such words seem to have cast a spell. Even the majority of the judges did not want to find him guilty once he had delivered his speech. They had to be persuaded to hand Hitler a sentence of five years, only conceding after being assured that he would be eligible for parole.
After the trial, upon reaching Landsberg Prison, Hitler was given a very nice room with a desk. He was allowed to receive gifts, cards, Nazi Party members, and to order and request reading materials at will. He was thirty-five years old now, and the trial had given him his first taste of fame. Hundreds of people lined up to visit him in jail. While there, Hitler read and studied endlessly: “Landsberg was a university paid for by the state,”10 he’d later say. While there, he also wrote the first draft of his autobiography, My Struggle, or Mein Kampf. His original title for it was Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. He worked on it day and night, buoyed by memories of his courtroom show. He’d felt the public’s admiration, and he wanted more. As he wrote and reflected on the new way he was being seen by those around him, he began to cast himself in a new light: perhaps he wasn’t simply “the drummer”; perhaps he was the man who would save Germany, he thought, the man born to be a dictator, reliant on his own will.
Oddly, even as he was writing Mein Kampf, thus solidifying his politics of racism and authoritarian angst, he was also having a revelation about the power of the democratic vote. While in jail, Hitler decided that the Nazi Party would have to come to power the legal way. Whereas before the Beer Hall coup, he’d felt that force was the only way to gain control, he now decided that his power must be given to him by the people of Germany themselves, by their votes. Hitler was also very concerned with getting Germany back into a place of international respect again. To him, that meant breaking the Treaty of Versailles and proceeding with rearmament. A prime motivating factor for Hitler’s every move would be revenge for the capitulation and punishment Germany suffered at the end of the First World War. He would speak about it incessantly, with the promise that such humiliation would not happen again.
Hitler’s reverence and enthusiasm for motor cars was also closely connected to his plan to return Germany to a position of international power. He would find a way to combine two things he felt very passionate about—the automobile and national power. Already, it was common knowledge around the Nazi offices that if Hitler could not be found, he was probably at one of two places: the nearby car showroom where his new friend Jakob Werlin worked or the auto racetrack. Even before the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, before jail, before the NSDAP was much of anything at all, Hitler had forced the party to stretch their limited funds in order to acquire two cars, both from the Austrian-born Werlin.
Jakob Werlin, a stocky man with hard eyes, first met Hitler in Munich, where the Nazi offices were located. There was a printing shop where Hitler used to go each time he needed to make flyers or posters for an upcoming lecture or rally the Nazis had planned. In the very same building as that printer, there was a Daimler-Benz showroom, and Hitler could never pass by without looking at the cars. Werlin worked there, and the printer knew him well. “I’ve brought a new customer for you!”11 the printer said on the day he introduced Werlin and Hitler. The two quickly became friends, talking and negotiating over Daimler’s cars. One of the cars Hitler acquired from Werlin was candy-apple red, an unusual thing at the time, but Hitler wanted to make a statement with it. When Hitler was taken to jail, this car was confiscated. From prison, he told the Party they would have to buy him another one, and he wrote to Werlin asking questions about what he currently had in the showroom, and what it might be possible to buy. He thought of perhaps acquiring a Daimler-Benz 11/40, or a 16/50 that had a roaring engine he especially liked. He wanted the car to be gray, and he wanted “wire wheels” on it. He also asked Werlin if he could get a special deal on the car, saying that he’d have to find a loan in order to purchase it because the legal fees he now owed were “making his hair stand on end.”12
Hitler loved cars in ways that had nothing to do with his own ambitions, but while he was in jail, he began to think of the automobile in a political sense. He read automotive magazines and sketched out designs for possible cars. His favorite book at the time was the autobiography of Henry Ford.13 Ford became a hero to Hitler. He even hung a life-size picture of the American on his office wall. It was (in large part) from Ford that he got his idea for giving Germany a People’s Car.
The Model T, that “single, wonderful car” that the Ford company had first produced back in 1908 had, by 1923, grown into millions of cars and thus become the world’s first car for the common man, the first car to be made for, and driven by, a class of people who were not necessarily elite or rich. Ford’s customers were farmers, artisans, housewives; people with essential, everyday jobs. The Model T was a car that these people could both afford and understand, and they adopted it as their own.
Ford had accomplished this feat by introducing the moving assembly line into his new Highland Plant in Michigan, an innovation that increased output while at the same time lowering production costs and making automobiles more affordable. In 1914, Ford had also introduced new conditions for workers, raising wages considerably (his revolutionary “$5 a day” policy doubled the average wage in one stroke) while at the same time shortening the workday to an
average of eight hours rather than the usual ten or twelve. These policies would eventually become the manufacturing standard for factories all over the world, providing the structural template for the modern automotive company, as well as the guiding example for the size and style of an automotive factory. It was a mode of business built on efficiency and speed. As Brinkley writes of Ford’s first Highland Park plant that opened in 1910, “No sooner did production start up than the company’s executives began prowling the factory floors14 looking for ways to save time, money and manpower through future mechanization … it was corporate development through unceasing improvement—and that, in essence, constitutes what came to be called Fordism, the restless approach to management that would sweep the industrialized world.…”
Henry Ford and the world’s first People’s Car, the Model T, which debuted in 1909. Comparing this photo to the early photos of Porsche’s Volkswagen shows how much the design of cars had changed between 1909 and the early 1930s. (photo credit 9.1)
The Model T had taken nearly a decade to steadily spread through the country, but the point was, it had spread. Nearly fifteen million Model T’s had been sold by the time Hitler went to jail, and nothing comparable had been attempted successfully in Europe. News of the car traveled slowly to the majority of people in Europe, but even for those in the know (and there were certainly people in Europe who bought and drove Model Ts), there was not a great deal of professional desire to create a similar car. In Europe, the conditions were very different and it was thought that the American model simply would not work. The American landscape and its mass of potential consumers differed greatly from the small European countries and their comparatively limited means of making a cheap car and a profit: With fewer people to buy the car, there was less of a reason to make one. But Hitler began to see the potential political points he could gain by being the one to bring the German people such an automobile.
Still, Hitler certainly was not the first to think Germany’s future would be in a car for the common man. Inspired and intelligent men like Josef Ganz and Hans Ledwinka had been championing and writing about the People’s Car for years. In 1923, for instance, the very same year that Hitler was taken to jail, the following was written in the Automobil-Revue:
Things will develop15 with the automobile as they did for the horse, the railway, and the bicycle. Not the grand automobile, which for a long time, if not forever, will belong only to a small, privileged minority, but the middle-sized and especially the small car … The day will come—more quickly than we think—when … everyone keeps an automobile (and that means speed) at home.…
If Hitler didn’t read this exact article, he certainly read one saying something like it. They were easy to find in automotive journals of the time. The powerful car companies might not have been interested in making a Volkswagen, but ideas of industrial progress in connection to the automobile were being talked about openly in print and even in German universities. In his inaugural speech as the rector of the University of Karlsruhe, Herr Kluge suggested the need for a new spatial design and consciousness that took the automobile into account, saying that “right of way in the literal sense16 must be introduced … even the middle-size cities will sooner or later have to undertake street construction, open up thoroughfares, build over- and underpasses …” For many academics who studied progress, it was clear that the car’s next step would be in the direction of everyday use. New inventions start in small circles, usually at high prices and requiring a lot of expertise, and then slowly become more familiar, more accessible, finally ending up in everyone’s home or on everyone’s desk. The washer and dryer are one example; the computer is another. In the years of Hitler’s rise in Germany, the car was silently going through just such a change.
Even so, on the whole, it was a small percentage of German citizens who would have read or heard such a thing, and an even smaller percentage who would have believed it. To say that the average German could have “speed” in his or her control was like a fairy tale. But Hitler knew all of this, and like the color red, the swastika, and the democratic vote, he would adopt the idea of a People’s Car and twist it into something toward his own ends.
When Hitler emerged from Landsberg Prison on December 20, 1924, Jakob Werlin had come through for him. Hand-delivered, waiting by the road, Hitler feasted his eyes on a brand-new shiny Mercedes. He’d gone to jail feeling defeated and depressed but now, a little over a year later, he was riding away with an entirely new image of himself. Remarkably, however, Hitler could not actually drive his new car. He did not have a driver’s license, and he never would. As much as he loved cars, Hitler never actually powered one. Perhaps even he didn’t completely trust himself behind the wheel.17
As luck would have it, just as Hitler was making his entry into German politics, Ferdinand Porsche was preparing to leave Austria and take up his first job in the German automotive world. He had been creating cars for Austro-Daimler—cars such as the Model 27/80, which he designed for the Prince Henry trials—for most of his adult life, over fifteen years. By 1916, he had moved up to become the company’s managing director, a position in which he felt he should be able to determine what kinds of cars the company chose to make. But Porsche and the other executives at Austro-Daimler did not agree about the future of car development. Porsche may have been idealistic, dreamy, all those traits that get caricatured under the term artistic, but he was also simple, practical, and severe; this combination of impatience and idealism became such a volatile combination for him that by the spring of 1923, he had to leave Austro-Daimler.
It was less than six months before Hitler’s Beer Hall coup when Porsche took his new engineering job at Daimler-Benz.1 The company was in Stuttgart, Germany, a prominent old town in the southern part of the country. His new job had no relation to the one he was leaving behind in Austria. Though the names were similar, the German Daimler was a whole new company, and that meant a whole new executive board, and a whole new philosophy about small cars, or so Porsche hoped. And so, as the buds were swelling and bursting into green, Porsche and his family eased along the curving and chaotic roads of the German countryside, spring weather streaming through their cars, preparing to start over once more.
Porsche had not left the Austrian company on good terms. His feuds with the executives and the board became extremely uncomfortable for all involved. Some at the Austrian company found Porsche too hard to work with: He wanted too much, and he was too impatient, they said. He might be a genius, but he made impossible demands. First there was the idea of a small car. Second, Porsche was adamant that the company should have a strong representation in racing, a strong marquee. By modern terms, race-car driving had now become a popular sport. Entire towns often turned out to watch or to welcome home their returning drivers. Spreading a car company’s name through winning such races was not a bad marketing idea. But Austro-Daimler was not quick to see Porsche’s point. Porsche wanted time and money to build an increasing number of racing cars, and when it came to such things, it was either his way or no way at all. Porsche was stubborn: When he wanted something, it was very hard for him to let any circumstance stop him from getting it. Arguments heated the air for months before exploding during a board meeting, which ended when Ferdinand rose in anger and left. The company no longer wanted him. Lawyers would be called in to settle the rest.
Relocating to Stuttgart so that Ferdinand could take his new job was not easy for the Porsche family. Austria and Germany were very different worlds at that time. In Germany, the Porsches were considered foreigners. They had a strange accent and unusual ways. Upon signing his name, and including the initials of the bestowed Austrian professorship, Ferdinand Porsche was told the new initials attached to his name would have to be taken off: The degree from Vienna was not legitimate in Germany.
Ferdinand Porsche carrying his young son, Ferry, on his shoulders. (photo credit 10.1)
Things were no smoother for the rest of the family. Ferry found he didn’t f
it in with his classmates so well, and they ridiculed him. Louise was set on art school back in Vienna. Aloisia and Ferdinand thus put great efforts into building the family a special home, the “Porsche villa” they would call it, though it was more like a modest country home. Porsche designed part of it himself, and the house felt good to them all. It would become the center of their lives, a place of comfort and warmth.
Porsche too had a bit of a rocky start at work. The men at the Stuttgart factory (which Porsche insisted on calling a “workshop”) were not used to the boss being so hands-on. Paul Daimler, the man who had been their boss before Porsche, was a behind-the-scenes manager and had rarely shown his face on the floor. But Porsche was almost always in their midst. Stuttgart was a place where distance was a part of the work environment and certain lines were just not crossed. Porsche crossed them. The engineers in their clean white coats were offended when the plump little “professor” climbed under their test cars and growled at them for not having figured out things he could see quite clearly. They had to get their hands dirty, he said, and stop all this standing around.
Porsche was used to eliciting a strong response. He had no time to waste, however, and those who didn’t see his point were simply left behind. Some found him self-absorbed and rude, and whispered about his lack of education and his rough, country ways. Others, however, thought he was an inventive sage of some sort and respected him immensely, men who would follow Porsche anywhere. One such man was Karl Rabe.
In 1913, the twenty-year-old Rabe had been working at Austro-Daimler when he impressed Porsche by coming up with a solution to a design problem that had had everyone in the design office stymied for months, a problem having to do with how to provide adequate “claws” on the sides of military vehicles to help get them out of mud. The gentle, bespectacled Rabe came up with a beautifully simple design, and Porsche soon made him one of his right-hand men. But it was just this kind of behavior that made it easy for some to find fault with Porsche. He did not follow protocol. When Rabe was only twenty-four years old, for instance, Porsche promoted him to departmental chief of design, a position many older and more experienced men in the office felt belonged to them. But Porsche liked Rabe, and he trusted him. When Porsche left Austro-Daimler, Rabe had to stay in Austria for the time being, but the two would surely meet again.
