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

by Andrea Hiott

  In the meantime, Porsche’s daughter, Louise, had gone off to school as well, choosing to study art in Vienna. While there, she’d also fallen in love with a young lawyer whom Porsche had hired back in Austria to help him settle some disputes with Daimler when he’d had to leave the company. The hearty man’s name was Anton Piëch, and not only would he become Porsche’s son-in-law, he would also be a business partner in the new consultancy and a trusted friend. For Porsche, work was inseparable from his private, family life.

  Porsche and his colleagues moved back to Germany to prepare their new business in December of 1930, just at the time that Hitler’s party was starting its fated comeback and rise. On April 25, 1931, the first company to ever carry the Porsche name was entered into the official registry of Stuttgart as the Dr. Ing. h. c. F. Porsche Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, Konstruktionen und Beratungen für Motoren und Fahrzeugbau, or, the Dr. Professor Porsche Company for the Assembly, Consultation, and Design of Automobiles and Engines. Louise and her husband, Anton Piëch, invested 15 percent of the funds necessary to open the business. Porsche himself contributed 70 percent of the capital, and the remaining 15 percent was invested by a Jewish man named Adolf Rosenberger,4 a man who—due to the rise of Hitler—would soon have to escape the country.

  Ferdinand’s daughter, Louise, with her husband, Anton Piëch, and her cousin, Ghislaine Kaes (left). Anton would later become the head of the Volkswagen factory, while Ghislaine served as Porsche’s valued secretary and personal assistant for most of Porsche’s life. (photo credit 13.1)

  Porsche5 wasted no time in getting to work on a Volkswagen. In that first year, he worked on a small car design for a man named Fritz Neumeyer. Neumeyer was the head of Zuendapp, a successful motorcycle company, and he was known to talk about his ideas for what he called a Volksauto. He and Porsche met as motorcycle sales began to slump in 1931 and Neumeyer felt ready to try out ideas for a Volkswagen instead. The Porsche guys called this Zuendapp commission Project 12. It would be Porsche’s first attempt at building not a small luxury wagon or a small racing car but rather a whole new kind of vehicle, one that could compete on all levels with the more luxurious cars of the time but that would be affordable for the common man. Porsche and his team already had a kind of ideal image of the car in mind, and sketches soon littered the shop as they tried to make their own ideas materialize, each of them brainstorming and experimenting with all aspects of the car. As it began to come together, Project 12 looked strikingly different from the long, right-angle civilian automobiles that Porsche had designed in the past. This one had a strange shape to its back, and a body draped over rear wheels like half-closed eyelids. The exaggerated curve of the car’s body dropped into plump fenders, the effect being one of an unusual simplicity and line. Their final sketch was for a streamlined two-door body, its engine in the rear, and a spare tire up front.

  The future Beetle is slowly taking shape (sketch from 1933). (photo credit 13.2)

  Looking at the drawings and sketches from this time, one can’t help but see that the Beetle’s personality (so to speak) is already there, but has not yet fully emerged. There is a familiar face in it, blurry, but coming into focus. Here is an iconic image in its rawest form, a little chick that has just been born but not yet grown; clumsy, wobbling, but sure to make its mark. It’s just a car, of course, and there were plenty of ideas going around for streamlining at the time that were similar to it—but none of those sketches became “The Love Bug,” so it’s hard not to see it as a kind of “family resemblance,” as if one is looking at photos of the ancestors of a good friend. In fact, following that same idea, it really does feel as though every Beetle ever made has actually been only one car, the same car living a million different lives in a million different shades. But back in 1931, the car didn’t yet exist in that form. Its characteristics were still developing; nothing was set. And there were plenty of problems.

  While many good ideas emerged in all the early brainstorming, the guys in the Porsche workshop had trouble getting those ideas to gel as a unit, to hold together in real life. Porsche and his team found that if they perfected one part of the car, another would then slip beyond their control. As they experimented with suspension systems, the engines and torsion bars would sputter and leak hot oil, gears would snap, slivers of steel would shatter like ice. Cars would run too hard, or just stop dead in their tracks.

  But as frustrating as the process was at times, in the long run, such experimentation had its rewards. In the process of creating this car, the Porsche workshop invented a workable torsion bar, for example, and the patent they received for this helped bring in funds and customers. In addition, there were sketches for a flat three- or four-cylinder engine that would not need water to be cooled, but early attempts at this engine proved frustrating and flawed. Cooling an engine by air was a rather new idea at the time (a Czech company named Tatra7 had been the first to try it), but Porsche could not get away with every idea he had, and Neumeyer insisted on a water-cooled five-cylinder radial engine instead. The gearbox would go in front of the axle, and the car would run about 25 hp from 1,000 cc. Amid the workshop clutter, there were also sketches on how to perfect the weight-bearing springs of the suspension system between each set of wheels and for a windshield glass that would sit straight up rather than having any slant or curve.

  Though the shop had other projects in the works as well, Porsche was obsessed with getting the small car exactly right. He consumed any automotive writing he could find on new ideas of streamlining and weight, trying to rearrange all available theories into something new. By 1932, the Project 12 prototypes were ready to test and were sent all over the roads and through all sorts of trials, their inventors tweaking and adjusting them constantly, still trying to find just the right balance. All this testing took more funds than Neumeyer had allocated, but Porsche put his own money into the project, unable to stop. Adolf Rosenberger, the firm’s investor and accountant, was often at his wit’s end with the professor, trying to get him to stay within the monetary bounds. At one point, Porsche even went so far as to borrow on his own life insurance in order to pay the salaries of his men. Sometimes those salaries came a few days late, and sometimes they felt a great deal of stress over this, but none of them quit: they were caught up in the energy now too, and they were doing what they loved.

  But when Neumeyer saw the prototypes, he wasn’t sure what to make of Porsche’s car. Something felt off. It didn’t help matters that motorcycle sales had also picked up again, and like so many others in Germany, Neumeyer was thinking maybe it was better to stick with what he knew already worked; it would have been very difficult for him to produce a small car and still make a profit. In the end, Porsche and his engineers were fully paid but the project was canceled; they would not get to see their car produced. Porsche was frustrated but rolled right through that frustration: He already had another project lined up. This one was for a company called NSU. The story was the same: NSU was a motorcycle company flirting with venturing into the business of automobiles, wondering if a mass-produced car for everyman might be the way to break in. In the workshop, the Porsche engineers called the NSU car Project 32, because it was 1932 by then, and they slid all the designs6 and ideas from Project 12 into this new prototype.

  The prototype of the NSU car designed by Porsche’s firm but never produced. It already has that familiar aerodynamic rounded hood. (photo credit 13.3)

  They initially had more experimental freedom with this car than the Zuendapp job had allowed and the result was that the car got even odder-looking, the edges further curved, the front even softer. With Project 32 they were also able to try out their designs for an air-cooled engine, one that could be mounted in the back of the car rather than up front. Three prototypes were built and tested and the workshop bustled, but word came that this project would be canceled too. The pattern felt relentless. NSU got cold feet, and they claimed they’d forgotten about a former contract that kept them from building sma
ll cars. Just like so many before, NSU decided to stay in the motorcycle business where it was safe: At the time, Germany had the biggest motorcycle market in the world. All this hesitation was agonizing for Porsche’s team, but the intense trial and error would not go to waste. Porsche and his men were innovating and tweaking with every seeming failure they experienced, and the overall design was getting better and better as a result. Porsche had been in business for only a year and a half, and he’d already gotten closer to building his Volkswagen than he had in the past decade of working for other firms.

  A politician’s first moves in office are watched carefully, thus it was telling that in his initial days as chancellor, Hitler showed up at the Berlin Auto Show to give a speech. It was also no accident that the theme of this show was The Will to Motorization. Before Hitler, no German chancellor had ever attended any such automotive event. But on February 11, 1933, less than two weeks after coming to office, Hitler stood before Germany’s top automotive men and promised that the motor car would be one of his party’s primary concerns. “The motor vehicle,”1 he said, “has become, next to the airplane, one of humanity’s most ingenious means of transportation … The German nation can be proud in knowing that it has played a major part in the design and development of this great instrument.…” And yet, Hitler went on to say, Germany has fallen behind in the automotive market and it was time to take steps to rectify that. There would be no more debate and hesitation, Hitler promised, and he would underline these comments at the following Auto Show of 1934. Starting immediately, he wanted Germany to embark on two major projects: The first was road construction, and the second was a car that could be owned and driven by the common man.

  His first automotive speeches shocked the German automotive world. Not only did Hitler promise tax relief for all auto companies, he also promised more money for racing cars, more resources allocated for motoring events, and less interference from state government when it came to owning and building cars. Hitler was going to take such concerns out of the hands of the state governments and put them into the hands of the national government instead. In his eyes, it was the previous Weimar (which in his mind meant Jewish, Communist, Capitalist, and Democratic) government that was to blame for Germany having fallen so far behind other countries when it came to the automobile. With his appointment as chancellor, that would change. No country could be strong if it was weak in transportation, he said. Roads, a new automobile, tax relief, subsidies, and incentives for race cars—it was a lot for a politician’s first full year in office, and the executives gathered at the Auto Shows didn’t know what to believe and what to dismiss: was this just politics, or was he serious? It was hard to tell.

  Included among those elite German automotive men who were following Hitler’s first automotive speech that cold winter day in 1933 was Heinrich Nordhoff, now a primary player on Opel’s automotive board. Hitler could be a captivating speaker, even Nordhoff would admit to that, but all the frenzy the new chancellor whipped up around him made it hard to see what was really there. On the one hand, Heinrich liked what Hitler was saying about automobiles, but he did not like or trust the rise of the National Socialists, or the frenzied feeling that was spreading through so many German streets and even affecting some of his peers. Heinrich hadn’t joined the Nazi Party, and he didn’t plan to now. For one thing, the party’s ideas threatened Nordhoff’s Catholic faith, something he held very dear. Hitler saw the power of the Church as a danger (priests were expected to obey Nazi dictates without question, including placing swastikas inside their churches).

  But for Nordhoff and his colleagues at Opel, there was another side to consider as well. Even before Hitler had been elected to office, a conflicted relationship between the GM-owned company and the Nazis had emerged. With Sloan’s company owning 80 percent of their shares, Opel was technically in the hands of the Americans, and Hitler found that deeply offensive. He saw it as a surrender: In his eyes, one of the crown jewels of German industry had been conquered by another land. Likewise, in the early years, there were many at Opel who did not like Hitler and were not afraid to say as much: In 1932, for instance, Opel executives refused to allow Hitler to use the Opel auto racing track for a campaign rally. It was something Hitler would not forget.

  Later that same year, Hitler’s henchman, Hermann Goering2—a man who also loved industry and automobiles—unabashedly told an American embassy official in Berlin that it would eventually become impossible for Opel to remain under American control: As soon as Hitler’s party came to power, Goering said, the National Socialists would take it back from GM. German companies had to be German-owned. It was a point Hitler had made early on: Even before coming to power, he had forced the members of the Nazi Automobile Club to sign an agreement promising they would not buy any foreign cars. He wanted German citizens to feel guilty if they participated in the global market: Instead, he felt Germany’s borders should be open to exporting, but largely closed when it came to what they took in. Hitler wanted an autarky, an expanded German landmass that would eat up more and more area and thus acquire more and more industry. The German economy, he insisted, must provide everything for itself.

  The feeling of hysteria that Nordhoff and many others felt descending on Germany was even more apparent a few weeks after Hitler’s first appearance at the Berlin Auto Show. On February 27, 1933, a terrorist attack sent fear soaring through Germany. The Reichstag, the main governmental building comparable to the Pentagon or the Capitol in the United States, was set on fire by a young man who had once been affiliated with the Communist Party. It would become a pivotal moment for the Nazis. After the fire, a sense of order and control was in demand, and Hitler parlayed that desire into a chance to give himself and his party much more control. In order to deal swiftly with those who were threatening Germany, the country must have a stronger executive, a führer, he said, and in the panic of it all, he was able to blame the Communists and push new legislation through; legislation that would in effect take power away from other branches of the German government and more fully localize it in him. It was such a perfect situation for the Nazis that many would later wonder if they’d started the fire themselves.

  In the following months, as the Führer Principle (Hitler’s belief that the will of the people could be expressed only through the will of their leader) rapidly moved toward becoming the law of the land, Hitler was careful to follow through on his campaign promises with incredible speed, keeping the trust of the people on his side. This was especially true when it came to transportation. In the summer of 1933, the Reich Automobile Law was passed, absolving German states of any responsibility in matters concerning the automobile. Now the construction of streets, the ability to tax auto companies, and all other such automotive decisions would be conducted at the national level. And having such control at the national level—and thus, in Hitler’s hands—did indeed produce speed: Three months after this law went into effect, and using plans that had been drawn up in the 1920s but gone unimplemented, widespread construction of the first modern German highways began. And Hitler was sure to be there for the groundbreaking. On September 23, 1933, the new chancellor earnestly shoveled out the first plot of earth of the coming autobahns. He was wearing his knee-high black boots, and he continually reached up to sweep his hair out of his eyes as he worked. He looked sincere: As the German magazine Die Strasse wrote at the time: “No symbolic groundbreaking,3 this was real work in the dirt.”

  In speeches that followed, Hitler tied the idea of national progress directly to the progress made in transportation: “Just as horse-drawn vehicles4 once had to create paths and the railroad had to build rail lines, so must motorized transportation be granted the streets it needs,” he said: “If in earlier times one attempted to measure people’s relative standard of living according to kilometers of railway track, in the future one will have to plot the kilometers of streets suited to motor traffic.…” The more roads that were built, the more the country would prosper. But pros
perity was not Hitler’s primary concern. There was another side to it too: The more roads the country had, the easier it would be to engage in war maneuvers, the smoother it would be acquire more Lebensraum, living space. It wasn’t as sly as it looked: For Hitler, motorization, war, and renewing Germany were interlinked, and he did not pretend otherwise. In the words of German automotive writer Wolfgang Sachs: “The erasure of stubborn differences5 was supposed to be effected by ‘eliminating opposition’ and the highways6 were the spatial expression of this venture.”

  Today, perhaps it is hard to understand what a bold move the autobahn project was, but the scale of the street construction project Hitler initiated was unprecedented. Again, like so many defining characteristics of the Nazi government, the idea of the autobahn was one Hitler co-opted from other sources (most notably from his hero Benito Mussolini). Still, when it came to the actual creation of a network of such highways, nothing had been done like it in any other country in the world. The plan called for 6,500 kilometers of road, about 4,039 miles. And in fact 3,500 kilometers (2,175 miles) of road would be built over the next seven years. It was a huge public works project, and it was described in grandiose terms: The Nazis spoke of these new roads as “monuments” and presented them as natural accentuations of the landscape. This view melded the Nazi Party’s philosophy of a return to nature with its philosophy of industrial progress in one fell swoop. One of their announcements called Not Roads, but Works of Art reads: “Nothing is to cramp or delay you in your7 swing from one horizon to the other, …” then adds that with highways the German landscape “will sparkle like a stone in an artfully wrought ring.”