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

by Andrea Hiott

  But it was probably not only the conflicting views and the souring of relations between Germany and the United States that made the visit with the legendary automotive man a rather cold one: Ford might also have been a bit distant with Porsche because at the very moment of their visit, he was in the midst of one of the hardest battles of his life, and his relations with Germany were tangled up in it. A newspaper Ford owned had published some terribly misinformed pieces about Jews, pieces with titles like “Does a Definite Jewish World Program Exist?” and “Will Jewish Zionism Bring Armageddon?” These articles were stupid and dangerous, to be sure, but one must realize that such stupidity did not mean Henry Ford wanted to exterminate Jews, as Hitler eventually would. Even so, it had been these articles, eventually published as a book called The International Jew, that had become one of Hitler’s favorite books, one he passed out to people on his staff. In 1926, Ford had issued a public apology about his campaign against the Jewish people, but not everyone believed he was sincere.

  Thus, Ford was getting lumped together with Hitler, and many felt that he wasn’t doing enough to change that view. In fact, Ford sometimes seemed to have turned into a different man altogether. Whereas he had once been considered an international hero and the most popular man in America, he was now the recipient of a lot of animosity, and it had made him bitter.

  A lot of that bitterness came from his problems with his workers. Workers had once been Ford’s main focus and his most loyal fans. But things had changed, and conditions in the plants had not evolved; indeed, they had worsened. Ford was not the only automaker in the States experiencing such problems. The whole country was experiencing a wave of uprisings. Workers had started forming groups and asserting their rights in ways corporations and the government could no longer avoid. By the end of the 1930s, those problems that Nordhoff’s old professor, Georg Schlesinger, had noticed back in the 1920s had now become political problems that threatened chaos and violence in Detroit.

  The national economy of the United States was changing and with it, so were expectations for a better quality of life: Industry, especially automotive industry, was an essential part of that. President Roosevelt understood this, and in an attempt to alleviate the tension, he established the Automobile Labor Board. This board conducted hearings that scrutinized the production centers and factories of automotive companies all across the country, exposing subhuman working conditions, hours, and pay. Until this point, workers had no legal representation, as unions were not sanctioned. Their treatment within the factories had gone unheeded and had thus deteriorated. Roosevelt’s administration worked to pass controversial laws that would protect workers: The National Industrial Recovery Act and the Wagner Act gave American workers the right to organize legally. The Congress of Industrial Organizations was formed, and from this, the United Automobile Workers Union, known as the UAW, gathered workers from all the major automotive companies together in 1935 in an open campaign demanding adequate working conditions and pay from the corporations that employed them. In 1936, the UAW took on the nation’s largest corporation—GM. A forty-four-day sit-down strike against General Motors began in Flint, Michigan, and swept across the nation to other General Motors plants. The strikes turned violent. The public opinion of General Motors began to suffer—which meant business began to suffer—so the company acceded to the workers’ demands and met with the UAW to officially work out a deal. It was the first time an automotive workers union had been recognized by a major company as having a direct say in their conditions, of where and for how much they worked. Many business owners felt Roosevelt had given the workers too much power, and at their expense. The proper balance between the workers and their bosses was still being sought.

  Henry Ford resisted the United Automobile Workers Union for as long as he could, but in the spring of 1937, that resistance erupted into violence, sparking an event now known as the Battle of the Overpass, a day when members of the Auto Worker Union clashed with Ford’s security force. Men and women from the unions were beaten and thrown down steps. Much of it was recorded in photographs. One man’s back was broken. Ford was soon charged and ordered into court. The company claimed that the entire thing—even the back breaking—had been staged by the union, but Ford signed an agreement with the UAW nevertheless.

  Porsche and the others visiting the United States on that 1937 learning trip were oblivious to this rioting and violence that had occurred just months before their arrival at Ford. Their eyes were trained on different things; they wanted a River Rouge of their own—the factory, and its machines and technology, was the filter for what they experienced there. Their notes are unemotional and precise. In one of the voluminous notebooks of thoughts and ideas from this time, Ghislaine wrote:

  There are 75,000 Ford workers employed at the River Rouge plant, and 140,000 in the United States … Ford is the only large company in the USA that hires Negroes and Whites without distinction in its plants. The Negroes are primarily assigned to physically hard tasks, such as in the forge and the foundry.8

  The new Volkswagen factory would use Ford’s River Rouge plant as its structural and technological model, but it was taking its cues from American plants in more ways than one, and it would take them to even uglier extremes. Whatever lessons Ford was learning were lessons Germany would have to learn for itself, and even more violently. In a more extreme echo of Ghislaine’s notes, the technical director and general manager of the Volkswagenwerk in 1941, Otto Dyckhoff, would deliver a lecture entitled “Automation in Production, with Special Reference to the Volkswagen Plant”:

  Automated operations require a workforce composition differing from that used in normal operations … The actual machine operators … can be unskilled workers or trained on the job, since German skilled workers will regard mere insertion and removal of production pieces as beneath them.… In the not-too-distant future, we anticipate using more primitive people from the East and the South to operate the automatic machines, while making better use of our more highly qualified workers to set up machines and as toolmakers.9

  As had been the case during America’s industrialization, great amounts of workers would be needed and would be thought of as a “mass” rather than as individuals: It was easier to avoid the inhuman connotations of this thought process if the mass was from a faraway place or of a different race. The assembly-line production employed at the factory and this mind-set would, for a while, go hand in hand. Ultimately, however, it would prove an impossible way to proceed economically, socially, and psychologically—just as Ford and America had learned, so too would Europe have to learn that to be profitable in the long-term, inhumane conditions could not endure. Ignoring basic human rights might produce more in the short-term, but it always inevitably proves to be an unsustainable, unprofitable path.

  Upon returning from this second trip to the United States, in much the same way he had been made a German citizen, Porsche was made an official member of the NSDAP. And while he never officially signed his Nazi card—though he was prompted and urged numerous times to do so—there is no denying that he had made a Faustian bargain. Having the chance to build his own car in its own factory was the undisclosed dream of Porsche’s life; it was also the beginning of the end for him.

  Hitler sounds nearly schizophrenic at the 1939 Berlin Auto Show as he makes a sincere plea to German drivers to be more careful on the streets. It is extremely distressing, he says, that the death toll from traffic accidents has risen so sharply during his rule. The number of Germans killed by cars has reached the same number of deaths that occurred in the Franco-Prussian War. This cannot be tolerated, he tells the audience: Anyone who causes a traffic accident is “an unscrupulous criminal1 who sheds the precious blood of the nation.” In the next five years, millions of Germans would die in Hitler’s war, but he was lecturing them about traffic accidents.

  There were no angry words at the 1939 Auto Show for the other companies of the RDA, though. All of that was in the past. The Volkswage
n was on its way to production now. The factory was planned and rising, and once completed, the towering brick façade would be unlike anything that had ever been built in Germany. Modeled on the American style that had been pioneered by Henry Ford’s chosen architect, Albert Kahn, the huge rooms were built to be spacious and bright. The Volkswagen factory, like Ford’s factory at River Rouge, was a stark contrast to the dark, tight factory spaces that had come before: This new style of factory had a “sense of spaciousness almost unmarred by interior columns.”2 They were, and still are, majestic pieces of architecture that catch and hold the eye.

  A promotional flier for the 1939 Berlin Auto Show, with an illustration of the Strength through Joy Car. (photo credit 19.1)

  In the shadow of this looming factory, an entirely new town would eventually rise: The Town of the Strength through Joy Car. Designs for it were already being made, having been delegated by Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer, to a young architect named Peter Koeller. Under Nazi patronage, thirty-year-old Koeller was told to design a “workers’ city” to accommodate 90,000 inhabitants, one that would accentuate the factory and its automobile. In his designs, Koeller looked at the empty farmland and tried to predict what functional traffic patterns might emerge there once a motorized population arrived. With Nazi social-utopian ideas in mind, Koeller wanted to meld a “return to nature”—an idea popular at the time that prescribed living close to the earth and growing one’s own fruits and vegetables as the native tribes once did—with the industrialization of city life and autobahns. He resolved this seeming contradiction by creating a town that had forested housing communities and estates dotting its circumference, all of which linked back through looping roads to the industrial heart. The diameter of this circle would be cut by the town’s main street, a line stretching from the factory up to a little hill known as the Klieversberg that formed the other visual boundary of the town. This long straight pathway would be the heart of the city, eventually replete with bakeries, grocery stores, small businesses, and clothing shops.

  Koeller aimed this main road at the car factory on purpose in order to connect the factory “visually with the center of town3 … and establish it in the consciousness of each citizen.” For that reason, even today, all subsequent developers have “considered this axis4 more or less sacrosanct.” This particular area had been chosen for the new town because it was close to the train line and close to the water—two things that would help when it came to transporting supplies and parts. The town was also located centrally in Germany, which would give everyone fairly easy access to come and pick up their new cars.

  It was an extraordinary project, and an expensive one, which is precisely why Hitler had chosen the German Labor Front to fund it, headed by the hard-drinking Ley. In fact, it was from the German Labor Front that the town and the car got their names: Since motorizing the population was inherently tied to ideas of labor and recreation, Hitler felt he’d found the perfect match in the division of the Labor Front known as Strength through Joy. This particular division of Ley’s organization dealt with holidays and free-time activities. Strength through Joy offered an array of carefully chosen cultural activities and opportunities to travel, always accenting the idea of the Volksgemeinschaft, the people’s community: The trips were supposed to unite people through participation. By calling the new car the “Strength through Joy Car,” and the town “The Town of the Strength through Joy Car,” Hitler and Ley attached the Volkswagen to the usual Strength through Joy mottos such as “Service not Self,” and made it feel like a community project.

  Ferdinand Porsche (left front), Robert Ley (center front), leader of the Nazi German Labor Front, and the city’s young architect Peter Koeller (right front) walking through The Town of the Strength through Joy Car, 1938. (photo credit 19.2)

  From the very beginning, Robert Ley loved the idea of the Volkswagen, calling it “the greatest social work of all time,” and Hitler’s “great pet.” To Hitler’s immense delight, Ley threw himself into the work of promoting the car, using the Labor Front and Strength through Joy as a public relations company for it, and launching an unprecedented ad campaign with posters, speeches, and toys. As part of this great propaganda push, another thirty prototypes of Hitler’s “pet” were built for exhibition purposes and sent through Germany—sometimes with Ferry Porsche at the wheel—on special motor tours that paraded through town and village streets. Exhibitions were held so people could see the cars up close: Wagnerian sets and sunbursts gave these exhibitions the feeling of a fairy tale. Leaflets given out at the shows called it The Strength through Joy Car, as willed by the Führer.

  The fantasy was exciting, as fantasies often are. In reality, no cars were anywhere near the point of being produced. But there were grand plans. The first massive hall of the factory would be ready by the end of 1939, and two further equally large halls were supposed to be added in the following three years. Just the first section alone was designed to be larger than any other car factory of the time. According to the plan, a hundred thousand vehicles were to be produced before the end of 1940, and then two hundred thousand more in 1941. This would need a workforce of more than seventeen thousand men each working two shifts. By the final phase, thirty thousand workers would be making close to one million Volkswagens each year. As there were nowhere near enough customers in Germany to sustain such a plan, Hitler expected to export more than half of those cars (which, in large part, meant he expected to sell them in the countries he was preparing to conquer).

  All that was an elaborate dream, however. The reality of 1939 was that The Town of the Strength through Joy Car was still a pasture with one giant brick building rising out of it and none of the necessary manpower to run such a plant. For that reason, training camps for German workers were set up in the nearby town of Brunswick instead, and recruitment began. As it was hard to find German workers to come and build the town—Germany had full employment now—Italy’s leader Mussolini sent three thousand Italians over to join the German workers and help build the factory; they were housed in makeshift wooden barracks. Overseen by Ley’s Nazi forces, they swarmed toward the canal each morning and back again each night. The popular German magazine Der Spiegel reported that “Chianti bottle and dagger ruled”5 alongside the “crocodile whip in the wooden watchtower of the SS.” There was also talk of all the babies of “Mussolini’s unemployed” that soon began to appear in women’s arms along nearby German streets.

  Needless to say, the Volkswagen project had turned into an extravagant enterprise. The scale of the project would have been impossible for any other car company in Europe, but even for the German government it was not an easy task. By the end of 1939, the plant had already cost 215 million RM, and only eighty percent of the first section was complete. For that reason, Robert Ley came up with another way of getting immediate funds—the Strength through Joy Car Savings Book Plan. Perhaps drawing on ideas from the United States first initiated by General Motors and their installment plans, the Volkswagen Savings Book Plan was a noncancelable and nontransferable contract with the German government. It was created, Ley said, to help Germans save their money6 for the purchase of a car: The people would pay about $2 a week (5 RM). For every such payment, they were given a stamp to place in their booklet. Once that booklet was full of stamps, the customers could come to the factory and receive their car.

  The idea was drenched in expectation: There was so much propaganda leading up to its introduction that on the day the stamp books were officially available, long lines snaked around the post offices where the books could be purchased. In practice, however, trying to keep up with the stamps would eventually prove too difficult for most people: the fee of two dollars a week was still beyond their budgets and had to be lowered to two dollars a month. That meant a subscriber could expect to have his or her car in about sixteen years! Nonetheless, 253,000 German citizens subscribed to the program before the war broke out. And another 83,000 Germans would sign up even after the war ha
d begun, pushing a total of 267 million RM into the Nazis’ Strength through Joy Car account.

  Once the factory was up and the machines ordered from America were flowing in to fill the rooms, Porsche wanted to be as close as possible while things were gearing up for the production of his car. He found a clearing he liked on the Klieversberg, the hill that is the city’s highest point, and had a lonely little cabin built for himself there, fir trees and wilderness all around. From the back door of this cabin, he could step out and look over the space that would eventually be the town and watch the factory rising in the distance just over the canal. Porsche planted yellow tulips in the cleared area around his house. On their off days, some of the guys liked to hunt in the forests behind Porsche’s hut. Ferdinand often went on those expeditions, but according to a later story told by Ferry, “nothing would induce him to pull the trigger.”7 He’d shot a roebuck once, and that had been the end of it.

  By 1939, all the things Porsche had wished for seemed to be coming true. More than $12 million had been spent on testing and perfecting his Volkswagen design, and in the midst of all this, a rounded little car had appeared. It looked plump, to be sure, but in reality there was hardly an extraneous inch of metal or steel to be found on it. The car had been tested and tweaked more than any other single car model in history to that point, and it was now as simple and precise as a Mies van der Rohe chair, its headlights a little larger than most, perhaps, giving it a perpetual look of youth. A majestic factory was being built for it, as was an entire city. For Porsche and his car, things looked good. Few on his team expected that the darkest times were drawing near.