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

by Andrea Hiott

  Today such a note would be sent via email. In 1947, each copy was typed and hand-delivered. Imagining Bill that day, I can’t help but think of those painful opening moments in the film Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise’s character Jerry is so inspired by his new ideas for bringing honesty and personal relationship into the sports agency where he works that he stays up all night to type and print his mission statement (titled The Things We Think and Do Not Say). He arrives early the next day and puts a copy in each person’s mailbox, confident that he has had an epiphany, and that, upon reading his words, his colleagues will have the same feeling. Instead, Jerry finds it to be one of the most embarrassing moments of his life: No one seems to have a clue what he is talking about. Bill, like Jerry, discovered that thinking strange is rarely easy. The very reason it is “strange” is because, for a while (sometimes a very long while) there are few others who “get” what you’re talking about or who are willing to jump in and do the hard work with you. Bill’s memo would garner a similar reaction to Jerry’s mission statement at first. But just as that moment in the film is actually the beginning of Jerry’s rise, so too was Bill’s memo, in many ways, the beginning of his.

  Ferdinand Porsche was being courted by the French. Not long after he’d returned from his American trial in 1946, a French official named Lecomte, a man who was working on behalf of the French politician Marcel Paul, knocked on Porsche’s door and invited him to come to an elegant spa town called Baden-Baden, a place with hot springs in the western foothills of the Black Forest that had been popular since the time of the Holy Roman Empire. The French authorities wanted to talk to Porsche about his People’s Car, Lecomte told him.

  At first, Porsche was skeptical and politely declined. Lecomte was persistent, however, and knocked on his door again a few weeks later, this time with a trusted German engineer in tow. While Ferry continued to doubt, Porsche couldn’t help but feel excited; maybe the invitation is legitimate, Ferdinand told his son. His son-in-law Anton agreed: If the German engineer—a man Porsche had worked with in Stuttgart—believed the offer was legitimate, then maybe it was.

  At that time, Porsche had no way of knowing what was happening at the VW plant he had worked so hard to build. He was not allowed to return to Germany, let alone the factory in Wolfsburg. The rumor was that the VW plant was being used as a proxy for British vehicles, but that it would soon be dismantled and closed. That meant, after all these years, Porsche would not see the production of his little car. Thus, it’s understandable that he would want the French proposal to be a real one. And in some ways, it was. But Ferry wanted to be cautious; he decided he would go to Baden-Baden first and meet with the French. Once he was sure it was legitimate, his father could join him.

  Ferry’s initial trip was a good one, and he returned to his father in Zell am See in good spirits. It seemed to him that the French were sincere, and he felt confident enough about it to ensure his father the coast was clear. What Ferry couldn’t have known, however, was that not everyone in France was necessarily on the same side in those chaotic, postwar days. Ferry met with one group, but there was a whole world of political maneuvering and jealousy raging between French carmakers, not to mention between politicians trying to gain a foothold after the war. The Porsches were stepping into the middle of a very ugly fight.

  In high spirits, Ferry, Ferdinand, and Anton Piëch all piled into one of Porsche’s cars and made their way to the beautiful spa town near the border of France. Wined and dined by the French, the men had a good time together and let themselves relax a bit. After Porsche talked with the French commission, and then privately with Ferry and Anton, he decided he would do as the French asked. Once again, he would embark on a project to build a Volkswagen. The next morning, details were sorted out over a breakfast of French pastries and champagne. It would take two days for communication to get to Paris and return. Relax and enjoy the spa for the weekend, the French officials told Porsche. Word will arrive soon.

  To everyone’s surprise, there was a knock at the door within days. Ferdinand opened it excitedly, only to find a group of French policemen standing outside. Without any word of explanation they arrested Porsche along with Ferry and Anton. Soon, they found themselves locked in a dreary cell that had been used by the Nazi SS up until the end of the war. Lecomte hadn’t expected such a turn of events either. He kept repeating that there must be some mistake, and promised that he would alert the rest of Porsche’s family. In a state of panic, Lecomte drove back to Austria to talk to Aloisia and Louise. He assured them that everything was fine and that this would all clear up very soon.

  In some ways, however, things would never be clarified. Even today, it’s hard to say exactly what happened in those convoluted months after the war. In France, it had become clear that the next step in automotive business was to motorize the masses and a mad rush began to get there first. Porsche’s idea of a whole new type of automobile, one that was not just a miniaturized version of the elite old cars, but rather an original rhythmic whole, had gone from impossible to inevitable. Having worked on such a design and tested it endlessly for so many years, Porsche was clearly the man who had the technological answers that so many now desired. But that same expertise was also seen by some as a threat.

  The French automotive world was chaotic. Having been occupied by Germany during the war, some of France’s automotive men had cooperated with the Nazis, and some had not. Now that the Nazis were gone, it was a scramble to try to piece together stories and reputations. Just before Porsche’s arrest, the French carmaker Louis Renault had also been arrested (by the French) for war crimes. According to one account, it was Renault who had supplied the Allies and it was Peugeot who had supplied the Nazis. According to another version, it was just the opposite. In any case, the already ailing Renault was taken from his villa and placed in a jail cell where he died (or was murdered, depending on which story you hear) within a month. Now Ferdinand Porsche was in a similar position: The French wanted his plans for the Volkswagen, or they wanted the threat of competition he posed to be contained.

  Trying to distance himself from the Nazis, automotive executive Jean Peugeot had charged Ferdinand Porsche with war crimes. Upon his arrest, Ferdinand was accused of violating the 1907 Hague Convention that dealt with the treatment of prisoners of war. It was claimed that Porsche had abused the men at Peugeot’s automotive plant after it had been seized by the Nazis and placed under Porsche’s command. Porsche did have frequent contact with men at the Peugeot plant, including Jean Peugeot himself. Ferry would later claim that Peugeot willingly helped the Nazis and made a lot of money working for the Germans during the war. But Peugeot also visited The Town of the Strength through Joy Car once, at which time the Gestapo tried to arrest him, so it’s not clear that Peugeot and the Nazis were on the best of terms. And yet, the reason Peugeot was not arrested was because Porsche intervened on his behalf and helped him get safely back to Paris! And it had been Porsche who had convinced German officials not to remove workers from the Peugeot plant in France and force them to work in Germany: It’s better if they can1 stay near their homes and families, Porsche argued; A man is more productive when he is near his home and his wife.

  The question of Porsche’s participation with the forced labor is a difficult one, much like it was for Nordhoff at Opel and for Volkswagen as a company once it emerged from the war. It must be said that the Porsche family certainly knew that forced labor was being used at the Volkswagen plant, and Porsche’s own Stuttgart workshop was likely employing forced laborers and prisoners of war as well, considering that in 1933, Porsche had employed 23 men, but by the middle of the war in 1943, he was responsible for a staff of 600. By all reports, the workers were modestly paid and well fed: Porsche felt they did their best work that way, and it was their work he was interested in. According to one account, when he happened to be at the Volkswagen factory as a large group of emaciated Russians arrived, he flew into a rage upon seeing their condition, took pictures of them,
and went to the Wolf’s Lair to show the photos to Hitler. How can men do any work if they have to live like this? Perhaps it was a clever way for Porsche to get the men some help, or perhaps he was simply focused on producing as much as he could: Either way Hitler acquiesced, and for a time Volkswagen laborers were fed by the factory’s own farms, and, according to Ferry Porsche, food became decent enough for the Nazi officials to complain that workers were being “pampered,” which was of course a terrible warping of the truth, but perhaps comparatively accurate.

  In any case, Porsche had been complicit in the use of forced labor, to the extent that every executive of any factory in Germany had been complicit during the war. The amount of punishment this kind of complicity deserved is exactly the issue that the Allies were confronting as they occupied Germany and tried to proceed with denazification. To some extent, everyone in Germany, merely by being a part of that nation, was guilty. To an even greater extent, everyone who had worked in an industry during the war had worked for the Nazi Party, whether they had joined that party or not, because all such companies had been taken over by the government. It would have been nearly impossible to place all those people in jail; after all, wouldn’t that include not only the executives, but each individual worker as well? And trying to pursue such an inherently ambiguous project, as the British were adamantly stating, could possibly lead to some further uprising, or to a very weak and incapacitated Europe at the least. It was a situation that was excruciating on both a psychological and an economic level. In any case, Porsche was held by the French on pretenses not of the condition of laborers in Germany, but of those in Nazi-occupied France, and he was being held without a trial. Once again, Porsche’s dream of seeing his car produced seemed to have met its end.

  Around this same time, Ghislaine, Porsche’s British nephew, was put on trial in Britain for being a traitor, but was then acquitted and released. Upon making his way back to Germany, one of the first people he wanted to see was his uncle, but when Ghislaine arrived at the workshop in Gmünd, Karl Rabe had to tell him the unfortunate news. Upon hearing what had happened, Ghislaine rushed to Baden-Baden and found his uncle in jail, just as Rabe had said, so he stayed in the town and took to bringing Porsche home-cooked meals each day (a woman in town cooked them for him), having to bribe the guards to get into the jail with every visit, and then bribe them again to get back out. But some French authorities began pressuring Ghislaine too, threatening him and threatening his uncle’s life. During one of his visits to the jail, Porsche told Ghislaine it was time to get another country involved: He should go to the British and tell them the whole story from beginning to end, and ask for their help.

  Anton was still in the same jail as Porsche, but Ferry, as Porsche’s son and heir, had been separated from them in hopes that the younger man would talk. Ferry was taken to a nearby spa in the Black Forest, where a different set of French officers tried to schmooze VW secrets from him. He was kept under constant surveillance, but because of his sweeter, softer ways, he was treated much better than his father. Even so, Ferry refused to give any information about the Volkswagen: “My thoughts are with my family,” he reportedly said. “And a prisoner is not a colleague. There’s no true collaboration when it involves a gun.”

  Back at the Porsche homestead, Rabe and Louise were running the workshop and trying to keep Aloisia healthy and calm. Louise was as tough as her father (maybe even tougher), with a piercing intellect and clarity that could be daunting to those she knew. Now, with both her father and her husband in jail, she held the home together, and she played a very big role assisting Rabe in the business affairs as well. Together, they were able to house, clothe, and feed hundreds of workers and keep the business profitable. In December 1946 there were 222 people working for Porsche in Gmünd. Only 53 of them were executives and engineers, which means many of them were likely former laborers who had come with them from Stuttgart and stayed.

  On March 17, 1946, Ghislaine reappeared at the Porsche home in Zell am See, trailed closely by Lecomte, who had now grown desperate and no longer seemed to have the safety of Porsche foremost on his mind: He too wanted the plans to the Volkswagen. Late that night, Ghislaine, Louise, and Rabe sat together around the kitchen table and tried to come up with a plan. There was no way they were handing the VW plans over to the French, Rabe said. Louise agreed: Giving up the plans would do nothing to bring their family back home. They needed to try for the British again; after all, the Volkswagen factory was in their zone. They might see the plans for the car as their property. Ghislaine had already gone once to see the British officials, but nothing had come of it.

  But now he left again, driving forty miles out of the Alps, Lecomte still in tow. And the British finally took interest in the situation, though it was not quite in the manner Ghislaine had hoped. While Lecomte was eventually banished from Germany, Ghislaine himself was also arrested and handed over to intelligence officers, where he was questioned constantly for nearly a week and then placed in an internment camp. Once again, the British wondered at his excellent English, and they were also suspicious about what was really taking place between Porsche and the French. Karl Rabe, Aloisia, and Louise waited back in Austria, still with no word or idea of what was happening. Now four Porsche men were in prison and under examination, and all of it was over the plans for one little car.

  Meanwhile, back in the Grey Advertising offices in New York, there had been little response to the memo Bill had sent, his version of The Things We Think and Do Not Say. Bill was realizing that there were simply a lot of people in the advertising business who were not ready for his ideas, and there was a reason that people think things they are afraid to say: Taking such a risk can be potentially alienating. After the memo he sent about “blazing new trails,” there was no outpouring of agreement, no collective sigh of relief; if he’d thought his memo was going to change anything at Grey, he was wrong. Nevertheless, there were a few who understood what he wrote. They came to him quietly over the next few months, and they came up with a plan. If they couldn’t change things at Grey, they probably wouldn’t have much luck anywhere else: It was doubtful any big agency would have given Bill’s memo a serious look. The more they talked about it, the more they realized that if they really wanted to change things, they’d have to strike out on their own.

  One of the first people to express solidarity with Bill was the calm and cool Phyllis Robinson.1 She’d originally been in the fashion promotion section, but Bill had noticed her creative work and brought her into copywriting with him. Robinson was talented, young, and confident; she didn’t have to search for ideas, they just came. She’d graduated from Barnard College in 1942 and began her career writing plays and musicals around Broadway. She had poise, a no-nonsense but elegant approach, evident in the colorful silk scarves she would wear to complement a simple gray dress, evident in the way she listened neutrally but completely and then gave an honest opinion of what she’d heard. Advertising felt simple to her. She was just good at it. Becoming part of the senior management at DDB seemed a natural step: The fact that she was a woman didn’t matter at all. It might have been unusual at the time, but it didn’t feel unusual to the unique team that was slowly forming.

  Robert Gage was a warm exceptionally talented young man who also strongly identified with what Bill had written, and he too had found great inspiration in the work of Paul Rand. If Rand had introduced Bill to the idea of collaboration and given him the desire to write copy in a way that could aspire to be artistic, then it was Gage, in his white shirts and simple ties, his hair neatly parted and combed but still unable to resist a curl, often taking pensive drags of a cigarette, that made Bill’s ideas come to life. It’s likely that Bill knew Gage would agree with the memo before he even sent it: His respect for Gage, and the interaction the two had at Grey, was one of the things that had given Bill his confidence in the first place.

  Phyllis could write. Gage had the artistic instinct. Bill had the guiding inspiration and energy. B
ut they needed partners, and preferably ones who could understand and generate capital. They needed someone with a strong mind for the practical side, someone who understood the business from an accounting point of view. And they needed someone experienced in dealing with clients, someone older, wiser; someone with contacts, someone who knew the field.

  Ned Doyle had already realized Bill Bernbach had potential. While his first impression of Bill was of “a nice little guy, very creative, with gold-rimmed glasses, a little on the scared side,”2 working with him at Grey and watching him rise through the ranks, Doyle couldn’t deny Bill’s unusual outlook and growing confidence. Like Bill, Doyle’s path to advertising hadn’t been clear-cut. He was the vice president of business accounts at Grey, but before that he’d been a captain in the Marine Corps and fought in the Pacific Rim during the Second World War. He’d played quarterback for his high school football team, and had gone to Fordham and studied law while juggling a job selling magazine space. He passed the bar in 1931, but stayed with selling magazine space because, oddly enough, he could make much more money there. Women were always attracted to Doyle, and he was attracted right back. The guys around the industry might say he was a player, a joker, but there was no one else they’d rather hear a story from, and when it came down to it, they always knew his word was word they could trust. Doyle seemed to know just about everybody in town, and nearly everyone was happy to take his call. He was good company, and genuine too. He didn’t like flattery, and he didn’t say things just to please. He knew he went overboard with the drinking and the flirting at times, and he’d admit as much.

  Bill looked up to Doyle in those years. Doyle was heroic, large in both physical stature and self-assurance. At Grey, Bill would often drop in and sit with Doyle in his office, learning from Doyle but also sharing his own ideas, using Doyle as a sounding board. And as Doyle listened, he began to realize that this “nice little guy” wasn’t so timid after all, that he could really identify with this man. So when Bill approached him about the new agency, Doyle was more than ready to go in as a partner. They now had Doyle and Bernbach for the masthead, but there would also be one more name.