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

by Andrea Hiott

  Thus Nordhoff told Colonel Radclyffe and Major Hirst that he’d have to say no for now; he was still waiting to hear what the Americans would say about Opel. They told him to think it over, that they’d try their offer again someday soon. In the days that followed, Nordhoff did wonder if he’d done the right thing. Especially when he opened his mailbox to find a letter from the American military government reiterating that no person who had been an industry manager in the time of the Nazis would be allowed into a position of management in the American Sector again. It was a standard letter, but it felt like an omen. He wondered if he should go to Wolfsburg and have a look. Contemplating, he called up an old colleague and asked if he might come by and talk some things over with him. He needed some advice. That friend would later recall how serious Heinrich had been, and how uncertain he was about taking the VW job. He also remembered that Heinrich had gone through the trouble of finding and purchasing a bag of coffee for him, something quite hard to come by at the time. Listening to his own thoughts and ideas pouring out as he talked to his friend, and listening to the man’s return advice, Heinrich made his way back home that night with his mind made up. He would go to Wolfsburg and see how it felt, and he would trust his intuition. But one thing was certain—if they offered him the job, it would have to be all or nothing for him. When Radclyffe finally called Heinrich a second time, Nordhoff accepted his invitation and began preparing to travel to the factory to meet Ivan Hirst.

  One thing about Nordhoff, he was easy on the eye. Something about him was so elegant and friendly. And his English was excellent, Ivan Hirst would later recount. At dinner with Hirst and his wife, Nordhoff made a strong impression. Hirst found him a relief. Heinrich was clean and well-kept, Hirst’s wife told Ivan later that night, and he seemed to bring a new air to all the mess. Hirst was as charmed by Nordhoff as his wife had been. Here was a man with a deep sense of technical knowledge, something Hirst had sorely missed in Münch. Hirst and Nordhoff spent two days together. The original idea was that Nordhoff might make a good technical director, but after their meetings and conversations, Hirst had something else in mind.

  According to the story Ivan Hirst told later, in their final meeting before Nordhoff was scheduled to leave, Hirst kept his head down and put on a serious face. “I’m sorry,” he told Nordhoff, “but I’m afraid I won’t be able to recommend you for the technical director job after all.” Heinrich slumped a moment, but recovered quickly, reaching down to pick up his briefcase. “Hold on a minute now,”2 Hirst said. “What I was going to say is that I’m going to recommend that our general director retire and that you be given that job instead.” Heinrich met his eye and smiled. “It’s not totally my decision in the end, though,” Hirst explained. “You’ll have to go and meet with Colonel Radclyffe first, and the rest of the British board.”

  Within a month, Heinrich had been to the main offices in Minden and met with the jovial Colonel Radclyffe and the other members of the Board of Control. Nordhoff and Radclyffe already knew each other from their phone conversations, but in person they felt a genuine warmness for each other and they got along well. A full background check was done on Heinrich—they had to be sure he had never joined the Nazi Party—but once he was cleared, they offered him a contract to become general director of the VW plant starting January 5, 1948. Nordhoff said yes, but only after a serious talk with Colonel Radclyffe: If he were to be put in charge, he’d need full authority, he said. That meant the British would have to recede from the daily managerial tasks. Radclyffe agreed. But, unaware of Nordhoff’s stipulation, Ivan Hirst was in for a shock.

  When Nordhoff arrived for his first day on the grounds, a subtle but noticeable change spread through the factory. He was friendly with Hirst, respectful, but over the Christmas holiday Heinrich had thought long and hard about what kind of mood needed to be set at the place. Bowing down to Hirst would not work. If he was going to be successful with the workers, with this factory, he was going to have to distance himself from everything that had come before, he thought, and that included the old German management and the British officers. Nordhoff would later say it was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do, but that it was necessary. It was his decision to make, and he’d been clear from the beginning with Radclyffe about his plans. He could have been clearer with Hirst, however, and with men like Hermann Münch. But Nordhoff knew how to be quiet and how to be aloof. In Hirst’s words, while Nordhoff was never cruel to him, he didn’t feel any “warmth of contact”3 coming his way. His relations with Nordhoff were “close but cold.” To Hirst, Nordhoff distanced himself from almost everyone even as he spent every waking moment at the factory. He worked incessantly, he slept in the plant, reading and thinking alone in the giant space each night, waking and giving each day his all, and yet, he also seemed inaccessible. He made the decisions; he didn’t discuss them.

  Hirst had not expected the change to be so swift, and he found himself wondering where his place was now: As much as he wanted what was best for the factory, and even though he’d known that someday he’d be expected to leave, there was also a part of him that imagined he’d find a permanent place in this world, somehow. But now, suddenly, a new man had arrived—a man he’d handpicked—and Hirst no longer felt needed. He had to search for things to do. Though he was officially supposed to be looking after Nordhoff and making sure he was up to the job—other German executives had tried before Nordhoff to work at the factory and had failed—it was obvious very quickly that in this case, the relationship had irrevocably flipped. From the very beginning, it was Hirst who reported to Nordhoff’s office. Heinrich also had all the English signs taken down and replaced with German ones again. The British did not try to stop him, and no one dared to complain.

  For Professor Porsche, 1947 had not been a good year. The French officials had eventually transferred both him and Anton out of Germany and into another jail in France. Keeping the men deep in France, it was reasoned, would give them more incentive to help design the cars. However, in the Black Forest, the other French officials had decided they’d had enough of the entire situation, and they released Ferry and let him return to Austria. Finally, Ferry was able to inquire about his father, and he soon discovered that both Porsche and Anton had been hidden away somewhere near Paris.

  Carmaker Louis Renault’s villa had been confiscated upon his arrest, and its attic had become the new prison for Anton and Porsche. They were kept there for nearly a year while Ferry, Karl Rabe, and Louise did all they could to try to get them released. Though they were treated well enough in Renault’s attic, they had little privacy; French engineers and officials came and went as they pleased, asking for Porsche’s automotive ideas and his advice. Nothing very tangible came from it all, however, largely because Porsche was such a different man when away from the only two things that mattered to him—his family and his workshop. When he did not have a medium and an outlet for his passion, it broke his enthusiasm and his spirit. He suggested a few basic changes to the Renault 4CV, but had no real hand in any part of its essential design. He needed to be creative on his own terms; it had always been that way for him.

  Seeing how futile their efforts were, the French finally grew weary of Porsche. In the spring of 1947, he and Anton were moved once again, this time to a damp and unheated dungeon in Dijon where they did not even have beds. Porsche, a man who thrived on working and collaborating, a man who was used to hot soups and pockets full of bread, a man who felt a deep and visceral tie to his environment and to the land and shelter he called home and was used to being cared for and attended to by a large family and a loving wife, was no longer able to cope. He wrote to Ferry that he was lonely and cold. His sentences grew shorter. He no longer issued any commands. In confinement, he was chilled and sick most of the time. One of the only visitors allowed to see him was a Benedictine priest who lived nearby. Perhaps Porsche talked to him about things he would never again tell a soul. He certainly had a lot of time to think. He was over seventy years old now
, and it didn’t look as though he’d ever see his own home again, much less the actual production of his car.

  The other men who had once worked with Porsche at the Volkswagen plant were also in jail now, or worse, dead. Robert Ley, the man who had headed the German Labor Front, and the Strength through Joy project, had been arrested along with other major Nazis and was to be tried at Nuremberg. From jail, he wrote to Henry Ford II asking for a job. He also desperately proposed a “conciliation court” between the Nazis and the surviving Jews, but before any of those requests were answered he committed suicide, using a towel to hang himself in his cell.

  Around the time of his birthday, in May 1945, Hitler’s old automotive consultant Jakob Werlin was arrested and put into an interment camp by U.S. soldiers. He was an SS Oberführer by then, party number 3208977. He was considered a principal offender and would remain in prison until November 1949. When he was released, he went back to work in the automotive industry, setting up a small Mercedes-Benz dealership that he called Jakob Werlin & Sons.

  Joeseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda during the Reich, committed suicide with his wife in the Hitler bunker. Their six children were given morphine to make them sleep, then tablets of cyanide were crushed in their mouths by Hitler’s doctor. The entire family died in the same room.

  Albert Speer was arrested and placed in jail until the Nuremberg Trials in Bavaria.1 There it was decided that he had contributed to the inhumane conditions of the concentration camps and forced laborers; he was found guilty of war crimes, but he did not receive the death sentence as most other top Nazi officials did at the time. Instead, he was given twenty years in prison. Speer was one of the few who accepted responsibility for his actions during the court’s proceedings, saying: “Who else is to be held responsible for the course of events, if not the closest associates around the chief of state?”2

  For many, there was a sense of closure that came from seeing men held accountable for the viciousness of their crimes. There was also something healing in the ability to put a face to the men who had been so intimately responsible for the war. In fact, it might have been these trials that allowed for the shift of mood that came to Germany in 1947, along with more magnanimous economic efforts like the Marshall Plan. The apocalypse had lingered for so long. After such darkness, when the light finally does begin to trickle back in, one sees paths that had not even seemed possible before.

  In the Tate Modern in London, a museum that sits on the south bank of the River Thames, it’s possible to walk in for free, ride up the escalator, and see a Paul Klee painting called Walpurgisnacht. This painting is a wash of swirling blues, adept but playful, and after looking at it for a moment, the dancing eyes of spirits materialize, tucked between its thick strokes. Klee’s title, Walpurgisnacht (Walpurgis Night), refers to a kind of “Day of the Dead” or Halloween-like holiday celebrated by some people in Germany. But Walpurgis Night is not a time for costumes and candy; rather it’s a night that celebrates the coming spring, a time for communing with nature, a time when spirits and fairies and witches might haunt the night. Observed mainly in the mountain towns of Germany now, people gather together to build bonfires and dance. It’s a potent night in German literature, playing a role in Goethe’s Faust as well as in The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.

  Walpurgis Night is also the night before the 1st of May (May Day). May 1 has a long history, having been previously celebrated in Wilhelmine Germany as “International Workers’ Day”; but the holiday took a bloody turn in 1929 as workers’ parties clashed and over thirty people were killed. Capitalizing on the split in workers’ parties at the time, the NSDAP used the disturbance to gain more support. Once the Nazis came to power, May 1 was transformed into an official national holiday, and was renamed “Day of Work” by Adolf Hitler. The Nazis made it into a mass event. Today, it is still called “Day of Work” in Germany, but it’s hard to say what the event is really about anymore. In Berlin, for example, there are usually riots that start on Walpurgis Night; in my experience, they have a young, anarchist feel, charged with energy, but vague in intent. One thing is certainly clear, though: While work was, and is, important in all countries, Germany has had an especially long history of meditating about it as an idea. A big part of this is well articulated by the close tie between Walpurgis Night and May Day; together, the two holidays are a matter of both spirit and body, and the line where they meet. Walpurgis Night is ethereal and easily romanticized, but May Day speaks to an inner, stolid self-reliance, a belief in the individual’s right and responsibility to contribute to his or her community. This contribution was an essential and uncompromising part of the German idea of labor, and every party that has come to power in the country has understood as much, especially the NSDAP. As it so happens, the evening of the day Adolf Hitler killed himself was the start of Walpurgis Night (April 30, 1945), and the following day was May 1, the Day of Work. And three years after his suicide, Hitler’s legacy had come to weigh heavily on Germany and its industries.

  Heinrich Nordhoff was experiencing this for himself at Volkswagen. He’d been on the job for five months, was still sleeping in the factory, and the problems were as numerous as ever. Wolfsburg and the plant were plagued by a lack of housing, a lack of raw materials, a lack of men, and a lack of motivation and unity. Because of all this lack, sometimes cars that were started could not even be finished; rubber door seals might suddenly be unavailable, or there would be a shortage of side panels to install. At one point the entire upholstery line had to shut down because there were no springs for the front seats. Some months, the turnover rate was more than 90 percent. The town, and the work, offered little incentive for people to stay.

  In part, this was because inflation had made money practically worthless, but there was also an imbalance in what Karl Marx called a “metabolism with nature,” the symbiosis between a person’s productivity and his or her inner experience of labor and work between the manual and the spiritual, body and mind. Nordhoff knew all about the problems that could arise when such a balance was off. He’d first studied the possibility of such complications in his days with Schlesinger, then had followed them from afar by paying close attention to the news about the labor and union fights at the leading factories in America (especially GM, as he was technically one of its employees). Now, he found himself face-to-face with them in his own factory. Nordhoff knew the VW factory workers were missing this: They had no real connection to the factory, the country, or the job.

  The very words “labor” and “work” had accumulated all kinds of connotations over the years, having been explicitly associated with the revolution, with Communism, and most recently with socialism and the Nazi regime. Work was still deeply important to Germans, but the relationship of that work to authority was tenuous. As Ivan Hirst had found upon his arrival, many workers were so used to being told what to do that taking initiative on their own did not come easily, and yet, there was also a lack of respect for authority, a lack of trust. The real difficulty faced at Volkswagen and elsewhere in the country was no longer how to mass-produce or whether mass production was necessary—the past ten years had made those things obvious—but rather how to do it in Germany again. How could German workers take pride in their craft? Feel a sense of loyalty without hurting anyone or being hurt? Would Germany ever again be able to think of itself as a positive contributor to Europe and the Western world? Because of Hitler, Germany was no longer respected or trusted by much of the Western community, and the situation was still volatile. Totalitarianism had been defeated in the war, but it was not necessarily dead. As the right-wing graffiti at the Volkswagen factory showed, that extremist tendency was still there, and it could rise again. The trick was figuring out how to ease into healthy forms of leadership instead. Tied up in that was the fact that government and industry needed to develop a responsible relationship; not only would they have to coexist, they would have to help one another to grow.

  Heinrich thought about such things,
and worried over them. With prominent German publications like Die Zeit insinuating that the Volkswagen factory was still under Hitler’s dark cloud, with umbrellas still being used throughout the plant to shield workers and staff when it rained, with cars being made mainly for the occupying forces, and with new bids and the threat of possible takeovers in the air at every step, the potential for following through on the original idea of the Volkswagen and motorizing the population looked grim. Germany was a poor country now. And for those who did have money, the Volkswagen either conjured uncomfortable images of Nazi times, or else was written off as a product of “the Allies’ plant.” The British had saved the Volkswagen factory. But saving the factory and getting it to run smoothly as a German company were very different things.

  On top of these concerns, Nordhoff also found the factory itself strikingly inefficient. When he arrived, he calculated that it was taking the workers at least 300 hours to build just one car. This inefficiency was due to a great lack of communication, both between the men on the line, between different areas of the company, and also because there was no standardization of the actual assembly procedure, with the machines laid out chaotically on the factory floor. Nordhoff had seen enough of Detroit to know that proper arrangement was necessary for maximum efficiency. He reshuffled the lines and machines, slowly putting the puzzle together again, restoring and augmenting Porsche’s original floor plan. The station for the final assembly of the car’s body, for example, was shifted so that it was in the same area as the paint shop (which was the car’s next stop), and both these stations were placed in Hall 3. The press shop, where the outer chassis of the car was made, was placed in the preceding hall, Hall 2. He also divided tasks and streamlined assembly so that each worker had a very clear outline of what he was supposed to do and how to quality-check that specific task.