Life of Automobile, The

by Parissien, Steven

  BMW’s pre-war base at Milbertshofen in Munich was virtually destroyed in the war. But its second-string works, at Allach, was only lightly damaged. Since both sites were in the American sector after 1945, neither was immediately dismantled or appropriated. However, Allach had been run during the war by slave labour, much of which had been plucked from the nearby concentration camp at Dachau. As late as 25 April 1945, the SS listed 9,997 inmates of Dachau allocated to BMW at Allach. BMW, which had also been a key supplier of aircraft engines during the war and had latterly helped to make the lethal V-2 rocket, was accordingly high on the allies’ blacklist in 1945. As the company’s historian, Horst Mönnich, has noted: ‘BMW was second after the I. G. Farben Dye Trust amongst those industrial companies charged with having been most responsible for the disaster that befell Europe and the world.’ Yet on 3 August 1945 the American military government decreed that Milbertshofen, at least, was to be reconstructed. America had no wish to see Germany remain on its knees, especially when a new threat was emerging to the east. At the same time, the Americans rebuffed Daimler-Benz’s cynically opportunistic proposal to take over the Allach plant.

  While BMW was permitted to reconstruct its Munich factory, it was not until 1951 that the company was able to unveil its first postwar model: the big, burly 501, affectionately nicknamed ‘the Baroque Angel’. Hardly the car for the shallow pockets of war-wracked Europe, it was no surprise when the 501 sold poorly. During the 1950s, indeed, BMW only survived through export sales of a vehicle that was as far removed from its pre-war sports cars as could be imagined.

  BMW, Heinkel and Messerschmitt had spent the war years churning out powerful fighters, bombers and tanks for the Nazis. Now, desperate for any kind of sales success, they resorted to mass-producing the most unlikely vehicle ever to grace Europe’s roads: the bubble car.

  Messerschmitt, manufacturer of the superlative Me-109 fighter, was first off the chocks. But its three-wheeled Kabinenroller of 1953 was not a huge success, derived as it was from Fritz Fend’s miniscule and fragile 38cc invalid carriage for disabled ex-servicemen. With its joystick steering and canopy adapted from the firm’s two-engined wartime Zerstörer (‘destroyer’), the Me-110, the diminutive Messerschmitt conveyed too many memories of the Luftwaffe to prove a success in the rest of Europe. What was more, its cockpit was incredibly cramped (just like that of the Me-110); the single passenger sat right behind the driver, legs straddling the front seat. To engage reverse, you had to stop the engine and start it again. Many export models simply had no reverse gear at all.

  BMW produced the first bubble car that actually took off. Its iconic, diminutive rollendes Ei (‘rolling egg’) of 1955 had originally been made by the Italian motorbike and refrigerator manufacturer Isa, which BMW now approached with a generous licensing agreement. Recognizing a good deal when they saw it, the Italians were soon shipping all the model’s tooling to Germany, in a grim parody of the enforced industrial relocations of the recent war. BMW, better known at the time for their motorcycles, then adapted the miniscule model into their own Isetta. The close-set rear wheels of the Isetta made many mistake it for a three-wheeler (one did indeed follow later). But in cash-strapped Europe, it was an instant hit. By 1957 the car was, in an ironic twist of fate, being assembled in Britain at the former works of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, which had suffered so grievously at the hands of BMW-engined German bombers after 1940.

  BMW’s unexpected success with the Isetta prompted Heinkel to follow with a similar model in 1956. It looked like a toad, but continued in production until 1964.1 Fortunately, the appearance of BMC’s Mini in 1959 soon consigned all of these hilarious, but inherently dangerous, bubble cars to the rubbish heap.

  While BMW managed to keep afloat during the fifties on bubble car and motorbike sales, those German car makers owned by wealthy American combines were able to recover quickly and comprehensively. Despite the wholesale obliteration of much of the city of Köln, Ford was producing their pre-war Taunus there as early as 1948, the year Henry Ford II visited Germany (and failed to buy Volkswagen). Oddly enough, the Köln plant had escaped serious damage from USAAF bombers during the war. Indeed, locals had often taken refuge at the Ford works during bombing raids, as they knew it to be one of the safest spots in the city. (By 1945, German historian Winfried Wolf has recorded, the Ford works was popularly known as ‘the bunker’.) Nineteen years later the Ford Motor Company, thanks to years of extensive lobbying, received $1 million in tax exemptions from the US government as compensation for the damage allied bombers had done to the Köln works – an astonishing victory given the notoriously pro-Nazi leanings of Henry Ford and the importance of the plant’s trucks to the German war effort.

  Opel, backed by the resources of the mighty GM empire, also recuperated rapidly. In 1945 the company’s principal plant at Rüsselsheim lay wrecked, and much of its tooling – including the whole production line for the successful pre-war Kadett – was taken to Russia as reparations. (The Kadett magically reappeared in postwar Russia as the Moskvitch 400.) All of the machinery from Opel’s Brandenburg plant, formerly the home of the Blitz truck, was also swiftly removed to Soviet territory. But Opel’s workforce helped clear Rüsselsheim by the end of 1945, and in 1946 production of the legendary Blitz restarted. In 1948 GM resumed full control of Opel (with no Germans on the senior management team), largely thanks to GM management’s success in cultivating the military governor of Germany’s US zone, General Lucius Clay. The same year, Opel produced its first postwar car, a reissue of the austere pre-war Olympia. Alfred Sloan was reluctant, however, to invest much new capital in Opel; accordingly, the new, ‘Western’ Kadett did not appear until 1962.

  Opel’s recovery was helped by a calm, collegiate attitude on the shop floor at Rüsselsheim. In the years after 1945 strikes were almost unknown in German car plants. Heinz Nordhoff of Volkswagen spoke for Germany’s car industry, and indeed the whole German nation, when he warned that ‘our grandchildren will curse us because we did not think of them but only of the present’. Nordhoff and his fellow auto makers thought nothing of introducing workers’ representatives on to their company boards – in marked contrast to the antiquated attitudes to labour still held by their American and British rivals. What mattered were not differentials, conditions or perquisites, but getting the company, and West Germany, back on its feet.

  Things were not quite so simple for those German car makers that were unable to benefit from American guarantees and investment. Auto Union had been formed in 1932 from four firms: Horch, created by former Benz employee Karl Horch in 1901; Audi, founded by Horch in Zwickau, in Saxony, in 1910, after he had left his original firm and a court had ruled he had no claim on the eponymous brand; DKW (Dampf-Kraft-Wagen – literally, ‘steam-powered car’), founded in 1916, which by 1939 had not only become the world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer but was also making cars at Audi’s Zwickau factory; and Wanderer, founded in 1911 in the Saxon town of Siegmar (today a district of Chemnitz). The four companies were all struggling in the midst of Germany’s appalling depression of the early 1930s and had huddled together for safety. (The new conglomerate adopted as its logo the symbol of four rings, for its component companies, which its successor, Audi, still uses today.) And the ploy worked: by 1936 Siegmar-based Auto Union was firmly in the black and its cars were challenging Mercedes for pre-eminence in international Grand Prix.

  In 1933 Auto Union’s aristocratic chairman, Baron Klaus-Detlof von Oertzen, sought to ingratiate himself with Germany’s new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, by suggesting two state-funded projects – both of which Hitler eagerly embraced. The first, as we have seen, was the creation of a Nazi ‘people’s car’ which, under the direction of Ferdinand Porsche (and not of Auto Union, as Oertzen had hoped), ultimately became the VW Beetle. The second was the launch of a state-sponsored motor-racing programme, at which Auto Union cars excelled.

  Immense wartime damage, and the fact that most of Auto Union’s plants
lay inside the Russian zone of occupation, meant that in 1945 little survived of Auto Union’s proud pre-war legacy. All of the firm’s East German assets were appropriated without compensation. Wanderer’s (and Auto Union’s) former home town of Siegmar was renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt, and the wrecked plant there was never revived. The wretched remains of the Horch and Audi factories in Zwickau were allocated to the VEB (Volkseigener Betrieb, or ‘People-Owned Enterprise’), which began to make poor-quality copies of old DKW models until halted by a West German lawsuit. In 1957 VEB began production of the Trabant, whose smoky, two-stroke, 594cc engine produced ten times the hydrocarbon emissions of comparable cars; and the manufacture of whose Duroplast body, made from an amalgam of recycled plastic, brown paper and shredded cotton waste, released toxic fumes which killed a number of factory workers and made many more seriously ill. Nevertheless, wealthier citizens of East Germany who wanted to buy a car had a choice of the Trabant or the equally appalling Wartburg. Trabants survived largely unchanged until 1989, when, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, VEB belatedly installed the reliable 1.1 litre engine from the Volkswagen Polo under the bonnet. But the fall of the whole Eastern Bloc that year spelled the end for the Trabant. As restrictions on international trade and personal movement evaporated, East Germans opted for second-hand Western cars rather than the ghastly Trabants and Wartburgs. The Trabant factory closed in 1991, after which Trabant cars could be had for just a few marks. (A proposal to restart manufacture in Uzbekistan resulted in the production of just one car.) But such are the vagaries of fashion that ten years later Trabants had become collectors’ items, with greenpainted examples especially, if somewhat inexplicably, prized by nostalgic Germans as ‘lucky’ cars.

  In West Germany, a new Auto Union slowly emerged out of the ashes of war. In 1949 a new factory was built in Ingolstadt in Bavaria, partly financed by American aid from the generous and far-sighted Marshall Plan. The new plant, partly staffed by workers who had migrated from old Auto Union plants in the east, began to make small, two-stroke cars, vans and motorbikes under the DKW label. However, the firm’s products failed to make much of an impact, and in 1958–9 the struggling company was bought by Daimler-Benz. Despite building a brand-new factory at Ingolstadt, Daimler-Benz preferred to concentrate on building its prestige Mercedes brands and seemed strangely uninterested in Auto Union’s far more humble products. In 1964 Daimler-Benz readily sold the company to Volkswagen, which dumped the DKW name, tainted as it was by association with low-powered, two-stroke models. Five years later VW merged Auto Union with niche German car maker NSU and badged all the resultant division’s products as Audis. The first new Audi had already appeared the previous year: the strikingly impressive, fast and handsome Audi 100, which set an admirably high benchmark for the company’s future output.

  Auto Union was by no means the only producer to try and rebuild plants that had been devastated during the Second World War. By 1945 Daimler-Benz’s vast works at Stuttgart was wholly ruined, and it was not fully functional again until 1947. Even then, the factory could produce only one Mercedes car: the pre-war, midsize 170 saloon. It was not that the 170 was particularly special; it was just that the machine tools for this particular model were the only ones that had survived the allied bombing. However, by 1951 (the year in which German car production reached the pre-war levels of 1938), Mercedes had assembled a roster of innovative and reliable models, headed by the new 300 range. The 300 saloons, the ancestor of today’s S-Class, were fast and sleek. Twodoor cabriolet and coupé versions followed, the coupé developing into the gull-winged, high-performance 300SL coupé of 1954, allegedly the fastest production car of its day. ‘SL’ stood for Sports Leicht (‘Sports Light’), and the 300SL’s 3 litre engine and racy looks, developed from a non-production racing car of 1952, made it formidably powerful. The 300SL was also the first mass-produced car to use the fuel-injection system, a feature that enormously improved the engine’s performance.1 Mercedes was fortunate in that it had no home-grown rival in the family and sports car markets until 1954, when BMW finally resumed production at its Munich works. That same year, the far-sighted Mercedes management followed Alfa’s example and returned to Grand Prix racing in order to provide a marketing platform for their sportier products. It was not until the 1960s, however, that Mercedes’ recovery began in earnest, as their executive saloons – the 190s, the 220s (ancestors of the C-Class) and the 300s – began to conquer the world.

  Mercedes was not the first German marque to make a decisive impact on the postwar global car market. Indeed, Stuttgart’s success paled into insignificance compared with the astounding reincarnation of what became one of the most celebrated cars of the twentieth century.

  In 1945 Volkswagen’s enormous Stadt des KdF-Wagens, like most German auto works, lay shattered by Allied bombing. On the evening of 10 April 1945 the plant’s SS guards fled into the night and the site’s slave-labour workforce – Polish, French, Belgian, Dutch and, of course, Russian – proceeded to destroy what the Lancasters had left. As Time magazine, reported, when American troops arrived they found that ‘every telephone had been torn from the walls, every typewriter had been sledgehammered to junk, every file and record had been scattered and burned’. The workers then got uproariously drunk on appropriated schnapps and were only prevented from burning down the whole of the Stadt des KdF-Wagens by the intervention the next day of American tanks, summoned by the plant’s chief engineer. The New York Times crowed that the US Army had captured ‘the German Willow Run’.

  By the summer of 1945 the American soldiers had been replaced by a British unit from the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME), as the Stadt des KdF-Wagens – now hastily rechristened Wolfsburg, after the adjacent historic settlement – was allotted to the British zone of occupation. REME found that what machinery had survived the allied bombing and the workers’ destruction was due to be transferred to the Soviets as war reparations. Both the Americans – who, in the Morgenthau Plan of 1944,1 had envisaged the complete eradication of all of Germany’s heavy industry and the country’s return to a predominantly agrarian, preindustrial economy – and the Russians, keen to avenge their twenty million wartime deaths, sought to obliterate or repatriate the site. However, the ‘people’s car’ itself was saved by the unlikely intervention of a young REME officer.

  Ivan Hirst was a Yorkshire grammar-school boy, who had joined the army in the 1930s after the failure of his optical instruments business during the Depression, and had by 1945 risen to become a REME major at the age of twenty-nine. It was Hirst who, when the Americans left, was made immediately responsible for the Volkswagen plant. He was well aware that the Americans and Russians had demanded the sale or destruction of the site. Even the Australians had tried to ship what remained of the plant home, while the aged Henry Ford had also waded into the debate, declaring that the factory lay too near to the communist peril to be viable as a future production centre. But having explored the ruined factory, Hirst found a pre-war prototype Volkswagen in a remote workshop and immediately saw its potential. Along with his commanding officer, Colonel Charles Radclyffe, he began to make plans for using the VW as an all-purpose transport for the British army. Some of the plant’s machinery had survived the bombing, having been stored in various outbuildings, and some Kübelwagens (the military version of the VW) had survived. Cars began to be assembled from half-built Kübelwagen chassis and whatever other parts were to hand. The workforce was increased from 250 in April to over six thousand by the end of 1945, and almost eight thousand by August 1946, and by the end of the year the factory was producing about a thousand cars per month. Radclyffe asked engineer Rudolf Ringel to make him a twoseat roadster from old Kübelwagens and other spare bits and pieces, while Hirst had Ringel construct a four-door convertible version as his personal staff car.

  To Hirst and Radclyffe, the promise of the Volkswagen was enormous. Together they persuaded the British military government to order twenty thousand Volkswagens over t
hree years, and successfully cranked production up to over ten thousand cars by the end of 1946. By the end of 1945 the plant had produced 1,785 cars for the British army and the German post office. Hirst also resisted pressure to change the VW badge, and indeed its name, both of which were still associated in the allies’ minds with the Nazi regime. And when a curious delegation from Renault visited the plant, Hirst deliberately showed their delegation the most damaged parts of the site in order to forestall a French takeover.

  Predictably, the British car barons did not share Hirst’s enthusiasm. Wolfsburg was offered to Ford of Britain for free, but its chief, Sir Patrick Hennessey, told Henry Ford II in Köln: ‘Mr Ford, I don’t think what we are being offered here is worth a damn.’ Hennessey’s rival, Lord Rootes, told Hirst: ‘If you think you’re going to build cars in this place, young man, you’re a bloody fool’. More damningly, Rootes actually judged the car technically deficient: ‘The vehicle does not meet the fundamental technical requirements of a motor car. As regards performance and design it is quite unattractive to the average motor car buyer. It is too ugly and too noisy [and] to build the car commercially would be completely uneconomic nonsense. We do not consider that the design represents any special brilliance … and it is suggested that it is not to be regarded as an example of first-class modern design to be copied by the British industry.’ Star-struck by the curvaceous, high-powered models then appearing in America, Rootes and his fellow car makers could not anticipate that a plain, functional, rear-engined vehicle would work.