Adolf Hitler had two great ambitions. One was to conquer the world and the other was to produce a people's car, writes Wesley Boyd
The first went down the Rhine but he nearly made it with the second. The dream materialised soon after his death in the shape of the Volkswagen Beetle and ended only a few weeks ago at Puebla in Mexico when the last of the original models rolled off the production line. It was the 21,529,464th Beetle built since December 1945. The first to be built outside Germany was assembled in a former tram depot on Shelbourne Road, Dublin, in 1950.
Hitler was a car enthusiast. He acquired his first model, a Mercedes, in 1923 using scarce funds from the fledgeling Nazi Party. (Did he know the car was named after the granddaughter of a Hungarian rabbi?) Strangely, he never learned to drive but delighted in being driven at speed around the German countryside. While serving a nine-month prison sentence for rabble-rousing he read a biography of the Irish-American car manufacturer, Henry Ford, who, incidentally, was also a notorious anti-Semite.
Hitler was much impressed by Ford's success with his mass-produced Model T, a small car for the masses. "Ford," he declared, "has done more than anyone else to obliterate class differences in America." Before he seized power Hitler approached Daimler-Benz with the request that the company should produce a small car, but it refused. A year later, as Chancellor of Germany, he again called on the manufacturers to develop a cheap, small car. They paid lip-service to his request, believing the working classes had no money to buy cars, big or small.
But they could not ignore Hitler completely and eventually put forward a plan for a three-wheeled "people's car", a sort of covered-in motorcycle. Hitler angrily rejected the plan. "So long as the motor car remains only a means of transportation for especially privileged circles," he said, "it is with bitter feelings that we see millions of honest, hard-working and capable fellow-men, whose opportunities in life are already limited, cut off from the use of a vehicle which would be a special source of yet-unknown happiness to them, particularly on Sundays and holidays."
When Hitler learned that a fellow Austrian, Ferdinand Porsche, the designer of successful racing and sports cars, was working on plans for a small car, he summoned him to Berlin in 1934. Porsche outlined his ideas for a car with a one-litre engine with a speed of up to 100 kilometres an hour. Hitler threw in a few of his own ideas. The car must be a four-seater to carry a family, be fuel efficient and have an air-cooled engine to combat Germany's harsh winters. The "people's car" was on its way and the German car manufacturers' trade association reluctantly agreed to put up the money for its development.
Porsche and his dedicated team worked on the prototype in a small garage in Stuttgart. The German car manufacturers, worried by Porsche's progress, told Hitler they would produce the Volkswagen themselves if the government paid a subsidy of 200 marks a car. Hitler did his sums. He wanted a million cars a year. With the 200 million marks a year demanded by the manufacturers he could build his own plant to make the car. In 1937 the Volkswagen Development Company was set up.
Land was compulsorily acquired on Luneburger Heath north of Hanover.
With the clouds of war gathering over Europe, Hitler laid the foundation stone of the Volkswagen factory and the new city of Wolfsburg before a crowd of 70,000 people on May 26th, 1938. At the end of the ceremony he was driven to the railway station in a prototype Beetle by Porsche's son.
When war came the factory and the city had only partially been completed and fewer than 200 cars had been built. Porsche was asked to adapt the Beetle for military use. In addition to this model the factory also produced munitions and parts for the V-1 flying bomb, using slave labour. Inevitably the plant was bombed by the Allies and was almost totally destroyed. At war's end it fell into the hands of the British administration and they appointed a former Opel executive, Heinz Nordhoff, to run it. Porsche was charged with war crimes and was given two years in prison.
In 1949 the Wolfsburg plant was handed over to the West German state as a restored enterprise. A few months later Motor Distributors, founded by the late Stephen O'Flaherty, secured the Volkswagen franchise for Ireland and started to import the Beetle for assembly in Dublin. While writing a weekly motoring column, I visited Wolfsburg with some of his executives. I asked the factory manager about strikes, then prevalent in the motor industry in Britain and Ireland.
They did not have strikes, he said; they put workers' representatives on the board so that potential problems could be identified in advance.
A good example for Ireland, I suggested.
"Don't be silly," one of the Dublin executives responded. "Irish workers are too stupid for that sort of thing."
I like to think Hitler would have had him shot.