In the UK 1933 production, registration and export figures were all going upward. Model year production figures showed 220,779 cars, including taxis and 65,508 commercial vehicles, including buses. Calendar year exports amounted to a total of 41,028 cars, representing a value of over £5 million. New car registrations from January to December were now led by the 10 HP class with 48,938 units, closely followed by 44,484 8 HPs. 12 HPs came third with 28,909 registrations, fourth and fifth were the 9 HPs with 13,319 and the 14 HPs with 12,149 units. In the 16 HP class just over nine thousand new cars were registered and the remaining classes were way behind. In Northern Ireland there were 3,484 new car registrations. Total new vehicle registrations numbered just under 290,000, of which 186,543 were cars and 4,068 'hackneys'.
September census figures revealed that there were some 1·7 million motor vehicles in use in the United Kingdom. This included almost one and a quarter million private cars. The number of 'hackneys' reemained steady at 86,805. During 1933 slightly more than 4,000 motor vehicles were imported, the majority being cars (complete and in chassis form), namely 3,619 units. The Rootes influence was evident at Humber by 1933; the overhead inlet/side exhaust engine had been discontinued the previous year, and the company introduced a 1.7-litre four-cylinder 12hp. Still, as Humber was positioned above Hillman, by World War II, Humbers were powered solely by six-cylinder engines; thanks to stylish bodies by Pressed Steel, the company's reputation was good. Production continued throughout the hostilities, when the 4.1-litre Super Snipe and its variants were built as staff cars; General Montgomery had one called “Old Faithful.”
The Birth of Volkswagen
In September 1974, the 18 millionth Volkswagen Beetle was constructed at VW's Emden factory near Hannover, this company having already exceeded the previous record total of cars produced held by the Model T Ford. It is fair to say that had it not been for the efforts of the British during the immediate post-war years, and, in particular, a Military Government team led by Major Ivan Hirst of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, there would be no Volkswagens on the road today. The Volkswagen story begins in the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin on May 11, 1933, when
Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, inventive designer and one-time racing driver, met with Adolf Hitler whereupon the latter expounded his views for a 'People's Car'. Dr. Porsche had already been working on a cheap car design for
N.S.U. and when Hitler outlined his essentials for a 'Kleinauto' their ideas were complementary. Hitler, insisted, however, that the car should not use more than seven litres of petrol per 100 kilometres (approx. 40 mpg), one litre less than
Dr. Porsche proposed; be a four-seater, able to maintain 100 kph on the new autobahns being constructed;
air-cooled (because of the severe winter in parts of Germany and the scarcity of garages); the final requirement being that it should sell for under 1000RM (approximately £50).
The following year at the Berlin Automobile Show, Hitler was able to announce that 'due to the superb designer Porsche and his staff, we have succeeded in completing preliminary designs for a German People's Car'. Official road testing of the first three Volksautos (as the German and US press were calling them) began on October 12, 1936. By Christmas that year they had completed 30,000 miles. Perhaps the worst fault to emerge from this testing was continual breakage of the cast crankshafts, which caused the adoption of forged shafts which has continued to the end of European production. Dr. Porsche, however, was not present at the beginning of the tests as he had decided it would be necessary to study American mass production techniques if the car was to be produced in sufficient numbers and to Hitler's price. He had arrived in New York on October 8 and during the following month toured all the major US automobile factories.
Strength Through Joy
On his way back to Germany aboard the Queen Mary he travelled to Great Britain to visit the
Austin factory at Longbridge, near Birmingham. A further US trip followed in 1937 to recruit American workers to form the nucleus of the factory staff that Dr. Porsche considered necessary to produce the car using American production methods. In this he was not very successful, and only twenty Americans, mostly of German extraction, signed. Two of the early recruits, Joseph Werner from Ford and Otto Hoehne ex-
International Harvester Company, remained at Volkswagen into the 1960s. Hitler proposed that Deutsche Arbeitsfront, the German Labour Front which he had established under Dr. Robert Ley, should be responsible for building the factory and the car. The project was an ideal one for the subsidiary organisation 'Kraft-durch-Freude' or Strength Through Joy, which was firmed with the intention of improving living standards for German workers. A company was created in May 1937, the Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Volkswagens, to produce the anticipated total of 1,500,000 cars.
Hitler intended that within ten years there would be no working person in Germany who did not own a people's car. An ingenious stamp saving scheme was inaugurated on August 1, 1938 where for 5RM per week, a German could order a VW for delivery when the cars were in production. Some 336,668 people took out savings cards and eventually saved 280 million marks. A site was chosen on land owned by Count Werner von Schulenburg, who lived in a fourteenth-century castle, Schloss Wolfsburg, near Fallersleben about fifty miles east of Hannover. By January 1938, ten thousand acres were transferred to the State. Hitler's architect Albert Speer, whilst remaining consultant, designated a young Austrian, Peter Koller, to design the factory. It was to be a mile long on the north side of the Mittelland Canal whilst a town for the proposed 90,000 workpeople was to be built the other side of the canal. In the middle of the Czechoslovakian crisis in May 1938, Hitler found time to lay the cornerstone of the factory on May 26, watched by a crowd estimated at 70,000.
The KdF-Wagen
Unfortunately, however, a plan of the building arrived too late to be placed in the metal container in the foundation stone, which had to be sealed without it. In his speech Hitler named the future car, much to the surprise of Dr. Porsche, the 'KdF-Wagen'. Unofficially the car had been called the Volkswagen and this had already led an engine designer at Dr. Porsche's office, Francis Reimspiess, to design the now famous VW emblem, originally surrounded by a spinning swastika, without ever being asked to do so. (When Dr. Porsche saw the emblem, he rewarded Reimspiess with a 100-mark bonus.) After the ceremony, Hitler sat in one of the three prototypes (out of the sixty that had been hand-built at the Daimler-Benz plant at Stuttgart) and had Dr. Porsche's son, Ferry, drive him to Fallersleben railway station in it.
Construction of the factory was hampered by the lack of local labour. This problem Hitler solved by asking Mussolini to send him unemployed Italian workers. The first thousand soon arrived, but in spite of these efforts no cars had been produced at the factory by the time war started. The 210 gloss-black KdF-Wagens which had been produced elsewhere were either destroyed during testing or were given to officials of the Nazi Party. None were delivered to the thousands of stamp savers. By the end of 1940, when building operations ceased, only 2,690,000 square feet of the planned 6 million square feet had been roofed. The town was still not marked on any maps and consisted of flats for 2,358 families. The Italian workers, who had been accommodated in wooden huts, were gradually withdrawn after the outbreak of war. The labour force was then increased with captured Poles, followed by Frenchmen, Belgians, Dutchmen, Danes and Russians, who eventually totalled 17.365 in 1944.
Two military versions of the car were produced: the four-seat cross-country Kubel-wagen, which made up for its lack of four-wheel drive by lightness (1100 lbs for ease of manhandling if bogged down), and the amphibious schwimmwagen with its retractable propellor. Some 55,000 Kubelwagens and 15,000 Schwimmwagens were assembled at the factory-the square Kubelwagen bodies being made at the Ambi-Budd body plant in Berlin. In the end only a small part of the factory was used by the German Ministry of Armaments for vehicle production. The plant was used as an emergency factory for airframe repairs and for producing such varied items as JU88s, mines, heating stoves, hand grenades and. towards the end of the war, for assembling VI flying bombs.
The first recorded bombing of the factory occurred in the summer of 1943, but no damage was sustained. As the factory was selected at the end of the war for examination by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey team, accurate records are available of the four major raids on the plant. Two other incidents occurred. The first of these, on April 18, 1944, when a single unknown aircraft dropped incendiary bombs, destroyed part of the front of the building. Then on April 29 at 11.19 in the morning, a US Eighth Air Force aircraft believed to be a Fortress returning from a raid on Berlin was hit by anti-aircraft fire. An engine was set on fire and the crew baled out, but the unpiloted bomber flew on to the factory where, after circling, it crashed into the corner of Hall 1.
By May 1945, 58% of the factory lay in ruins and as the war came to an end, orders were given to evacuate the remaining undamaged machinery to the west away from the advancing Russians. Two hundred machines were shipped to mine shafts at Longwy, other equipment being scattered throughout the surrounding countryside. An advance unit of the 405th Regimental Combat Team of the US 102nd Infantry Division reached Fallersleben, four miles from the factory, on April 10, but the Americans did not come to KdF Stadt as it was not marked on their maps. The SS guarding the forced labourers fled, leaving the prisoners unguarded. Overnight they broke free of their camp and, after looting the few executives' houses south of the canal, turned their attentions to the factory. Telephones were ripped out, files overturned and burned and typewriters smashed. Others 'captured' freight trains at the railway station and the exhilarated looters soon threatened to burn the town. The next morning the German Army Chaplain, Pastor Holling, accompanied by a French priest from the camp who spoke English, drove to Fallersleben to plead with the Americans to take the town to stop further violence. They found the US occupation army consisted of a Lieutenant and eleven men. When the Lieutenant was told that the thirty American children of the German-American engineers recruited before the war were in danger, he lost no time.
When the priests returned they were preceded by an armoured car and a jeep. The children were found safe, but at the hutted camps the intoxicated looters seemed to have lost their senses. Three bursts into the air did not succeed in serving its purpose as a warning; two further bursts along the road, leaving several bodies lying motionless, soon restored sanity. The following morning two hundred US troops with Sherman tanks occupied the factory and town. On May 25. 1945, the name of KdF Stadt was changed by the town officials to Wolfs-burg, after the nearby castle. The Americans were persuaded to keep the factory power station operative, as it supplied (as it still does) electricity for the townspeople, and Rudolf Brormann, the factory's former chief inspector, was put in temporary charge. Although captured by the Americans, Wolfsburg and nearby Fallersleben came within the British zone of occupation. On May 26, the British 52nd Division started assuming responsibility for the area occupied by the US 406th RCT and a few days later the changeover was completed. Repatriation was begun for the foreign workers, although no arrangements existed for the return of the Russians and other East Europeans. The British soldiers guarding the camp frequently had to break up disturbances amongst these displaced persons.
When the first British Army detachments arrived at Wolfsburg they surveyed the factory and found the power station working at low pressure but with no activity at the plant itself. Sentries were oosted to ensure no further looting took place and the unit's vehicles were garaged at the factory. Some workless ex-employees and engineers returning to the factory to collect belongings offered to service and maintain the unit's vehicles. The officer in charge, faced with sending vehicles over fifty miles to the nearest workshop unit, agreed, and a section of the less damaged part of the building was cleared to install some suitable equipment and machinery from other parts of the plant. Soon there were almost a hundred men keeping themselves occupied with this work. There was no financial reward other than the midday meal provided by the unit. Thereafter word spread to other British units about local servicing facilities and what had been intended as a makeshift arrangement became a workshop establishment. By July, British Forces HQ learnt of the facilities and skilled personnel available at Wolfsburg and posted a detachment from 30 Workshop Control Unit of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers to the plant.
Designated 3/1/Provincial Heavy Workshops, it consisted of Captains Gerrard and Murdoch and three other ranks. They had the task of organising a workshop for the repair of captured enemy vehicles. In August another section of the factory was set aside for engine repairs. At first only Jeep but later other types of engine were overhauled. An RAOC Stores Section of nine joined the detachment in September under Captain May. The REME strength of 3/1/PHW was increased to six that autumn and the unit re-designated No. 2 REME Auxiliary Workshops in October. With a view to meeting occupation requirements, the British Military Government thought that the main part of the Volkswagen factory could perhaps be re-opened for car production, and Major Ivan Hirst of REME was assigned to the factory in August 1945 to see what could be done. With REME assistance machinery was re-concentrated at Wolfsburg and the German staff replanned the factory layout in order to achieve a limited production of cars in the least damaged buildings. By the end of August Kubelwagens were being assembled again from parts left over from wartime production.
In September one of the pre-war Volkswagen saloons was sprayed khaki green and driven to HQ 21 Army Group as a demonstration model. The resulting order for the first batch of saloons was taken as the signal to go ahead. During that month Property Control arranged for a £250,000 overdraft with the Deutsche Bank in Brunswick. Being under the authority of the Control Commission Finance Division, they had no choice but to agree! By the end of 1945 fifty-eight new vehicles had been produced. Manufacturing, as distinct from mere assembly, was planned for 1946. As the remaining German management was very weak, Hirst appealed to his chief, Colonel C. R. Radclyffe, at the Zonal Headquarters of the Control Commission (British Element), for re-inforcements on the British side. Wing-Commander R. M. Berryman, a retired RAF officer who had been in the motor trade, was appointed as his production officer to liaise with and back up the German executives within the factory, and Major A. Mclnnes arrived as resident Property Control Officer with responsibilities extending beyond financial matters.
It was clear to all at Wolfsburg-British and Germans alike-that other Allied countries, especially the Russians, were clamouring for serviceable machinery as reparations. In accordance with the Allied policy of dismantling a proportion of German industry for reparations the Volkswagen-werk, being the property of the Nazi Party, was high on the list. Colonel Radclyffe stated that there would have to be practical proof that Volkswagenwerk was still an essential and productive factory, otherwise it would certainly be demolished. Proof for this would be the production of a thousand new cars a month-by the end of March. A Russian unit of two officers and thirty men in Wolfsburg for the repatriation of USSR nationals was a constant reminder of the urgency! Wing Commander Berryman put the position to the key German employees through one of the original ex-US employees named Fietz, manager of the press shop. The German workers agreed to try, providing adequate food and blankets could be found. By every effort, including the 'diversion' of a train-load of coal on its way to Berlin to keep the power station going, and the re-activation by Military Government of suppliers' factories elsewhere, the target was achieved-1003 vehicles had been produced by April 1. A signal was sent to Colonel Radclyffe 'Target achieved'. Some of these cars were collected by the Red Army during March, marking the first 'exports'.
With the future of the factory looking more hopeful, 9,871 vehicles were produced by the end of 1946. During that year all German factory workers were screened by the de-Nazification Courts and those politically objectionable were discharged, including Brormann, the plant manager. His functions passed to Dr. Munch, the custodian of the property. The severe winter of 1946/47 brought production to a complete halt at the end of January, due to lack of coal for the power station. Production did not start again until March. No sooner had it done so when, in April, the paint shop was burnt down. Until a new one could be built cars had to be sprayed in the open. In spite of these setbacks 8,939 vehicles had been produced by the end of 1947. In February, 1948, the workshops under REME began building 110 ambulances from Kubelwagens and Beetles that had been scrapped. Stretchers and other special fittings were made by outside firms and the programme was completed by June. By August that year when it was closed, the engine repair shop had overhauled 15,000 engines of all types for the British Army. This work was then transferred to 23 Heavy Workshops, REME.
The Aussies Arrive
Although the efforts in production during March 1946 had assured the future of the factory as a whole, its eventual disposal had not been decided. An early Volkswagen had been sent to England for evaluation, and the report concluded that 'to build the car commercially would be a completely uneconomic enterprise' and that if the Germans produced it 'it would mean no undue economic competition on the world market against British products'. Lord Rootes (then Sir William) visited the factory; his opinion was typical-the car and the plant were of no interest, even as a free gift. We Australians sent a team to the factory in February 1947 but decided not to bid for it as reparations, and later in March, 1948, at a meeting in Cologne with Ford of America, the British Military Government made one final attempt to give the factory away. With Henry Ford II at the meeting was chairman of the board of the Ford Motor Company, Ernest Breech. When Henry Ford asked the latter for his opinion. Breech said 'Mr. Ford, I don't think what we are being offered here is worth a damn'. Later in 1948, however, the Russians expressed a 'willingness' to take the Volks-wagenwerk off the hands of the British authorities. Relations with the Soviets had already cooled drastically and the Berlin blockade had begun in June. Despite this, the Russians suggested a convenient plan for their take-over of the factory. Since Wolfsburg lay just five miles west of the Soviet Zone, the Russians suggested that the border be shifted a little to place both the town and the factory inside East Germany!
However, the appointment of Heinz Nord-hoff by the British Board, of which Radclyffe was the chairman, on January 2, 1948 to replace Dr. Munch as general manager of Volkswagenwerk, began the chain of events leading to the eventual handing over of the plant to the German Government. Nordhoff on his appointment asked for a completely free hand. The 'Wolfsburg Motor Works' sign was replaced with one reading 'Volkswagenwerk' and a parking notice 'Officers Only' was removed by the British as an indication of goodwill. This set the pace for Nordhoffs plans for the factory. The early post-war phase of direct Military Government intervention in the absence of stable management. which was marked by outstanding British-German co-operation, was drawing to an end. Henceforth management was to be purely a German matter, with Herr Nordhoff reporting to the Control Commission's Board for the Volkswagenwerk Organisation. The British gradually withdrew into the background, though Major Hirst continued as the executive member of the Board resident at the Wolfsburg factory until the autumn of 1949. An important milestone in the recovery of the factory was the German currency reform on June 20, 1948. Overnight 170,000 million Reichmarks shrivelled to 10,000 million new Deutschemarks. Restrictions on industry were lifted and Nordhoff outlined his expansion plans for overseas sales.
As money trickled in, the factory was repaired and enlarged. Three million square feet of plant and offices were rebuilt and the production line system, originally intended for the factory in 1938, finally laid out. This released a further 400,000 square feet of factory space. Export sales had already begun in 1947, and by November 1948 there was a waiting list of 15,000 for Volkswagens for Germany and 7,000 for export. Production rose to 19,244 vehicles in 1948 and by May 1949 the 50,000th post-war VW had been produced. While these figures are low, they were truly remarkable for the 1946 - 1948 period when production from all the other car makers in Germany was negligible. Throughout the initial phase the British team laid strong emphasis on the need for good after-sales service-REME had suffered greatly from the shortage of spares during the war! In fact. Hirst went so far as to 'block' the first export shipment of Beetles until the foreign concessionaires placed their order for spare parts and special tools for delivery at the same time as the cars. The Company's reputation today owes much to those early efforts.
Bundesregierung Deutschland
On October 8. 1949. the British Occupation Authorities handed the plant over to the Bundesregierung Deutschland. the Federal German Government-Colonel Radclyffe signing for the British, and Dr. Ludwig Erhard, Economics Minister, signing for Germany. The company, already a viable enterprise, was to be administered by a trusteeship in which the Federal Government, the province of Lower Saxony and the employees of the plant were represented. Dr. Nord-hoff was confirmed in his post as managing director. On May 9, 1960 the final ownership of the factory was settled, almost fifteen years to the day the war ended. The company was transformed into a shareholder-owned corporation, 20% being owned by the Federal Government, 20% by the provincial government and 60% by the general public. The 3,600,000 shares were placed on the market on June 30. Over 1.5 million people oversubscribed by 84 per cent for the company, then worth 600 million Deutschemarks. Volkswagen was well and truly on the map. but as the post-war architect of the VW miracle, Dr. Nordhoff, recorded, 'by one of the ironic jokes history is sometimes tempted to produce, it was the Occupation Powers who, after unconditional surrender, brought Hitler's dream into reality'.
