Ferdinand Porsche's People's Car: VW "Beetle" (der Käfer)

Designing Cars for Hitler: Porsche and Volkswagen's Nazi Roots

From the Magazine

 By Dietmar Hawranek      21 July 2009

Both Volkswagen and Porsche had close connections with the Third Reich. It was Ferdinand Porsche who designed the "people's car," the legendary VW Beetle, in 1934. Adolf Hitler was so taken with the engineer he declared him "brilliant."

Without Ferdinand Porsche, neither automotive giant Volkswagen nor luxury marque Porsche would exist today. The man who would have a huge influence on German car-making was born in Bohemia in 1875 and completed his apprenticeship in his father's mechanical shop.
 

 While working for the Viennese coach-building firm Lohner, which produced coaches for the court of Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria, Porsche developed an engine that many engineers are once again working on today: the electric motor. A vehicle equipped with the motor was an attraction at the Paris World's Fair in 1900. 

Even at a young age, Porsche enjoyed such a strong reputation that two dictators vied for his favor and service: Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. But that never seemed to trouble Porsche: He was an inventor and a developer who was interested solely in his designs. In the end, who he worked for was as unimportant to him as the question of whether the projects were of a civilian or military nature. Solving the problem at hand was what mattered to him, not who was paying him.

In World War I, he designed aircraft engines for the army of the Austrian emperor and tractors for heavy artillery. Later on, Porsche developed sports cars for Daimler in Stuttgart, before founding an engineering firm with his son Ferry in Stuttgart, which developed cars for two German car and motorcycle makers, Zündapp and NSU.
In 1932, a delegation from Moscow visited Porsche in his Stuttgart office. Shortly thereafter, Stalin invited him to the Soviet Union for an informational visit. "At first we thought the invitation was so improbable that we had trouble taking it seriously," Ferry Porsche later wrote in his autobiography. "But soon it was made very clear to us that everything was perfectly serious."

Stalin wanted to advance industrial development in the Soviet Union with the help of experts from capitalist countries. He had Porsche taken on tours of aircraft and automobile factories and, in the end, made him an offer to become general director of the development of the Soviet auto industry.  Stalin promised Porsche many privileges and powers. But the German engineer turned down Stalin's offer "after much consideration," Ferry Porsche wrote.
 
'The Brilliant Design Engineer'

It was not the communist dictatorship that had deterred the senior Porsche as much as the language barrier. How could he manage such a gargantuan task, he reasoned, if he couldn't even communicate in his native tongue?

Stalin's offer "could have had a very decisive influence on my subsequent life," Ferry Porsche wrote. His life would not have been the only one affected.

If Porsche had accepted, the VW Beetle might have become the Soviet Union's "people's car." And instead of becoming a symbol of West Germany's post-war "economic miracle," perhaps it would have become an icon of Russian backwardness -- as the Lada did, years later.

When Hitler asked the German automobile industry to develop a "suitable small car" in 1934, Porsche submitted the best design -- and was awarded the contract. At the 1935 German auto show, Hitler was full of praise for Porsche. He said that he was pleased that, thanks to "the abilities of the brilliant design engineer Porsche," it had been possible to "complete the preliminary designs for the German Volkswagen (people's car)."

A new factory had to be built to produce the car, as well as a new town surrounding the factory to house the workers. "Hitler proposed building the factory in central Germany," Ferry Porsche recalled.
The search for the site proceeded from the air. It was to be located near a railway line, canals and autobahn. The site that was eventually chosen was near a medieval castle, the Wolfsburg, after which the city was later named.

Hitler wanted to call the factory the "Porsche Plant," but Ferdinand Porsche was opposed to the idea. Instead, it became the Volkswagen Plant.
 
An Automobile for the Masses
 
Much of the money to build the plant came from trade union assets. To this day, the IG Metall metalworkers' union has a right to an expanded role in the management of the VW Group on the basis of this early use of union money. As a result, VW management cannot move production to a different plant without the consent of labor representatives on its supervisory board.

DER SPIEGEL

 

Keeping it in the family:
The Porsche dynasty.

Berthold Huber, the current head of IG Metall, accused Porsche CEO Wendelin Wiedeking of being "ignorant of history" when Wiedeking planned to acquire Volkswagen and transform the group into what he called a "normal" company.
After 1933, the Nazis occupied and later confiscated union offices and printing presses, turning them over to the German Labor Front (DAF), the Nazis' trade union organization. The DAF was eventually required to provide the original capital of 50 million Reichsmark to establish the company known as the Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH (Company to Develop the German People's Car).

But a true automobile for the masses was not produced in Wolfsburg during the war. Only 630 Beetles were made there during World War II -- and distributed to the privileged.

Instead, the factories were used in weapons production, to manufacture tank chains, mines and an all-terrain vehicle that came to be known as the Kübelwagen ("bucket-seat car"). Thousands of forced laborers were later used, including Jews from concentration camps and prisoners of war, mostly from the Soviet Union and Poland.

'Cheap Eastern Workers'
 
Porsche's son-in-law, Anton Piëch, began managing the plant in 1941. In his study "The Volkswagen Plant and Its Workers in the Third Reich," the German historian Hans Mommsen writes: "In the summer of 1943, Anton Piëch bluntly declared that he had to use cheap Eastern workers in order to fulfill the Führer's wish that the Volkswagen be produced for 990 Reichsmark."

In the early 1990s, this part of the history of the VW Group caught up with Ferdinand Piëch, the son of the former plant director Anton Piëch. Ferdinand Piëch, the head of Audi, was trying to rise to the top of the Volkswagen Group.

Piëch, who had pushed aside a number of executives along his career path, had his share of enemies. Some of them spread the rumor that Piëch was incapable of being the head of VW, hinting at the headlines it would produce in the important US market if the son of the former Wolfsburg plant director, who had used forced laborers, became the head of the modern-day VW Group.

Ferdinand Porsche himself served Hitler during the war as the head of his tank commission. He supported Hitler's power and profited from the regime. Nevertheless, Mommsen believes that "the question as to the extent to which Porsche understood the criminal character of the regime he served must remain open." 

 

For Mommsen, Ferdinand Porsche is "the prototype of the expert interested solely in technological matters." An Allied investigative commission later declined to file charges against Porsche, although he, his son Ferry and his son-in-law Anton were imprisoned in France for several months.

When Ferdinand Porsche died on Jan. 30, 1951, he left behind an estate distributed across two businesses: the design engineering firm in the Stuttgart suburb of Zuffenhausen, which would later develop into the Porsche sports car company, and the Porsche dealership in Salzburg, Austria, which would become Europe's largest car dealership.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Erwin Jöres wird 100 Jahr alt

Was all of this really that long ago?   Here's a man who has seen plenty, and certainly has a story to tell.  
IM ORIGINAL
http://www.welt.de/kultur/history/article109642851/Vier-Mal-Haft-unter-Hitler-Stalin-und-Ulbricht.html 
Translated by Military Fotos. net

Cured - or so you could call the state of mind of Erwin Jöris. 
Cured of any totalitarian idea, every temptation of the extremes.



The resident of Cologne, who has lived in the same apartment for 57 years, has survived everything you could survive in the 20th century. Jöris fought in the political riots of the crumbling Weimar Republic, he was sent to a Gestapo jail, deported to a concentration camp and made it through the infamous Moscow "Hotel Lux" and NKVD imprisonment.

Having been deported to Germany, he was again imprisoned by the Gestapo, released on "probation" to endure five years of war including four years on the Eastern Front. During the "Battle of Berlin" he was captured and released into the Soviet occupation zone in 1946, only to catch the eye of the new rulers, being arrested again and sentenced to 25 years of forced labor in Siberia. In 1956 he could finally return home along with the last German prisoners of war.

There are few stories like that of Erwin Jöris - people who would have fought the two worst tyrannies to ever gain hold in Europe, and lived to tell the tale. Margarete Buber was one of them, who was also a prisoner of both Stalin and Hitler, though she died in 1989 at the age of 88. Another one is that of Jöris, who celebrates his 100th birthday today.

Both hung in their youth-time communist ideals, and both realized too late that behind the promises of a better world in the sense of Marx, Engels and Lenin there only hid a power-hungry self-proclaimed avant garde. Both were declared enemies of the inhumane Nazi regime and paid for their views with time in concentration camps, the very symbol of the Hitler regime. Both found home in a certainly imperfect Federal Republic of Germany after the war.

The life of Erwin Jöris seemed mapped out early. Born into a working class family, he grew up in a leftist family similar to Erich Honecker (who was a bit older; and ultimately served East Germany as its last significant president)- in Berlin-Lichtenberg though (not in the Saarland). At the age of 16 he joined the Young Communists League and made a name for himself. But in 1931 he already refused to follow the party's every change of course when the Communists supported a Nazi attempt to oust the democratic government of the state of Prussia. Being a young KPD member, he caught the Gestapo's attention soon after the takeover in 1933. He was arrested and imprisoned in the early Sonnenburg concentration camp. Here he experienced the "particularly painful" lack of solidarity of former "comrades" who had joined with the Nazis.

For his pledge to refrain from any political activity, Jöris was set free in March 1934.

The now illegal Communist Party sent him to Moscow to undergo ideological training there. Upon arrival Jöris already got to know the darker side of the purported "workers' paradise."  He was harassed by a control commission, saw the misery on the streets and the megalomaniac projects that were hardly different from the Third Reich, as was the personality cult surrounding Stalin. Jöris voiced protest and as a consequence was forced to work in a heavy machinery factory in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). With the beginning of the "Great Terror" - the series of show trials and mass executions in Stalin's empire - Jöris finally began to lose his faith in Communism. His change of mind did not escape the eyes of his Soviet hosts: the unruly 25-year-old was labelled a "Trotskyist", arrested and taken to the Lubljanka, the headquarters of the NKVD.

From here the Soviets eventually deported him back to his native Germany.  Jöris, now back in the clutches of the Gestapo as an alleged "traitor", survived the torture.  But his former comrades, who had formed a resistance movement against Hitler, also saw him as a traitor. It was getting lonely for him. Then came the year 1940's general mobilization and Jöris, who was not considered "unworthy to serve", was drafted into the military on probation. He fought during the entire campaign in the East and to the very bitter end in Berlin in April 1945.  There he had some luck after all: he was quickly released from Soviet captivity, perhaps because he had kept silence about his former life.

Hoping he could build on the ideals of his youth, he joined the newly formed SED which had arisen from a forced merger of the SPD and KPD in 1946. But soon after Jöris would become a pain in the back of the powerful once more. Instead of submitting to the instructions of the Stalinist returnees among Walter Ulbricht, he would praise the pre-war Communists of Germany for spite.

As the inevitable consequence he was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to 25 years of forced labor in the gulag.

During the trial the judge hurled at him: "Your damn yap will freeze up in Siberia!"  Not intimated at all, Erwin Jöris replied: "And so will yours!"

In 1956, he was able to return to East Germany after many years of mining in Vorkuta, from where he left to West Germany as quickly as possible.

Since then he has lived in Cologne.

In recent years he often made appearances to tell of the events he witnessed at public events and in schools. He has become unable to do that now.

All things considered he is still quite fit, though. He has described his experiences in several documentaries and his memoirs called "A life as a prisoner of Hitler and Stalin". Akin to Margarete Buber-Neumann's much better-known "The prisoner of Stalin and Hitler," the out-of-print book is very disturbing.