The Nazi Car That Conquered the World

How did the Nazi Volkswagen become the world-renowned symbol of postwar, post-fascist Germany?

“Millions of postwar Germans imaged driving away from their past,” writes historian Natalie Scholz, but they were doing so in the “debris of the Nazi Empire.”

The Nazi state leisure organization Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) introduced the KdF-Wagen, as the first incarnation of the VW Beetle was called, with great fanfare in 1938. In a country with little car ownership, the KdF-Wagen was promoted as an affordable vehicle for the Volk (people). It was presented as the automotive flagship of a “racially defined Volksgemeinschaft” (people’s community); Jewish Germans were not allowed to purchase one.

Hitler, the car’s biggest booster, unsurprisingly got one of the very few produced. For everyone else, the promised car never materialized.

KdF-Wagens were supposed to be produced in a new, purpose-built factory town given the utilitarian name Stadt des KdF-Wagens. The enormous facility, later known as Wolfsburg, was planned to produce 1.5 million cars annually. The basic price in 1938 was 990 Reichsmarks (RM). An installment plan meant people could invest 5 RM at a time, receiving special stamps to show their payments. The idea was to fill four 250 RM stamp books and then turn them in for a vehicle.

But here’s the thing about investing in totalitarianism: it’s a sucker’s game. Hitler, the car’s biggest booster, unsurprisingly got one of the very few produced. For everyone else, the promised car never materialized. From 1939 until 1945, the Wolfsburg factory was given over to military vehicles and munitions, even as the regime continued to promote the unavailable civilian car. It would take thirty years for Volkswagen to finally settle the last of the 120,000 claims from those who had purchased the stamps.

After the war, a British engineer led the effort to bring the Wolfsburg plant back online. When production increased for the VW Type 1 in 1948, writes Scholz, “it was the first time that the car as it was originally conceived became a mass-produced reality, populating German streets.”

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Since it looked like a ladybug, the Type 1 was called the Käfer, which is German for beetle. In English, it was affectionately known as the Bug or Beetle. Names in other markets included Vocho, Coccinelle, Fusca, and Maggiolino. “Beetle” became the official name in 1968. Over 21.5 million were made, a world record for number of units and years of production. While Wolfsburg stopped production in 1974, the Type 1 continued to be produced in Mexico until 2003. (The “New Beetle” was launched in 1998.)

“What has made [the car] well-known and popular, what has made it the top-selling and much sought-after German car is not its history of origins, but the harmony of its technical and economical features,” went a 1952 VW print advertisement quoted by Scholz, who italicized the elephant in the room.

The iconic Beetle became the embodiment of West Germany’s postwar Wirtschaftswunder. This “economic miracle” was a rise from the literal ashes of defeat to a secure place in “the West’s” consumer democracy. But such transformations are only “miracles,” Scholz argues, when their genesis is invisible.

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That genesis would officially be acknowledged in 1991 when Volkswagen accepted corporate responsibility for crimes against humanity during the Nazi period and set up a compensation fund for survivors of the enslaved labor used in Wolfsburg. (Last year, a Brazilian court found Volkswagen liable for exploiting forced labor in that country during the military dictatorship there.)

The Beetle’s origins were always what Scholz calls a “public secret.” That public secret was also alluded to in an “Auschwitz joke” Scholz heard in 1980s West Germany, when she was around ten years old. She writes that “How many Jews fit in a Volkswagen?” is older than that, with variations going back to the 1950s. The answer is unspeakable, a grotesque mixture, Scholz writes, of “anti-Semetic aggression and feelings of superiority as well as a German consciousness of the Holocaust—possibly accompanied by feelings of shame.”

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