Volkswagen Company and ItsVW Beetle
The VW Beetle was one of the most successful automobiles built in the twentieth century. Ideas about a car that would not be a luxury product but an affordable vehicle for the majority of the population go back as far as 1904.
In the Wilhelmine Empire, engineers were already arguing that the future of automobiles would lie only in mass production of affordable small vehicles that even working-class families could afford. This debate was sparked by Henry Ford’s creation of the Model T. The Model T, commonly known as the Tin Lizzie, was produced by the Ford Motor Company between 1908 and 1928. The first model rolled off the assembly line on October 1, 1908. It was the first car mass-produced on assembly lines with completely interchangeable parts. By 1914 the production of the Model T had been streamlined in such a way that it took only 93 minutes to produce one car. According to contemporary estimates, roughly half of all the cars driven in the world by the early 1920s were Model-T Fords. About 15 million Ford Model T’s were sold. Only the VW Beetle surpassed this record.The idea of a Volkswagen (people’s car) became the leitmotif for German engineers during the Golden Twenties. However, the idea became feasible only after the endorsement of this suggestion by Adolf Hitler, who admired Henry Ford and realized the potential of his concept of affordable mass- produced cars for the integration of average Germans into the Nazi system. The Reichsverband der Deutschen Automo- bilindustrie (Imperial Association of Carproducers, RDA) requested Ferdinand Porsche to construct a prototype of his people’s car in 1934. Hitler demanded that the sales price was not to exceed 990 reichsmarks. Porsche already had worked on concepts and sketches of a small and affordable family car before Hitler seized power in January 1933. However, only after the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship did this idea gain much support in political circles.
The production of a people’s car fit Hitler’s plans for the construction of a system of Autobahnen (highways) and was an ideal element in the Nazis’ desire to create a Volksgemeinschafi (people’s community).The Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Laborers’ Front, DAF) under its leader Robert Ley took over the responsibility for the production of the Volkswagen in 1937. This organization was also in charge of the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy, KdF) Program, the first mass-tourism program. This explains the naming of the people’s car as the KdF car (as Hitler had suggested it). The DAF founded the Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des deutschen Volkswagens mbH (Society for the Preparation of the German People’s Car, Gezuvor), which soon was renamed
Leaflet for the "Kraft durch Freude" (Strength by Joy) car, 1938. (Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin)
Volkswagenwerk GmbH (Volkswagen Company). On May 26, 1938, construction began on a production facility for the Beetle near the city of Fallersleben in Lower Saxony. This production site, completed between 1939 and 1940, became the center of an entire new city, which was named Stadt des KdF Wagens (City of the KdF car). The Volkswagen soon became a symbol of the National Socialist consumer policy. By 1936 the car already had its distinctive round shape designed by the Austrian car-body designer Erwin Komenda (1904—1966). Porsche had met him in 1929 in Steyr and hired him in 1931 to head the Porsche Car-Body Construction Department.
Beginning in August 1938, Germans were invited by the DAF to buy car coupons in the form of saving stamps, which would enable average families to purchase a people’s car after several years of saving. By 1945, about 340,000 people had participated in this saving scheme and accumulated some 280 million reichsmarks (Graef 2002, 4). However, only a handful of Beetles were ever produced before the onset of war in September 1939.
Production was immediately switched over to military vehicles, and, instead of Beetles, VW produced jeeplike Kubelwagen (bucket seat cars) and amphibious Schwimmwagen. Only after 1945 did the actual production of Beetles begin. The British, who were in charge of the automobile production facilities, decided to restructure the factories rather than demolish them. In October 1946 the 10,000th Beetle left the assembly line. By 1954 about 1 million Beetles had been produced (Graef 2002, 42). The Beetle, sold worldwide, became the most striking symbol of the fast West German economic recovery after World War II. Inside West Germany, the Beetle was quickly seen as the most obvious indication that the old class society had been replaced by a classless mass-consumer society. The Beetle was the car that everyone could afford. The sales numbers proved that the car finally had become a consumer good and was no longer an exclusive luxury item.By the end of the 1940s, VW was producing more than half of all vehicles manufactured in West Germany. During the 1950s, production skyrocketed. In 1954 the 1 millionth car rolled off the assembly line. In the following decades, the Beetle would become one of the highest-selling cars in the world. Until March 1950, VW had only one product—the Beetle. This changed with the development of the first VW transporter, the Bulli. At the same time, VW embarked on worldwide expansion of its production facilities. In September 1952 Volkswagen Canada, Ltd., was opened, with its headquarters in Toronto. One year later, Volkswagen do Brasil, S.A., in Sao Bernardo do Campo near Sao Paulo was founded. In October 1953 Verkaufsge- sellschaft Volkswagen of America, Inc. (Volkswagen Marketing Company of America) was established with its seat in Inglewood, New Jersey. Over the next few years, new production facilities were opened in Hanover and Kassel (Germany) as well as in South Africa (Volkswagen of South Africa Pty. Ltd. In Uitenhage) and in Australia (Volkswagen Australasia Pty.
Ltd. in Melbourne).By 1973 more than 16 million Beetles had been produced worldwide. With this output, the Beetle surpassed the previous record set by the Ford Model T. It became the best-selling car of the twentieth century. After the introduction of the VW Golf, sales dropped and the Beetle slowly but surely began losing ground. Until 1978 it was produced in German production facilities, afterward (between 1978 and mid- 2003) only in the Mexican VW factories. On July 30, 2003, the last VW Beetle (No. 21,529,464) rolled from the assembly line in Puebla, Mexico, after an unexpected and unprecedented life span of 58 years. Sold in the United States until 1978, the VW Beetle and VW Bus became the symbols of an alternative counterculture during and after the 1968 student revolutions. No longer just a car, the Beetle has been the center of a cult since the 1960s and its association with the hippie movement. It still has a very strong fellowship of believers worldwide. It even became the star, “Herbie,” of a Walt Disney movie The Love Bug
(1968) followed by three sequential movies: Herbie Rides Again (1974), Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo (1977), and Herbie Goes Bananas (1980).
In 1998 the Beetle experienced a resurrection of sorts when VW presented its New Beetle to the public. Developed by VW engineers in California, this New Beetle does not have much in common with the original version. Technically based on the Golf model, it is only reminiscent in its round shape. It is quite an irony that the “grandson” of Hitler’s people’s car is an American.
Alexander Schug
See also Ford, Henry; Mexico
References and Further Reading
Baaske, Edwin. Volkswagen Beetle: Portrait of a Legend. Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley, 1997.
Barber, Chris. Birth of the Beetle: The Development of the Volkswagen by Ferdinand Porsche. Sparkford, UK: Haynes, 2003.
Graef, Bernd, et al., eds. Volkswagen Chronik. Wolfsburg: Unternehmensarchiv der Volkswagen AB, 2002.
Patton, Phil. Bug: The Strange Mutations of the World’s Most Famous Automobile. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002.