The Volkswagen Beetle's tangled origins, from Nazi propaganda to 21.5 million cars
Built for 65 years, longer than any other single generation of car, the Beetle began as a Nazi propaganda promise that every German would own one. Hardly any civilians got theirs before the war, a British-run factory restarted production, and a court later ruled that the basic idea belonged to someone other than Ferdinand Porsche.
At a meeting in Berlin's Kaiserhof Hotel in May 1934, Hitler demanded a car that could carry two adults and three children on no more than seven litres of fuel per 100 km, with an air-cooled engine because not every country doctor had a garage. The following month Porsche won a contract for a prototype. His team included Erwin Komenda on bodywork and Franz Xaver Reimspiess, credited with the VW badge. The first prototypes appeared in October 1935, and a batch of thirty test cars built by Daimler-Benz covered over 2,900,000 kilometres.
The Strength Through Joy leisure organisation ran the project, and its chief Robert Ley promised in 1938 that every German would have one within ten years. The Fallersleben plant, now Wolfsburg, was unfinished when war came, so only 210 cars were made by May 1945. British occupiers then got the factory running and built 1,785 by the end of 1945, mostly for the occupying powers and the post office.
Credit is disputed. Béla Barényi sketched a similar car in 1925, and in 1953 a court upheld his claim; Porsche's own archive head later called his role decisive. The aerodynamicist Paul Jaray, the small-car campaigner Josef Ganz and Tatra's Hans Ledwinka are also cited, and Porsche admitted he and Ledwinka sometimes looked over each other's shoulders.
The formula was a rear, air-cooled four-cylinder boxer engine driving the rear wheels, a body fixed with eighteen bolts to a flat chassis, and torsion bar suspension. It was officially called the Type 1, only formally named the Beetle in 1968. In 1972 it passed the Ford Model T as the best-selling car ever, a record held for 25 years, and it became the first car produced more than 20 million times. Volkswagen made over 78,000 changes while keeping the shape, before front-drive hatchbacks like the 1974 Golf took over. Production ended in 2003.
Source: Volkswagen Beetle
