Rivals dismissed the Volkswagen factory as worthless before the Beetle conquered the world
In March 1948 the British offered the whole Volkswagen company to Ford for nothing. Ford's chairman, Ernest Breech, told Henry Ford II it was not worth a damn, and Ford walked away. Carmakers from America, Australia, France and Britain had already turned the bomb-damaged plant down. Within seven years, the millionth Beetle rolled out.
The business started in 1937 under the Nazi regime's labour organisation. In the early 1930s only one German in 50 owned a car. In 1934 Hitler demanded an affordable vehicle that could carry two adults and three children at 100 km/h, to be bought through a savings plan for 990 Reichsmarks. Ferdinand Porsche's team produced the design, with Erwin Komenda shaping a body refined in a wind tunnel, and roughly 336,000 people paid into the scheme. When war began in 1939, none of those savers received a car. During the war the factory built military vehicles, and the company admitted in 1998 that it had used 15,000 slave labourers, some supplied from concentration camps at managers' request. Survivors sued for restitution, and Volkswagen set up a voluntary fund.
American troops captured the factory town in April 1945, and it passed into the British zone. Major Ivan Hirst, a British Army officer, took charge. Finding an abandoned car on site, he painted it green and showed it to headquarters, and in September 1945 the army, desperate for light transport, ordered 20,000. Conditions were grim: the roof leaked so badly that work stopped in the rain, new cars were bartered for steel, and Hirst had to arrange carburettor production after the original supplier ended up in the Soviet zone. Still, by 1946 output reached 1,000 cars a month.
Sir William Rootes, a British industrialist, had predicted collapse within two years, calling the car too ugly and too noisy for ordinary buyers. Instead, the firm became a symbol of West German recovery. Heinrich Nordhoff, formerly of Opel, took over in 1948 and pursued a near single-model strategy built around the Beetle, adding only the Type 2 van and the Karmann Ghia until shortly before he died in 1968.
America was slow to warm up: just two cars sold there in 1949. Yet the Beetle eventually became a global icon, and the wider Volkswagen Group led the world in vehicle sales in 2016 and 2017.
Source: Volkswagen
