After the war, nobody wanted the Volkswagen factory as a gift
In 1945 the bombed Volkswagen works could have been carted off as war reparations, yet no British carmaker wanted it. A British report judged the car unattractive and commercially hopeless. In 1948 Ford was offered the company and a senior executive dismissed plant and car alike. It became the world's second-largest automaker.
The company was founded in Berlin by the Nazi German Labour Front and incorporated on 28 May 1937 to make a people's car, first known as the Porsche Type 60. War broke out soon after its factory at Fallersleben was completed, so it mostly built military vehicles such as the Kubelwagen and the amphibious Schwimmwagen, along with V-1 flying bombs, which made it a major Allied bombing target. Only a few of the civilian cars were produced. In 1998 the company admitted using 15,000 slave labourers, and it set up a voluntary restitution fund after survivors sued.
In June 1945 Major Ivan Hirst of the British Army's Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers took over the wrecked plant to repair army vehicles while its fate was decided. Ford's Ernest Breech later said the ownership was so tangled that no takeover was possible anyway. Production of the renamed Type 1, the future Beetle, restarted slowly amid shortages, then boomed through the 1950s and 1960s, spawning the Type 2 van in 1950 and the Karmann Ghia in 1955, all on the same air-cooled, rear-engine layout.
Growth then came by acquisition. Volkswagen bought Auto Union from Daimler-Benz on 1 January 1965, which led to the first postwar Audis. It took control of Spain's SEAT in 1986, its first foreign brand, then the Czech maker Skoda in stages from 1991, and in 1998 added Bentley, Lamborghini and Bugatti. The front-wheel-drive Golf, launched in the 1970s, became its bestseller.
Its biggest modern setback came in 2015, when regulators found it had fitted defeat devices to disguise nitrogen oxide emissions. The fines exceeded 30 billion dollars.
Source: Volkswagen Group
