Origin and Evolution of Ferdinand Porsche's Beloved Volkswagen Beetle
Years ago, before the war, the bright and cheery VW Beetle had a somewhat sinister origin as Hitler's people's car. Designed to cheaply and efficiently make Germany mobile and modern, its long production life surprised everyone but Dr. Porsche.
1. Porsche's early vehicle designs
Ferdinand wanted to engineer a simple vehicle that would be cheap enough to produce, so that anyone could afford one. His first real attempt at the design was the Type 12 for German motorcycle company Zundap in 1931, who then decided not to get into the car market after all. The design was revised and a year later another motorcycle company, NSU, was considering producing it. Seen above, the flat-four powered, rear-engined, air-cooled car, with torsion bar suspension was very close to what would be called the Beetle a few year later.
2. Adolf Hitler's involvement
The Beetle we all know and love today was originally just called the Volkswagen, or "People's Car". This wildly successful machine would have never hit the assembly line without the pressing insistence of the world's most infamous dictator, Adolf Hitler. When Hitler saw Dr. Porsche's Type 32 in 1934, he immediately liked it and in 1938 the Beetle we all know was rolling out of the factory, only to then be diverted to military uses. Hitler ordered three different special forms, based on the same design, for his rough and tumble military: The Kubelwagen (Bucket Car) which was a Jeep-like body on a Beetle chassis, and became the VW Thing, The Kommandeurswagen (Commander's Car) was a 4x4 version of the basic Beetle, down to the stock body work, and the radical Schwimmwagen (Amphibious Car) which was much like the Kubelwagen but could be used in water.
3. Porsche officially becomes German
Adolf Hitler was not known for his kindness, but he pulled special strings for his best engineer, Ferdinand Porsche. After finding out that Porsche was technically a Czech citizen, Hitler quickly had Porsche's citizenship rectified so he would officially be a German from that point on.
4. Joseph Ganz - Motor-Kritik and Volkswagen creator?
The true creator of the Volkswagen concept may have been a Jewish inventor and journalist by the name of Joeseph Ganz. In his magazine Motor-Kritik he preached for the creation of a lightweight, inexpensive car for the people, with rear engine, backbone frame, and rounded aerodynamic body work, all features of the Beetle. Many of his ideas were original enough, and developed enough that he received patents for them, but he could never convince a manufacturer to back him in production. Unfortunately, his status as a Jew forced him to flee Nazi Germany before the war, and he had no power to claim royalties on his genius.
5. Forced labor
Ferdinand Porsche was Adolf Hitler's favorite engineer, and perhaps the most brilliant one in Germany. The ruthless leader had no problem diverting some of the population of Jews in the German labor camps to build the first Volkswagen Beetles. Like much of industry in Germany in the war years, Jews, political prisoners, and even prisoners of war were all forced to help in the very war effort they were fighting against.
6. The Tatra V570 controversy
Even before the war, Porsche was sued for infringing on the designs of Czech car company Tatra and designer Hans Ledwinka. The Beetle's design was so similar to the Tatra V570 that the company sued, only to be stopped by the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. After the war, the lawsuit was taken up again and Tatra was compensated a million Deutsche Marks in an out of court settlement in 1965. Dr. Porsche himself is quoted as saying "Well, sometimes I looked over his shoulder and sometimes he looked over mine".
7. Post War Rebuilding
After the war Germany was in ruins, and Volkswagen was just as bad. The Allies had planned to dismantle all industry left in Germany so it would not have the capacity to equip an army again, and any factories that were still intact were being taken apart. The British were supposed to take VW, but no car company in the UK wanted them, saying "the vehicle does not meet the fundamental technical requirement of a motor-car ... it is quite unattractive to the average buyer ... To build the car commercially would be a completely uneconomic enterprise." In 1946, British officer Ivan Hirst was in charge of reviving the factory, and the first step was removing a large unexploded bomb wedged between irreplaceable machinery. A few months later the factory was producing 1,000 cars a month for British military use.
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