1938:The Nazis build a car factory

A Volkswagen for everyone:That's what the Nazis promised the Germans. On May 26, 1938, they laid the foundation stone for the VW factory - and produced armaments there.

by Malte Krebs

"You have to save five marks a week - do you want to drive your own car?" More than 300,000 savers in the German Reich followed this slogan by the end of the 1930s. The financing model promised the unbelievable:a "Volkswagen" affordable for everyone, which Adolf Hitler had already announced to his "comrades" in 1934.

Masses save on their own car - in vain

And the Germans saved - week after week they put their stamps on the savings card in the hope of owning a car. The problem with this:The advertised car did not exist. Not even the factory where it could have been built. Hundreds of thousands had already signed a savings contract when the cornerstone for the Volkswagen factory was laid on May 26, 1938 near the town of Fallersleben in Lower Saxony.

But the so-called Kraft-through-Freude-Wagen was never built. With the beginning of the war, production was switched to armaments. Private cars continued to be reserved for a small, privileged class.

Motorization of the masses?

At that time, Germany was underpowered compared to other European countries. In 1930 there were only about 500,000 registered motor vehicles. This put the Reich far behind neighbors such as France or Great Britain, where more than 1.5 million cars were already rolling on the streets. The difference to the USA is even more blatant:mass motorization had long since begun here with a good 26 million vehicles.

The Nazis wanted Germany to follow suit. Soon after taking power, Adolf Hitler announced his ambitious goal:a top speed of 100 km/h, space for four people, cheap to buy and economical to use - that's what the "Volkswagen" should look like. Car manufacturer Ferdinand Porsche (1875-1951) was commissioned with the construction. However, the spherical car he developed in the mid-1930s was not called the "Beetle" but the "Power through Joy Car". It is questionable whether he could have become a worldwide bestseller with this name.

The National Socialist auto mobilization

Progress, technology, speed:Although he didn't have a driver's license himself, Hitler knew about the fascination of the automobile and used it for propaganda purposes. As with the autobahns, which were built across Germany as a job creation measure and were dubious in view of the low level of motorisation, the same applied here:The propagandistic effect was more important than the real benefit. Because it was accompanied by the vague promise that the car would soon no longer be the privilege of the upper class, but a pleasure for everyone. Accordingly, the motorization of the masses was staged with great effort.

The National Socialist mass organization "Kraft durch Freude" (KdF) was in charge of this project:it was supposed to organize the leisure time of the German "comrades", monitor them and win them over to the regime with apparently harmless entertainment. She organized holiday trips and hiking trips, hosted bowling tournaments and sewing courses. And under the direction of KdF, the car for the masses should also be produced. But for that you first needed a factory.

A new factory town

The Volkswagen factory was intended to be an exemplary project from the start. Ferdinand Porsche - who was also the general manager of the newly founded "Volkswagenwerk GmbH" - had learned about modern production methods on study trips to the USA, especially the assembly line principle with which the Ford company had revolutionized cost-effective mass production. In Germany, the project was financed not only from the many millions of Reichsmarks from savers, but also from the property expropriated by the trade unions in 1933.

The choice of location fell on the small town of Fallersleben in Lower Saxony, north-east of Braunschweig. Above all, the location between the Mittelland Canal, the railway line and the Reichsautobahn Berlin - Hanover seemed favourable. In addition, military aspects spoke in favor of the location:in the event of the foreseeable war, the factory was far away from the state borders and was therefore reasonably protected from air raids.

Laying of the foundation stone with a lot of pathos

The foundation stone was laid in Fallersleben on May 26, 1938. The regime did not miss the opportunity for pathetic staging. The ceremony was meticulously planned down to the last detail. KdF savers from all over the Reich made a pilgrimage to the future production facility, SA and SS sent honor formations, members of the Reich Labor Service, the Hitler Youth and party members were promoted to the sparsely populated "Wolfsburg Ländchen".

50,000 participants and around 600 guests of honor were present in the Südheide when Adolf Hitler stylized the future VW plant as a "symbol of the National Socialist German state, the National Socialist people's community" in his mass-effective speech.

The factory needs a new city

The founding of the Volkswagen factory is also an early example of industrial settlement on a greenfield site:at the end of 1937, just 857 people lived in the area. For the planned mass production, there were neither enough workers nor appropriate accommodation. So a few weeks after the new plant, the new "City of the KdF car near Fallersleben" had to be built from scratch. It was only given the much more concise name "Wolfsburg" by the Allies after the war on May 25, 1945.

With the Volkswagen to the front

But before that happened, more than 20,000 forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners had to work in the Volkswagen factory under inhumane conditions, many of whom died in agony. Instead of the promised automobiles for the masses, military jeeps were produced. What particularly impressed Hitler about the "Volkswagen" that could be produced in large numbers was the fact that it could easily be converted from a civilian to a military vehicle. VW delivered more than 60,000 units to the Wehrmacht and SS for the German war of annihilation, as well as combat aircraft, mines and flying bombs. For this reason, the VW plant was allowed to call itself a "war model company" and was also given the honorary title of "National Socialist model company".

By the end of the war, only 630 civilian vehicles had left the factory - for leading NSDAP officials. The actual triumph of the "Beetle" as a symbol of the economic miracle was to begin later.