Chapter 44
Though he never learned how to drive, Adolf Hitler made a point of personally opening the annual Berlin Motor Show after he assumed the chancellorship of Germany in 1933. Indeed Hitler exploited the expo to introduce the first working model of the Volkswagen.
Years before, Hitler had announced plans to create an affordable, fuel-efficient “People’s Car” that would cost about as much as a motorcycle, or about 990 reichsmarks (roughly $400 in 1930 dollars). The vehicle would hold two adults and three children and would be capable of hitting 62 mph.
His inspiration was less about martial prowess than manufacturing productivity. If Hitler’s mental template of a military conqueror was Frederick the Great, his model of an industrial magnate was Henry Ford. The Führer dreamed of a four-wheeled chariot that would rival the affordability, and therefore the ubiquity, of Ford’s Model T, which sold more than fifteen million cars between 1908 and 1927, when it ended production. In its time the Model T was the most successful single model of an automobile ever produced, but the Volkswagen would be one of the rocks upon which Hitler would build his dark church.
Just as attractive to Hitler as Ford’s business acumen was the auto magnate’s personal philosophy. After Ford purchased the Independent, the Dearborn, Michigan, weekly newspaper in 1919, he turned it into a snarl of anti-Semitic rants that were medieval in their bigotry and as subtle as a gunshot. Styling himself “Chronicler of the Neglected Truth,” Ford in 1920 began publishing the first of a series titled “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” He warned of the perils of “Jewish Jazz—Moron Music” and the dangers of “Too Much Jew” in baseball. He ran the text of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the scurrilous forgery by the czarist secret police, as observable revelation and unchallengeable fact. After publishing a series of like-minded articles in more than ninety issues, Ford collected them into a four-volume set titled “The International Jew” and distributed 500,000 copies to his car dealerships and subscribers.
Hitler gravitated to Ford with the inevitability of a mosquito to blood. The only American to be mentioned in Mein Kampf, Ford is portrayed in it as a noble resistor of America’s Semitic controlling masters. Behind Hitler’s desk in the Nazi party’s Munich headquarters hung a life-size oil portrait of Ford, the man Hitler called “my inspiration.” The HQ’s waiting room carried copies of “The International Jew,” translated into German. Knowing that Ford had presidential aspirations, Hitler offered to lend Ford some of his storm troopers to help his bid along. The larger-than-life Ford, a bona fide inventor of the twentieth century itself, offered Hitler validity, cachet, and money, sending Hitler a birthday check for $50,000 in 1939.
Ford wasn’t the only conceptual source for the people’s car; exhibitions played a key role. In 1926, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy hosted the fifth International Road Congress, where prominent opinion-shaping civil servants and journalists from Britain, France, and America left impressed by Italy’s slick new autostrade, which Il Duce bragged on as much as Hitler’s ministers touted their new autobahn. A few years later in 1934, Nazi Germany hosted the seventh International Road Congress, and in 1936, the second International Congress for Bridges and Overground Structures. And in April 1936, Reichsminister Goering opened the new Autobahn out of Berlin by tearing down it in his duck-egg blue Mercedes 540K Special Roadster, on the wrong side of the highway. The road literally and figuratively had been paved for the Volkswagen.
While nearly 340,000 Germans put money down on the cars through membership in the KdF (Kraft durch Freude, or Strength through Joy) organization, no civilian in the Third Reich ever actually received one. Of the estimated 700 Beetles produced from 1941 to 1944, most went to the Führer himself and the Nazi elite.
Exhibitions were always part of expanding Hitler’s appeal. When he ran for president of Germany in 1932, Hitler’s minions used all the communication technologies of the time to spread his malignant gospel. They flew him in his own private plane to as many as twenty cities a week, exhorting audiences of up to 250,000 to vote for the would-be Führer. They employed radio, movies, and especially gramophone records, like those arranged in a swastika in the Nazi party’s exhibit at the 1932 Berlin Radio Show. Creating their own record label, known as Braune Platte (Brown Disc), the Nazis produced an 8.5-minute-long recording of the madman’s tirades called “Hitler’s Appeal to the Nation,” that gave full voice to the man who said “I have no equal in the art of swaying the masses” to reach millions. Indeed, Hitler’s voice may have had no equal, even in an era of sonic barbarians like Father Charles Coughlin and Mussolini, in luring listeners to their eventual doom. Distributing 50,000 copies of it nationwide at a price of 5 reichsmarks, the Nazis also played the record over loudspeakers mounted on the backs of roving trucks to win votes and sow fear.