18.

On May 26, 1938, Hitler stood at a podium in a forest clearing, his visor cap shielding him from the sweltering sun, and snarled at an audience of more than fifty thousand people: “I hate the word impossible!” He was about to lay the foundation stone for the Volkswagen factory. The building site was located in Nazi Germany’s geographic center, in the municipality of Fallersleben, near an estate called Wolfsburg. It was perfectly positioned next to the highway from Berlin to Hannover, the railroad from Berlin to the Ruhr area, and a shipping canal. One year earlier, Hitler had moved the responsibility for building Europe’s largest factory away from the car industry to the German Labor Front (DAF), the Nazi organization that had replaced trade unions. He deemed the DAF better equipped to handle a project of such national importance and huge expense; earlier estimated to cost ninety million reichsmarks, it was already nearing two hundred million. The DAF’s corrupt and alcoholic leader, Robert Ley, had issued Ferdinand Porsche a blank check for the project, financed by membership fees and assets seized from the unions. For the factory site, the DAF had bought thirty-seven hundred acres of meadowland from a count. As far as the impoverished aristocrat was concerned, the loss of his estate’s hundred-year-old oaks paled in comparison to a potential expropriation. So he succumbed to the lure of Nazi millions.

On the morning of the ceremony, thousands of people were transported to the countryside in specially reserved trains. They lined the road to the construction site, where Hitler arrived in an open car amid the sounding of trumpets and shouts of “Sieg Heil!” The SS had difficulty controlling the crowd. Everyone pushed ahead to get a glimpse of the führer and the shiny new cabriolet in which he rode. “In the cordoned-off area reserved for Hitler and his entourage, three models of the ‘people’s car’ . . . gleamed in the sunlight, strategically placed in front of the wooden grandstand draped with fresh forest green,” a chronicler wrote. From there, the German chancellor delivered his speech. Toward the end of the hour-long event, broadcast live on national radio, Hitler made a surprise announcement: the new car would not be called the Volkswagen, but rather the Kraft durch Freude-Wagen (Strength Through Joy–Car), after the DAF’s tourism organization. Ferdinand Porsche, horrified, looked on. Its impracticality aside, the name was far removed from the one Porsche desired: his own.

Laying the foundation stone at the Volkswagen factory, May 26, 1938.

Bundesarchiv, Atlantic

The previous summer, Porsche had met his longtime hero Henry Ford at Ford’s River Rouge factory complex in Detroit. Ferdinand Porsche wanted to be for Germany what Ford was for the United States. The Volkswagen plant would be modeled after Ford’s. And just like Ford, with his eponymous creation, Porsche hoped the Volkswagen would be named for him. Yet this wasn’t meant to be. After the ceremony, Porsche’s twenty-eight-year-old son, Ferry, driving the cabriolet, took Hitler back to his private train. His father, disappointed, sat in the back.

Nevertheless, the ceremony was good publicity for the Volkswagen. A correspondent for the New York Times excitedly wrote about the prospect of European highways filled with “thousands and thousands of shiny little beetles,” thereby unwittingly coining the car’s nickname, which endured when the vehicle became a global phenomenon years later. Pictures of Ferry, driving the führer to his train, circulated all over the world. The Porsche design office in Stuttgart was inundated with love letters, racy pictures, and marriage proposals addressed to Hitler’s handsome impromptu chauffeur.

Now that his father had become director of the Volkswagen factory, Ferry would take control of the design office back in Stuttgart. Porsche was in the midst of an expansion, to be financed by the DAF’s millions. One month after the ceremony, the car design firm moved from its office in central Stuttgart’s Kronenstrasse to a major plot of land in the city’s Zuffenhausen district. A factory had been built on the site, where cars could be constructed. The land, still part of the site where Porsche’s headquarters stand today, had been Aryanized from a Jewish family, the Wolfs, that previous spring, at a price below market value. It was business as usual for Porsche. Another matter involving the firm’s Jewish cofounder, whose shares Ferry had received, needed to be handled immediately.

In early June 1938, Adolf Rosenberger received a letter at his Paris apartment on avenue Marceau, around the corner from the Arc de Triomphe. The message from Stuttgart contained bad news. Baron Hans von Veyder-Malberg informed his predecessor that Porsche was no longer able to maintain its patent licensing contract with him “on higher authority.” The man who had freed Rosenberger from a concentration camp was now cutting off all professional and personal contact because of “certain aggravations in the internal situation.” The letter was dated June 2, one week after Hitler had laid the foundation stone for the Volkswagen factory. Ferdinand Porsche and Anton Piëch were severing their last ties with the firm’s Jewish cofounder.

On July 23, 1938, Rosenberger wrote to Piëch, who was also the company’s tough legal counsel, suggesting two ways to part amicably: $12,000 to start over in the United States or a transfer of Porsche’s American patent license to Rosenberger. But Piëch did not merely go along with the Nazis as a necessity for doing business; he shared their ideology and had just become a party member for the second time. As an Austrian native, he first entered the NSDAP’s sister party in his home country in May 1933, only to apply for membership in the German Nazi Party on June 2, 1938. Later, Piëch sought to gain admission to the SS and was accepted.

In a separate letter, Rosenberger made a personal appeal to the firm he cofounded: “Dr. Porsche has told me on several occasions that, in view of our many years of cooperation and the risk that I have assumed for the company at all times, I can count on him at any time, and I believe that the modest claims for compensation that I’m making will meet with his full approval and that he too will use all his influence to bring our eight-year relationship to an amicable end.” Rosenberger acknowledged “that it may be difficult for you to continue to work with me as a non-Aryan in the old way.”

But, adding insult to Aryanization, Anton Piëch coldly rejected the proposal. “My company does not recognize your claims under any circumstance and rejects them for a lack of legal basis,” Piëch responded on August 24, 1938, on the grounds that Rosenberger hadn’t succeeded in selling any patent licenses abroad in recent years. That same month, the Gestapo began the process of revoking Rosenberger’s German citizenship. It was time for him to leave Europe.