On April 20, 1939, Ferdinand Porsche gifted the first finished Volkswagen, a black Beetle convertible, to a delighted Hitler at the führer’s fiftieth-birthday party in Berlin. Göring received the second, and Goebbels the fourth. The “people’s car” was not, in fact, delivered to the people. Only 630 of them were built during the Third Reich, and they all went to the Nazi elite. The 340,000 Germans who signed up for the DAF’s program to save for the purchase of the car were bilked of around 280 million reichsmarks. Meanwhile, the Volkswagen factory complex in Fallersleben was nowhere near finished; soon work was underway to retool it for arms production. Aided by his son, Ferry, and his son-in-law, Anton Piëch, Volkswagen’s factory chief, Ferdinand Porsche, had to abruptly change gears. The designer of civilian automobiles and race cars became a maker of weapons, tanks, and army cars.
But to produce anything, there first had to be a factory that was fully functional. When Hitler visited the plant in early June 1939, Porsche dared show him only the pressing shop, because it was the most developed part of the complex. The factory’s massive red-brick façade, measuring eight tenths of a mile in length, obscured the largely empty inner halls. What was supposed to be the world’s largest automobile plant, capable of churning out 1.5 million cars per year, still lacked much basic machinery. Fallersleben was little more than a dusty barracks camp, mostly filled with the three thousand Italian construction workers that Hitler’s ally Mussolini had sent over to help finish construction. German men were barely available, as most had been called to military service. By the time the brutally cold winter of 1939 arrived, Volkswagen’s main factory halls remained unheated, and its stairwells were missing window glass. Many more workers were needed to finish the job and keep the place running. Ferdinand Porsche did not care whether they came voluntarily or by force.