Work stopped at the Volkswagen factory in early April 1945. There was barely any food left at the massive complex in Fallersleben. The Nazis began using it as a transit point for deportations from other sub–concentration camps. On April 7, the SS ordered the evacuation of the remaining Volkswagen factory subcamps. A hundred male prisoners from one of them died after being deported hours north to Wöbbelin, yet another Neuengamme subcamp. Six hundred and fifty female Jewish prisoners held in a Volkswagen factory hall were deported one hour northeast in freight cars to Salzwedel, a women-only concentration camp. One week later, American forces freed them.
US troops liberated the remaining laborers, both forced and enslaved, at the Volkswagen plant on April 11, 1945. One day before the American soldiers arrived, the sadistic factory director, Anton Piëch, fled the complex, but not before stealing more than ten million reichsmarks in cash from the Volkswagen coffers and sending about 250 factory militia troops to fight on the front line. He made off with the millions to his native Austria, where the Porsche-Piëch clan awaited him at the family estate in Zell am See. Over the prior eight years, the Porsche firm had already billed the Volkswagen plant about 20.5 million reichsmarks for design and development services. “This sum likely laid the financial foundation for the successful post-war development of the house of Porsche,” two historians concluded decades later.
In mid-May 1945, an Allied investigation team in Austria raided the thousand-acre estate in Zell am See and the provisional Porsche company headquarters in Gmünd. They began questioning Ferdinand Porsche and his engineers about their development of tanks and military cars. As the interrogators came down harder on them, Porsche and his staff cracked, and they handed over the company’s technical drawings. At the time of the raid, the OSS published a memo on the arms and car designer: through Hitler, “Porsche was entrusted with the execution of one of the favorite Nazi schemes”: the Volkswagen. Porsche also “played an important part in equipping the Nazi war machine.”
The CIC arrested fifty-year-old Anton Piëch and Porsche’s son, Ferry, on July 29, 1945, and brought them to an internment camp near Salzburg. Ferdinand Porsche was detained five days later, but he was moved to Kransberg Castle in Germany. The sixty-nine-year-old star designer complained to his interrogators that he had already been exhaustively questioned in Austria. “Hitler’s support was simply necessary in order to successfully implement my ideas,” Porsche told them.
It wasn’t just Ferdinand Porsche’s arms production for the Nazis that had put him at the mercy of the investigators. If anything, the Allies wanted his trade secrets. And as for Porsche and Piëch’s brutal management of the Volkswagen factory, where they had used about twenty thousand people as forced or slave labor, including some five thousand concentration camp captives, the Allies didn’t care much about the moguls’ deplorable labor practices. The investigators mainly focused on their money and accused the men of stealing Volkswagen’s assets for their personal profit. And they weren’t wrong. Piëch, after raiding the Volkswagen coffers, had continued sending invoices from Austria to the British military, the plant’s new overseer, billing them more than 1.25 million reichsmarks for services rendered by the company, even after the British occupied the plant. Piëch, not yet officially removed as the factory director, felt justified in doing so.
Ferdinand Porsche denied that he had done any looting: it was, after all, his son-in-law who had done the stealing at Volkswagen. Porsche was released after five weeks, and he returned to Austria. Anton Piëch and Ferry Porsche were soon let out of the internment camp too; Ferdinand Porsche had spent weeks lobbying the Allied authorities for their release. But as the American and British investigators moved on, the trio had to face another of the Allies: the French.