In early November 1945, a French army lieutenant paid a visit to the Porsche-Piëch estate in Austria’s Zell am See. The American and British authorities had recently released Ferdinand Porsche, his son, Ferry, and his son-in-law, Anton Piëch, pending further investigation. Now the French officer approached the trio with an invitation. A French commission, headed by the Communist minister of industry, wanted to work with Ferdinand Porsche on developing a French version of the Volkswagen, aided by the state-owned Renault company, which had been nationalized after its collaboration with the Nazis.
Eager to again work with a government, Porsche promptly provided reams of drawings and technical data to the French. He then started negotiating with the commission in Baden-Baden, the base of the French occupation authorities and close to Germany’s border with France. In mid-December 1945, Porsche, Piëch, and Ferry traveled to Baden-Baden for the second round of negotiations. There, plainclothes French army officers suddenly arrested them on suspicion of war crimes.
As it turned out, Porsche’s competitor Peugeot, after catching wind of the negotiations, had complained to the government. According to Peugeot, it was unpatriotic for the French to reach out to Ferdinand Porsche, given his prior relationship with Hitler and the Volkswagen’s association with the Nazis. (What Peugeot actually feared was increased competition from Renault.) More damning, though, was Peugeot’s accusation that Porsche and Piëch had committed war crimes. Seven managers at a French Peugeot plant looted by Volkswagen had been deported to concentration camps; three of them were killed. And all this while Porsche and Piëch were in charge of the Volkswagen complex, where thousands of French civilians and soldiers were pressed into forced and slave labor. But, as was typical of the Allied authorities, the tycoons’ brutal labor practices weren’t even a point of interest for the French government.
Instead, it was the deportation of Peugeot’s staff and the accusation of murder that prompted French forces to arrest the trio and detain them in Baden-Baden. Ferry was released from jail in March 1946 but was kept under house arrest in a rural village in the Black Forest until July, when he was finally allowed to return to Austria. Meanwhile, Porsche and Piëch were moved to the outskirts of Paris, where they were held in the servants’ quarters of a villa formerly owned by the Renault family. Instead of spending his pretrial detention in jail, Porsche was asked to give advice on the development of the Renault 4CV. Although Porsche contributed to crucial aspects of the minicar’s design, Renault’s CEO told the government that Porsche had done a miserable job. The company’s director, a hero of the French Resistance, couldn’t bear seeing the German star designer, accused of committing war crimes against French compatriots, receive a sliver of credit for helping design the French car. In mid-February 1947, Porsche and Piëch were moved from the Paris suburbs to a harsh military prison in Dijon to await trial.
With the two men in prison, Porsche’s children, Louise Piëch and Ferry, had to save the family business on their own. It was facing serious challenges. The Porsche plant in Stuttgart — abandoned since the clan and its employees fled to Austria — was being used as a car repair shop for the US Army after it, along with Ferdinand Porsche’s private assets, fell under American property control. Given the family’s flight to Austria, the Americans were seriously considering liquidation of the Porsche firm in Germany. Meanwhile, Ferdinand Porsche’s application to become an Austrian citizen was rejected because he was in custody. Citizenship would have allowed him to transfer his firm and assets out of US property control to Austria, but alas. He would need to find another way to slip past the Americans.
Desperate times called for desperate measures. In early 1947, the Porsche siblings decided to formally split the family business. Louise had retained Austrian citizenship through her marriage with Anton Piëch. She incorporated a new firm in Salzburg, under the Porsche name, to which the family’s Austrian assets were transferred. Ferry held on to his German citizenship to save the Porsche company in Stuttgart. But because of the Americans’ property control, Ferry had to undertake this from the safety of the company’s Austrian base in the Alps, where he was busy fulfilling his father’s dream of designing the first sports car bearing the family name: the Porsche 356.
From prison, Anton Piëch wrote to his Porsche cofounder, Adolf Rosenberger, asking for a thousand dollars to help him and Ferdinand Porsche make bail. This, after the two had Aryanized Rosenberger’s stake in Porsche more than a decade earlier. Now Piëch offered Rosenberger the Porsche patent license in the United States, though Piëch had coldly rejected Rosenberger’s request for it in 1938. Rosenberger had immigrated to America in 1940 and was living under the name Alan Robert in Los Angeles. After the war, Rosenberger had sent a telegram to Louise Piëch. In her response, Louise expressed the hope that business relations with him might resume after the property control was lifted. They were soon writing to each other regularly. Rosenberger also corresponded with Ferry and even sent care packages to their family estate. Rosenberger clearly hoped to be part of the company once again.
With Ferdinand Porsche and Anton Piëch facing trial in France, and the next generation fighting for the survival of the Porsche company, it seemed that the Jewish Rosenberger might actually return to the car design firm he had cofounded.