Seven weeks earlier, on July 31, 1947, Ferdinand Porsche and Anton Piëch were released from Dijon’s military prison after Louise Piëch put up one million French francs in bail. The men had been in near-constant detention for two years now. They returned to Austria, where they were allowed to wait out a trial in France on war crime charges. The two had been indicted for the looting of a Peugeot factory, which had been expropriated by Volkswagen, and for the deportation of seven Peugeot plant managers to concentration camps — three of them were killed.
On May 5, 1948, a military tribunal in Dijon acquitted Porsche and Piëch. The case, already considered weak, collapsed after French witnesses testified in the tycoons’ favor. The court found that neither man had played a role in the looting of the Peugeot factory nor in the deportation of its managers. It was said that both had actually lobbied for the release of prisoners. Not even mentioned in the trial: Porsche and Piëch’s use of thousands of French civilians and soldiers as forced and slave labor at the Volkswagen complex.
During the two men’s detention, the siblings Ferry and Louise were busy saving their family business by formally splitting it in two: Louise Piëch incorporated a new firm under the Porsche name in Salzburg, while Ferry revived the original Porsche company in Stuttgart. One question, however, remained: what to do with Volkswagen? The factory complex in Fallersleben had come under control of the British military, who renamed the town built around the plant, calling it Wolfsburg, and began mass-producing the original Volkswagen. Hitler’s “people’s car” was becoming the much-beloved Beetle. Still, Ferdinand Porsche had designed it, and during the war he had negotiated an initial remuneration contract with Volkswagen in the event that the car ever went into mass production.
That moment had at long last arrived. In mid-September 1948, a few months after Ferdinand Porsche and Anton Piëch were acquitted in France, the families entered into negotiations with the new Volkswagen CEO, Heinrich Nordhoff. The British-appointed executive also had a rather tainted recent history. Like Ferdinand Porsche, Günther Quandt, and Friedrich Flick, Nordhoff had been appointed Wehrwirtschaftsführer by the Nazi regime while serving as a car executive at Opel, where he had used some two thousand people as forced labor. But after Nordhoff’s denazification, the British authorities disregarded his past sins.
The negotiations took place in the Bavarian spa town of Bad Reichenhall, bordering Austria and just ten miles north of Hitler’s former mountain retreat on the Obersalzberg, where, twelve years earlier, Porsche had presented the test Volkswagens to the führer and convinced him to put the car into production. Now a different agreement was negotiated: how to remunerate Porsche in the years to come for the Volkswagen Beetle he designed.
Enormously, that’s how. The car would become a massive success. The Porsche family ended up negotiating a 1 percent licensing fee on every Beetle sold — that would be about 21.5 million models worldwide by the time production stopped, in 2003. What’s more, Louise and Anton Piëch’s newly incorporated Porsche company in Salzburg received exclusive rights to import Volkswagens. Their company became Austria’s largest car dealership and was sold back to Volkswagen for $4.6 billion in 2011. Another formal agreement enhanced the dynasty: Heinrich Nordhoff’s daughter soon married a son of Louise and Anton Piëch.
Unlike the other German business dynasties, the Porsche-Piëch clan had entered the Nazi era, in January 1933, on the verge of bankruptcy. Now, in the wake of the war, the Bad Reichenhall deal secured its place alongside the other dynasties and would make the Porsche-Piëchs one of the wealthiest families in both Germany and Austria. And all this in mid-September 1948, before the first Porsche sports car was put into production and while the original Porsche factory in Stuttgart — the one that would one day produce millions of the world’s most desired cars — was still under property control of the US Army.
From Austria, Ferdinand Porsche wrote: “I mourn my Stuttgart factory . . . every day.” Although the American control of Porsche’s firm and private assets in Stuttgart was lifted in early March 1949, the release proved to be short-lived. Adolf Rosenberger and the Porsche company had been engaged in a heated legal battle since summer 1948. Rosenberger hadn’t returned to the company. The Jewish émigré now wanted restitution — to be reinstated as a shareholder in the firm he had cofounded, with the same stake Ferdinand Porsche and Anton Piëch had acquired from him in their 1935 Aryanization. After the Porsche company consistently refused any settlement, Rosenberger requested another asset freeze on the Stuttgart firm. It was granted in October 1949.
As the case went to court in late September 1950, a lawyer for Porsche and Piëch proposed a settlement to Rosenberger’s attorney: fifty thousand deutsch marks plus a car. Rosenberger was offered a choice: a luxury version of the Volkswagen Beetle or a Porsche 356, the first sports car under the family name, designed by Porsche’s son, Ferry. Rosenberger hadn’t yet returned to Stuttgart. He was still in Los Angeles, caring for his wife, who was ill. So, Rosenberger’s lawyer accepted the settlement without consulting him. Instead, he informed Rosenberger by letter after the matter was concluded. The Porsche firm was released from American property control; Rosenberger ended up picking the Volkswagen Beetle.
Ferry had already returned to Stuttgart from Austria with his sports car design. Now his father could at last follow. While the legal battle with Rosenberger raged in June 1949, Ferdinand Porsche had initiated his denazification proceedings. At his estate in Austria, where the denazification measures were generous and lax, he had waited for the zeal back home to wane. His lawyers’ line of defense was essentially the same one that so many other Germans had used: “Professor Porsche has always been only a technician, a designer . . . political issues of the day were and still are completely outside his sphere of thought.” On August 30, 1949, a denazification court near Stuttgart exonerated the car designer, whom Hitler had once considered his favorite engineer.
Ferdinand Porsche was particularly happy with this because it meant that he didn’t have to pay for the court proceedings, which amounted to some thirty-nine thousand deutsch marks. With his firm intermittently under an asset freeze, he had been living off his two children and the rental income from his Stuttgart villa: “I was entbräunt free of charge. That ‘free of charge’ was very important to me,” he wrote to a friend some months after the verdict. Because SA uniforms were brown, to be “entbräunt,” or to have lost one’s tan, meant to be “denazified.” Ferry, who had been a voluntary SS officer and was also exonerated in a denazification court, was less preoccupied by the colors of his new associates’ former Nazi uniforms (SS black and field gray, to be precise). To market the first Porsche sports car, Ferry teamed up with Albert Prinzing, an early member of the NSDAP who had served as an officer in Heydrich’s SS security service and had cultivated ties to Mussolini’s fascist party in Italy. A true believer, in short. Prinzing had spent three years in Allied custody, until he was judged a lesser offender by a denazification court in May 1948. He was then hired by his childhood friend Ferry as Porsche’s commercial director, and along the way he helped Ferdinand Porsche successfully navigate his denazification proceedings.
Prinzing was put in charge of assembling Persilscheine for Ferdinand Porsche. The car designer was most grateful to his new employee. In mid-January 1950, Porsche wrote to Prinzing that he was thankful and aware “how hard you worked for us and how much you have contributed to everything that has been achieved.” While the frail Porsche was no longer playing a significant role at the car design company that bore his name, the two former SS officers, Ferry and Prinzing, were only just getting started. In November 1949, production of the Porsche 356 began in Stuttgart. Within eighteen months, the factory had churned out five hundred. Prinzing then introduced the Porsche 356 to the United States, the world’s largest market for automobiles. It was an enormous success. Wealthy Americans quickly became Porsche’s most important clientele outside Germany. In the end, it wasn’t the firm’s persecuted Jewish cofounder and German émigré Adolf Rosenberger who brought the prized name of Porsche to America. It was Prinzing, a former SS-Hauptsturmführer.