Volkswagen: The People's Car Of Nazi Germany | War Factories | Timeline

my name is dan snow and i want to tell you about history hit tv it's like the netflix for history hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians we've got an exclusive offer available to fans of timeline if you go to history hit tv you can either follow the information below this video or just google history hit tv and use the code timeline you get a special introductory offer go and check it out in the meantime enjoy this video the untold story of war production all wars are about competition in production the side that can produce more is always going to triumph this is a war between the factories [Music] the real story of how the world wars were fought and won it may sound strange but modern wars they're not won by battles they're won by factories they swamped the other side with a tide of mass production and those factories would shape the modern world volkswagen fiat mitsubishi they're all household names now but they made those names as war factories gotta get back to work [Music] the volkswagen beetle the world's most successful car everyone loves a beetle it's got that lovely iconic curved shape there's never really been anything like it before or certainly since i defy anyone to say they don't like the volkswagen beetle they're awesome they're cute how can you not look at it and smile it's so silly looking it doesn't just look good but it's also really affordable it's recognized all over the world it's what the term cheap and cheerful was made for but there's a darker side to this car the bonnet of the vehicle had to be capable of supporting a machine gun what does that tell us about what's really going on because the people's car and its slogan strength through joy were created by the nazis and like everything touched by them it was designed for war [Music] 1933 adolf hitler becomes chancellor of germany and soon after sees his total power when adolf hitler came to power he had to face a very very significant obstacle in that the country was broken and he had to deal with a broken and fractured economy the fallout of the wall street crash the depression it unleashed in europe this was one crisis too far millions millions of ordinary germans suddenly found themselves unemployed their savings destroyed to counter this hitler has a plan hitler's intention was to modernize the reich economy and he was going to do that with autobahns and cars the car was the future hitler frankly was a bit of a petrol head uh he absolutely loved cars now he never learned how to drive but that didn't stop him from from loving them i think hitler's attraction for cars really came out of that adoration of speed of efficiency of getting somewhere fast in fact the new york times once estimated that hitler did more mileage in his cars than any other world leader and he's driven around at one point in this huge armor-plated five-ton mercedes it was an absolute beer moth it's one of the heaviest cars i think ever produced now if hitler had known the origins of the brand mercedes he may not have been quite so fond of being driven around in them because the mercedes was named after the daughter of the man who had commissioned the firm's first car an entrepreneur called emil jelenek and emil jelenek was a jew the idea of hitler being driven everywhere in a big muscle car would play perfectly into his ego the idea that it makes you look like the daddy so yeah i can totally see why cars appeal to hitler cars were the perfect vehicle to help solve some of the economic challenges faced by nazi germany the nazis come to power after the great depression and what hitler knows he must do is put germany to work he creates the autobahn network motorways germany is building the most modern automobile highways in the world as part of the new motorization program 000 miles of new roads are being built simultaneously in all parts of the country the autobahns fulfilled a number of purposes one of the key elements of course was showing how hitler's germany was well ahead of the rest of the world and it was this has uh two benefits to it first of all if you're getting people working again you're providing employment but secondly the autobahn network is going to be another really vital tool in reinvigorating the german economy not just for getting people around but for getting goods around germany and not just goods like everything to do with nazi germany the autobahn network has a sinister ulterior motive but actually autobahns don't just move goods and people around they can also move tanks and that's going to prove very useful to hitler in the years to come autobahns uh obviously serve a very evident military purpose they'll get um hitler's armies from a to b very quickly and because he is the most humble individual in history uh he originally wants to call them adolf hitler strasses so hitler streets but actually even hitler decides that maybe just a step too far even for him these modern roads would transport you to a brave new world founded on very traditional values we may think of fascism as being a backward political concept it's something that kind of plays in the mythology of nazism uh you know the the old germanic way of doing things but actually what hitler wants to do is imbue it with modernity there was a long tradition amongst academics of dismissing the idea that there was anything modern about nazi germany but the third reich was itself using technology and the imagination to create new mental spaces and new possibilities to reshape the future uh this is this is radical the motorway it is almost a kind of space age thing at the time but to be of use to anyone other than the army the autobahns needed cars and hardly anyone in pre-world war ii germany owned one rich people and doctors had cars to go places and everybody else either wrote on public transportation or they got there on horseback or on a bicycle or using a horse-drawn car hitler realizes if the car's going to be successful it's going to have to stop being a luxury item and for that to happen it's going to be affordable you could democratize the way that people move around the country and it will provide a reliable means of transportation for every german family but hitler only wanted to give people cars and freedom on the nazis terms the nazis were proud of abolishing individualism and individual freedom because they saw it as essentially an arctic free time was never free it's really regimented and almost bolshevik in in that you can have this freedom and you can have this vehicle that will take you anywhere you want to go but really what it's supposed to do is take you from home to work and then back home again while you're doing everything that the state tells you to do so having one type of car that everyone would drive is very much part of that nazi philosophy but at the time there weren't many factories producing affordable cars during those really bad depression years in the 1930s you've got several car manufacturers just going to the wall one of them actually realized that the only way it could survive was to team up with three other companies and then call themselves a auto union this big joint venture what's fascinating the outer union a a combination of four rather struggling marks which together um came up with two proposals for hitler for a racing team which would became hugely successful in the 1930s but you got a problem if you're going to survive in the long term you can't just produce top spec fast cars as well as the eye-catching sports car auto union needs a cheap runabout for the mass market the other idea is something called the people's car volkswagen and that's going to be made affordable to the masses by constructing it with a massive state subsidy now hitler loves both these ideas but he gives them to somebody else a man called ferdinand porsche porsche is part of the team that pitches the whole volkswagen idea to hitler he's someone who knows hitler who who hitler gets on very well with but he's not only talented he's very politically skilled too so when hitler asked him to design the car himself porsche has got absolutely no compunction about going alone by 1936 porsche has three design prototypes ready for the people's car and he needs a factory to build them in it turns out that hitler is already one step ahead what he had in mind was it was going to be built in a special factory city known as the city of strength through joy and this was going to be this really model nazi workers paradise if you like it was to be a great great metropolis in a way it was to be motor city much as detroit had become in the states and it was going to have all the latest production methods learned from henry ford whom hitler was frankly a really big fan of ford's popularization of the the assembly line approach to car manufacturing is just the sort of the more modern uh technological advance producing a classless car that hitler massively admired the new car was going to be called the kdf wagon the strength through joy car snappy title but when the car is finally unveiled to the waiting world some felt they'd already seen it this is a model of the volkswagen it's got a very distinctive shape curved at the front and it's very unusual for its time it's actually got a rear mounted engine which is air cooled however there was already something very much like it here it is this is a later model of the tatra if you look at it you'll realize it's got very much the same features same rear engine same rear vents the same curving shape and in fact they were so incensed by what porsche had done they threatened to take him to court to sue him for infringement of copyrights porsche went to hitler and said what should i do hitler replied do nothing fifteen months later nazi tanks rolled into czechoslovakia and they stopped making the tetra but they continued to make the volkswagen the kdf finally hits the autobahn in 1938 when it was shown off by the nazis at the berlin motor show at the time it was a game changer the kdf market was robust it was reliable didn't it's a modern equivalent to ford's old model t what it could do was to seat your model nazi family it's going to have a cruising speed of about 100 kilometers an hour it's pretty quick in those days the kdf falcon was also most importantly um attractively priced at 990 rocky marks that all sounds great that all sounds brilliant and then you've got to realize a small problem the average weekly wage of a german worker was around 32 rights marks that's just under a tenner so what you're looking at there is to afford a car is 30 weeks of your salary so to make the car affordable the nazis came up with a payment plan what was a very modern concept was selling the kdf falcon through a sort of a public high purchase scheme where you put a little aside basically you paid the government in installments and eventually there'd be enough in the government bank to be able to afford your car according to official figures loyal nazi followers donated around 280 million marks to the scheme hardly any of them got their car frankly the scheme is an utter failure and many of those who put you know money dutifully into their little savings books they never saw their money again because only 630 kdf bargains were ever produced and where did they go have a guess the ones that were produced were basically being driven around by sort of mid-level hitler flunkies in the nazi party so the volk people never got to see their wagon in hitler's lifetime at least but maybe the people's car wasn't intended for the people in the first place yes it was the people's car but it was also imagined as being a part of the mobility of the german military one of the technical requirements of the volkswagen was the idea that the the the bonnet of the vehicle had to be capable of supporting a machine gun why on earth are you mounting a machine gun on a people's car you know what does that tell us about what's really going on you don't design cars today strong enough to mount machine guns unless you think you're going to go and have a lot of fighting that was a military vehicle that gives a very different meaning to the whole idea of strength through joy because this car is more about strength and not about joy so actually rather than producing cars for everybody to drive what you're actually producing is a fleet of war machines for the nazis and those war machines were all part of adolf hitler's plan to avenge the humiliation of world war one [Music] by 1936 when the kdf bargain was on the drawing board hitler's factories had already started rearming germany the treaty of versailles had severely limited the size of germany's army after world war one by this treaty the germans agreed to disband the general staff to limit their army to a hundred thousand men to hand over their fleet to demilitarize the rhineland and coastal fortifications under the terms the treaty of versailles germany is not allowed to be building new weapons and so you've got many machines being designed with the dual purpose they may look like they've got a civilian application but actually they're they're for military usage germany would do this with with multiple other things they would have um private airliners that could be equipped with bomb racks should that ever be needed and then you had these great roads that allowed people to drive across the country but then could allow you to move tanks from place to place should you need that as well and so a lot of agricultural machinery was actually designed with future tanks and and armored vehicles in mind and the kdf was no exception the type 82 kubel bargain was a utilitarian off-road vehicle based on the kdf bargains chassis the kubelwagen was germany's jeep it was a vehicle that could be mass produced that provided transportation not just for vip in command leadership and it could also function as a fighting vehicle after they test it in poland in 39 the german army went back to porsche and said there's something we want you to change about this car and one of the specifications that came from the german military about that vehicle was that it had to be able to move at the speed that german soldiers marched which is basically two and a half miles per hour porsche the man who designs racing cars the fastest cars in the world and yet here he is being asked to design basically the slowest car in the world but he's a truly versatile engineer so building a military version of the kdf should be a walk in the park porsche gives it larger wheels revising its suspension and installing a gear reduction system this is a car is meant to be capable of 100 kilometers an hour um and so he's then going to come up with a whole new sort of kind of gearbox uh with a sort of reduction facility in it and of course actually ironically this gives rise uh to the mechanism that's going to enable four by fours in years to come so something does come out of it but production of the kubelwagen was slow by the end of the war the kdf's war factory had only managed to produce fifty thousand vehicles the adaptation of the kdf bargain into the the kubelvac and the military vehicle it wasn't an unalloyed success it was prone to breakdown it was thin skinned high velocity bullets could pass straight through it so it wasn't the um the great success that the willis jeep had been for the allies if you just compare that to the production line for the american jeep which doesn't even go into full production until the end of 41 that is coming out at a rate of 660 000 vehicles in just four years so you know when you look at 50 000 compared to the jeep you realize it's a pitifully small number so the relatively limited amount of kubernetes never enjoyed the success that the porsche and the german army had hoped for in fact most of the nazis motorized transport was actually produced by american-owned factories commandeered by the nazis during the war [Music] it was interesting that that by far the vast majority 70 of the trucks produced for the german army were made by american-owned plants basically you're on american wheels going into poland at the end of the war the us car giants ford and gm made representations to the american government for the amount of money these factories had lost during the war [Music] ford in fact um secured uh immense damages from the american government after the war even though their cologne factory was relatively unscathed but what ford didn't realize is that they had just scored a massive own [Music] goal sometime after the war the u.s car giant's claims for war damages incurred by the factories which the nazis had commandeered to make trucks came back to haunt them the compensation that ford and gm demand for damage their factories was actually used in a series of class actions against those car companies by slave laborers who worked at those plants now they had a lawyer you know who turned around and said well listen if ford is so eager to demand compensation for losses due to bomb damage frankly it should also be responsible for any benefits derived from any forced labour in those plots however in 1999 the judge ruled that the issues concerned involved foreign policy and were not in the jurisdiction of the courts and the case was dismissed while american industrial know-how churned out vast numbers of vehicles during the war the production of the nazi's own people's car wasn't going so well and the same could be said for the german war effort by 1945 the same german army that had introduced the world to the concept of blitzkrieg was now a shadow of itself by the end of the war there are shortages of everything there are shortages of manpower there are shortages of raw materials people aren't being paid and things just aren't being made the kdf war factory suffered along with the rest of germany's heavy industry from the relentless pounding of allied bombing at the end of the war in may 1945 the kdf factory was a complete ruin um workers were rioting um no one had been paid for weeks it was a complete shambles but all that was about to change thanks to the tireless work of one british engineer in the bombed-out war factory of strength through joy the slave laborers left behind by the retreating nazis went on an orgy of destruction it's on the 10th of april 1945 when the strength through joy factory the factory that was meant to be churning out hundreds of thousands of these people's cars is eventually abandoned by its ss guards it was in an appalling condition it had been hugely bombed and labourers who work there go about trying to destroy as much of what remains of this factory as they can you know they're ripping telephones out of walls they're sledgehammering walls down you know they are going to destroy this place because it's been their prison for four years in the summer of 1945 the british eventually took over the ruins of strength through joyville and inherited a total mess at the end of the war you know there was some discussion amongst the allies of what was going to happen to it i mean the russians just wanted to dismantle it uh you know just just obliterate it really the americans wanted to ship some of the parts back home even the australians wanted to take bits of the kdf factory back to australia so everyone was looking to to grab a bit of the cake um and um so it looked like that was the end of that project engineers from the british army are dispatched to put the war factory of joy out of its misery so ultimately it falls to two men uh who are put in charge of dismantling the kdf factory and they're both british and they're both officers in what's called remy the royal electrical and mechanical engineers so you've got a man called colonel charles radcliffe and you've got his assistant a man called major ivan hurst major hurst arrives at the vw factory and takes a look what he finds is an unexploded bomb as an ordinance officer he has to dispose of that but then he takes a close look at what there is it's not as bad as it first looks what he realizes is actually a lot of the machinery it's actually not that badly damaged it's all pretty superficial although the buildings of the kdf factory were largely smashed to bits hurst as an engineer could see that it was still relatively workable so he thinks you know hang on a bit you know with a little bit of work i can get this factory you know back online and i can start building these cars again he frankly thinks it's a great idea why wouldn't he because you've got this local area there wolfsburg and you've got about 17 000 unemployed people and they're desperate desperate for work um and also postwar germany you know what does it need to get back on its feet it needs some cheap transport people in order to rebuild germany and to rebuild their lives they're going to need to move around they're going to need to to help build the country back up again so what better way to do it than to give people jobs and instigate a process by which you can actually provide people with the transport that they need to rebuild the economy for that you need a car so the story goes that hurst is sifting through all this rubble when he stumbles across this almost completely intact prototype of the kdf bargain in this little workshop kind of tucked out the way um and he realizes what he's got here um and what he does is he gets his workforce to cobble together two pre-production models based on this very prototype but no one else seemed to share hurst and radcliffe's vision so hers tries to give it to a british manufacturer who just says if you think you're going to build cars in this place and you're a bloody fool so he tries to give it to ford and he's not interested either and you've even got this figure in the form of ford's right-hand man coming to look at the plant and he reports back what we're being offered here mr ford ain't worth a damn so hurst has got this brilliant idea and this nifty little prototype and nobody wants to know it's one of those classic stories isn't it a bit like the beatles not being picked up what happened to one of the most successful cars ever in the history of motoring in its early years when you you name the car manufacturer everyone turned the model down it looked like nothing was going to happen with this car with its awful nazi tainted past so hearst tried another attack first realizes that the british army needs reliable transport um and suggests that these former kdf falcons be adapted for british military use to make this happen he comes up with a clever wheeze hers is very canny he takes a couple of cars paints them in british khaki and he sends it round to the british army and says listen you're gonna need a cheap run around for soldiers and officers to to get around germany uh this thing is brilliant it's cheap to make it's cheap to run it goes pretty fast what do you think and the british army look at it and they go yeah all right we'll have 20 000. this was the huge plant erected at hitler's order for the construction of the german people's car now they're being turned out by the factory at the rate of 600 a month and turned over to the british military government and that is the spark that that lights that the revival of of the the old kdf fargo at hq british military government in germany there are large numbers of the people's car in service with the master race as taxi drivers volkswagen was now in business but production was slow initially after the war when they started to produce a few volkswagens um they couldn't get a piece of steel big enough for the roof so if you look at some of the early models of the beetle you'll see that it's actually two bits of steel welded together and that just tells you you know exactly what hurst was up against by 1946 the cars were rolling off the production line to great fanfare but no amount of celebration could hide the fact that it was behind schedule things got so bad that hurst was reduced to bartering for parts to keep the factory running so what he starts to do is to pay for things he needs to make the cars with cars that are already finished and he actually gets into trouble for it because he gets uh the british army are effectively accused of running a black market instantly a rumor starts that um hersta's using the restarted assembly line to trade vw's for for favors for goods every car exchanged had serial numbers paperwork for every barter deal he was able to show the investigators look look it's all above board it's all been recorded there's no element of black marketeering whatsoever the incident brought home to hearst and radcliffe the precarious nature of their operation hurst and radcliffe realized that you know they can't sustain this kind of industry you know what what they need to do is to go on to a kind of proper commercial footing aimed ultimately at a domestic market germany is only going to survive and not fall victim to communism if people can have a livelihood again they felt let them produce things export them and the income they make they can use to feed themselves and this enterprise really has to be germanized if you like given back to um german people the german car workers and for that they're going to need a german manager hurst and radcliffe spent months searching for a german manager to take over the plant but finding someone with the right level of experience and credentials was a tall order it's pretty hard finding a manager um at that stage because anybody with any uh experience and administrative know-how had obviously had already been employed during the nazi period and in order to be employed at those sort of levels during the nazi period you were almost certainly had to be a member of the nazi party but there's a flip side how to find a german who would work for the allies to agree to to take over a factory under british control could still be seen as a sort of betrayal of germany and a surrender to the british allies and since most industrialists in germany were pro-nazi extremely nationalistic then that that could that could be one factor in the end they found just the man heinz nortoff was a senior uh motoring executive who'd worked for opel um general motors owned april who developed the the cadeta another people's car that in fact had been replicated by the russians after the war he was the ideal man to take on another similar project by 1942 he was working in brandenburg helping to churn out military vehicles as the russians arrive he ran away was arrested by the americans and since then he had absolutely failed to get any kind of decent job in post-war car industry and he was running a garage near hamburg and that's where hearst found him nordhoff was just the kind of manager hearst was looking for he was smart he had hands-on experience and it even shepherded a small family car into production there were only two minor stumbling blocks nordhoff doesn't like the vw he once says the car has more faults than a dog has fleas and the other problem well the americans saw him as a nazi but he had never joined the nazi party he actually wasn't a member which meant that hearst could use that to try and push him through the door into volkswagen which he did that and the fact that his uh papers were lost in the russian zone as well meant that compared to a lot of people they might have had to consider he could hers could present nordhoff as having pretty much a blank history compared to a lot of other people he might have to look at who were qualified to do the job you know what nordoff may not have liked the volkswagen but actually he had a fantastic personal opportunity to wipe his own slate clean with this brilliant new job in this new post-war car industry [Music] nordhoff officially joins vw in 1947 and volkswagen was growing from strength to strength the people who had turned up their noses when it was looking for support earlier were fighting each other off for a slice of the action much to nordoff's concern one of those prowlers was the russians obviously naughtoff is is extremely wide one his livelihood at stake but so is his life if he falls into the hands of the russians again remember they have the records of his past uh all his achievements over the last few years to rehabilitate himself will just evaporate [Music] 1948 heinz nordhoff is happily running his office as managing director of the burgeoning volkswagen factory but he's not sure he will be there for long things were coming to a head in the standoff between the soviet union and the west that would become known as the cold war so what's going on is this iron curtain churchill's famous phrase is being slammed down at the end of world war ii with the defeat of nazi germany uh four powers occupied germany and berlin france great britain the us and the soviet union the town where the volkswagen plant was wolfsburg was in the british occupation zone so you've got the soviet zone just stopping five miles east of wolfsburg but you know the russians desperately won that factory it feels so close for them and the allies are gonna be absolutely damned if they're gonna give away anything to stalin and his red menace that's not going to happen vw is staying very much in western hands now that the vw had proved its worth the americans plan to use it as an economic weapon of the cold war if you're going to face the might of the soviet union and all its satellite states you've got to have strong countries and and what needs to be strongest of all is this new country called west germany so the u.s decided um was secretary of state george marshall to launch the marshall plan in 1947 a program of u.s aid to 16 countries to help them recover from world war ii it's absolutely vital that west germany is a prosperous uh strong state backed up by a lot of american know-how and frankly american cash in dealing with a broken and prostrate germany the post-war policy of the united states seeks neither vengeance nor enrichment but to rebuild an economic entity on which the peace and prosperity of europe in great measure depends hence volkswagen and other plants who were operating in this environment where suddenly there was more money there were opportunities to invest there was more food around people started to be able to get jobs they could employ people we talked today very much about the german economic miracle of the 1950s and 60s well the first harbinger of that economic miracle really was the the huge success of the volkswagen beetle it becomes an emblem of western germany the rebuilding of the volkswagen works and the and the creation of the volkswagen stripped of its nazi connotations and given new connotations of post-war german recovery personal mobility the embrace of individualism of freedom of travel was symbolic of this process of the rapid recovery of of a new german national consciousness and actually is now going to do everything that hitler kind of promised it was going to do you know it was under you know capitalism really gonna become the people's car it was incredibly successful it was it was cheerful you know by the end of the 1950s one in three cars on the road in west germany was a beetle and now it had proven to be worth more than a dam even the american car companies wanted to get in on the act the ford motor company had initially of course rejected the volkswagen factory um now not only is the volkswagen a success um ford look at it and think this could be our rival to to their that the big american competitor general motors whose opal cadet is is proving a huge success in the west too they want a small compact car of the sort that they really don't have in america nordoff sees a potential takeover by ford as a way into the american market but the deal is a non-starter the approach by ford is very heavy-handed it's it's total control there will be no autonomy um for the german management and particularly for north and north is not someone who likes taking orders that the deal collapses it's a no go this is now the second time that ford have not uh got their hands on on the vw beetle and they're never gonna get a third opportunity meanwhile the vw beetle is selling like hotcakes actually it was the germans who came up with the name beetle not the word beetle but actually the german for beetle is kefir but it's not until 67 68 that um a u.s brochure is produced where they refer to it as the volkswagen beetle and then we have a film which comes out called the love bug which features a 1963 beetle in it which is affectionately called herbie but it's the word bug in the title that really sticks in the american market and not the word beetle so that's why you've got bug in north america and you've got beetle just about everywhere else you know when hollywood turns you into a movie star that you've arrived and that was the beginning of everybody's love affair with the volkswagen beetle [Music] when the millionth beetle rolls off the production line it's a big celebration [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] with the celebration of the millionth vw in 1955 you got the midwife for the original concept major ivanhurst brought back from britain so you've got a british military officer there um at the celebration of one of uh west germany's great economic miracles it's a celebration that hitler would have hated because what they did is that they made the car lurid and gold and rhinestones and they had african dancers and brazilian dancers and drums people from around the world came to kind of celebrate this people's car this global people's car [Music] the model that everyone had written off in 1945 was now very much the car of the moment at a time when other motor manufacturers were really living off past glories the beetle turns into an icon of 50s and swinging 60s design it's ubiquitous on both sides of the atlantic and truly becomes the people's car nordoff has a really simple design philosophy it's not to go out and uh you know constantly make lots of different versions of the same car uh it's not even to go out and make lots of different cars it's just to make this same car over and over again but keep refining it and making it better einstein was fascinating in that he he tended to mimic in his design philosophy the man who he came to eclipse by 1972 henry ford in that he puts all his his eggs in one basket the one model there's a few more more modern sophisticated elements put in but it's still ultimately in 1972 the same basic vehicle that it had been in 1945 this in a way i think is the secret of its success it's also very easy to make assembly lines were established all the way around the world [Music] on the 17th of february 1972 you got a big day because it's the 15 million 7 000 34th beetle rolling off the assembly line at wolfsburg this now is the best-selling car in the world now that's now overtaken the record held by model t which the model t ford had held for four decades but it's now been beaten by this stubby little bug which ford had once written off as not worth a dam well you know what it was worth more than his own model t and so it was that a small car designed by the nazis as part of a sinister plot to take over the world achieved its original destiny in a way that would make hitler turn in his grave the volkswagen stories is a it's a wonderful parable in a way it's about um the renewal of hope a brand that was toxic that was looked like it was down and out is not only revamped rethought re-launched but becomes very much an icon of the age and a symbol of a whole nation a symbol of renewal people didn't look at a beetle and think of it as a nazi vehicle they thought of it as a as a german car but this german was no longer a nazi aryan german it was a post-war uh economic miracle german it could be painted it could go hippie it could go popular it could have all sorts of things added to it to make it more functional in for holidays etc now this is an incredible turnaround germany was the enemy now everyone is embracing this fun little car that's sort of the symbol of a modern germany a democratic germany a friendly germany you've got this car designed by hitler to do something that it singularly fails to do under nazism which is to create a proper people's car and yet it takes british military bloody mindedness and proper capitalist thinking to actually make this come into life and it makes it into a concept which is all about you know freedom and liberalism and and the good side of capitalism so i kind of like the beetle as a kind of symbol of subverting the nazi nightmare and turning it into a dream it wasn't actually a success until the nazis were already history so i like that irony [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, germany ww2, ww2, hitler, nazi germany ww2, volkswagen, history of volkswagen, german motoring, history of german cars, ww2 production, war factories

Id: gQzcZlLvoKQ

Length: 43min 22sec (2602 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021