Thinking Small (19 page)

Heinrich Nordhoff’s influential professor at the Technical University in Berlin, Georg Schlesinger, was accused of being “a spy for the enemy,” for instance, and had to leave the country and teach in exile. And the popular Jewish automotive writer
and early Volkswagen advocate, Josef Ganz, a man who designed cars that had the look of a beetle, and who it is hard to imagine Hitler had not read, was banished as well. On that note, it is necessary to point out that when designing a car for the people, Hitler believed it was his own authority that could determine
who
those people were. All Jews in Germany, for instance, were forced to give up their driver’s licenses and were banned from driving cars. Hitler’s Volkswagen project did not escape the ugliness of his racist thoughts. Nor would the country that had elected him.

As the leaves were turning
colors on the trees outside the Porsche home in Stuttgart and autumn pushed 1933 into its final months, Ferdinand was in his office sweating over designs for a new race car he was building. He was so caught up in the work that he’d lost track of time and missed lunch. When Karl Rabe, often referred to as Porsche’s gentler “second self,” came in to tell him there was a visitor, perhaps Porsche was just about to reach into his pocket for last night’s dinner roll: He had a habit of stashing them there in the mornings before he left and eating them throughout the day, and I imagine Aloisia had long ago gotten used to dumping the crumbs from the pockets of his well-worn pants and coats.

Porsche was never happy to be interrupted in the midst of work, and it was no different when Jakob Werlin stopped by for a chat that day. Porsche and Werlin had known each other for quite a while, having both worked together for a time at Daimler, and thus Porsche’s first thought upon seeing Werlin was that he had come to spy, sent over from Daimler-Benz to get a look at his designs for the new race car. That might have been true to
some extent, though if Jakob Werlin were spying, it was probably not for Daimler, but rather for Hitler himself.

At the 1933 Berlin Auto Show, Hitler had promised to fund new efforts in racing and to make Germany into a strong force in the international racing world. He wanted a strong German marquee and he announced that the state would sponsor motor racing with a 500,000-RM annual stipend. The money was to be awarded to one of Germany’s foremost car companies and to be used to build a top-of-the-line racing car. Everyone expected the money to be given to Daimler-Benz toward
building a Mercedes,
¹
as the Mercedes was Hitler’s favorite car. But a company called Auto Union
²
—a new firm that had formed when four small car companies merged to survive the Depression—wanted a shot at
building such a car too, and they wanted to do it with a design by Ferdinand Porsche.

Just about anyone you’d asked at the time would have said Auto Union’s chances of getting any of the Nazi race-car funds were close to zero: Auto Union was a new company and did not have the history or the prestige attached to it that Hitler sought. Ferdinand Porsche, however, was a name that did have that history and prestige, and it was a name Adolf Hitler knew well. He’d kept track of Porsche’s cars and designs, and he’d read about him in the papers in Vienna all those years before. During a race of one of Porsche’s cars in the early 1920s, long before Hitler had any real power, the two men had been introduced at Hitler’s behest. Porsche never remembered that introduction, but Hitler did. It may have even been one reason Auto Union was able to get a meeting with the German chancellor: Porsche, alongside a famous race-car driver named Hans Stuck, agreed to go with the Auto Union executives on May 10, 1933, to try to convince Hitler to allocate them some of the new race-car funds.

Upon receiving the group, however, none of Hitler’s admiration for Porsche was apparent. Hitler was distant at first, even going so far as to call the men rude for attempting to ask for money, shocked that such a “no-name” company would dare to ask for Nazi funds. But once Porsche began to speak, the vibe of the room changed. As Porsche poured out a monologue that lasted for more than half an hour, talking exclusively about his design for a new race car, brimming with the energy he always felt when talking about new automotive ideas, Hitler was rapt. The chancellor’s secretaries would later say that it was the first time they’d ever seen Hitler listen to a man for so long without interrupting him. Porsche’s passion for his cars filled the room, and by the end of the meeting, the impossible occurred: Hitler took a third of the money away from his beloved Daimler-Benz and promised it to Porsche to build an Auto Union racing car.

It was about a year later when Werlin unexpectedly dropped by to visit Porsche at his workshop, and it was that very Auto Union design that Porsche and his team were working on. Before
they got the race-car commission, his guys at Porsche had been living hand to mouth. Being awarded the government funds was a big relief, but Porsche was less excited about the money and more excited about getting to build the race car. Werlin’s visit, however, was for another reason entirely: He’d heard about Porsche’s attempts at building a People’s Car. Thus, in Porsche’s office that day, sometime in late Autumn of 1933, it was the Volkswagen project that he and Werlin discussed. Hitler was interested in seeing a car produced for the people, Werlin said. Eager to discuss this, Porsche told Werlin about the designs for a small car he’d created on the projects with Zuendapp and NSU, and showed him some of the notes and figures he’d been compiling toward the construction of a whole new kind of car.

Werlin must have gone back to Berlin and told Hitler about Porsche’s ideas because a few weeks later, Porsche received a call from Werlin asking him to leave Stuttgart as soon as possible and come to Berlin. They had some important things to discuss, he said, but it wasn’t safe to talk about it over the phone; could Porsche come to the Kaiserhof Hotel
³
the next day? Porsche was not one to arbitrarily change his schedule, but this time he obliged. He would leave for Berlin the very next day. He knew very well what this meeting could mean.

At the grand Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin, Porsche met Werlin in the lobby and the two of them were shown into a lush room upstairs where they continued their talk about the People’s Car. Moments later, the door opened and Hitler walked in. In their first meeting about the racing car, Porsche had held the floor, but now it was Hitler’s turn to talk. Porsche listened as Hitler discussed his desire for a four-wheel-drive, 30-bhp car, one with a three-cylinder, air-cooled diesel engine, all ideas Porsche himself had already been working on with the NSU car and that he had shared with Werlin when they met. The car should also be able to hold two adults and three children, Hitler said. Porsche could probably tell that Hitler was regurgitating his own ideas, but he was nevertheless impressed by the depth of Hitler’s knowledge of cars and his ability to converse about them.
⁴

On the surface, sitting there together near the large windows that looked out toward the Brandenburg Gate, Porsche and Hitler must have looked like opposites: Hitler in his perfectly tailored Nazi suit, not a stitch out of place, Porsche wearing his oversized work coat, his pants a bit too short, the edges of his shirt a touch frayed. But on some level, the two men probably recognized each other as well, both having been born in the Austrian countryside, both having come to their positions in untraditional ways, both passionate to the point of obsession. In time, the ease of the relationship between Hitler and Porsche, and their inability to discuss anything aside from automobiles when they were together, would annoy Nazi officials in Hitler’s cabinet: Albert Speer, for instance, would avoid being in the same room with the two of them, finding their conversation frivolous in the face of daily politics and, eventually, of war.

But at the time, Porsche had no idea he would soon become so entwined in Hitler’s government. Standing in the grand hallway of the Kaiserhof after that first official meeting with Hitler, marble arches and ornament stretching high above his balding head, scribbling ideas into his notebook, Porsche, as usual, was focused only on the immediate. Which is not to say he wasn’t skeptical: How many times had he gotten his hopes up about this car, only to be let down at the last moment? Hitler seemed serious, but maybe it was just a lot of political hot air. And what about that price! Just moments ago, Hitler had said very clearly that the Volkswagen he envisioned should not exceed the cost of 1,000 marks. The average German at the time was not capable of saving more than 1000 marks, Hitler said, and so the price must be under that line. The car Porsche had in mind, however, would surely cost at least double that price. Once he was back at the shop, he told all this to Karl Rabe, and Rabe was as surprised by it as Porsche was. It is easy to imagine the two friends laughing about this price or simply shaking their heads in amused disbelief.

Nevertheless, in the following days, Porsche prepared a detailed plan incorporating all he and Hitler had discussed. It
would later be known as “the Exposé” and would contain the most precise rendering of Porsche’s thoughts about the car to date. He’d already written pages and pages on the car, but he specified and scaled those down in the Exposé, working on it for hours with his team. Werlin wanted it as soon as possible, but Porsche carried a final draft around in his chest pocket for days, pulling it out to make slight revisions, reading it again and again. In one section of the proposal, Porsche wrote: “In my opinion, a people’s car does
⁵
not have to be a small car with its dimensions, power output, weight and etc. being reduced in the misdirected manner adopted for previous efforts in this area … For me, a people’s car must be a full-scale, practical model that can stand comparison with any other car intended for day-to-day use. [To create] a people’s car, I believe that a fundamentally new approach has to be adopted.”

In sending this document to Werlin at the Transport Ministry, Porsche knew he was submitting an application of sorts, and he knew what it would mean to have that application accepted. He tried desperately to get the price down to under 1000 marks, but he finally had to leave the price at about 500 marks higher than he’d been asked, and even that felt like a stretch. Porsche told Karl Rabe that he’d given Hitler the best price he could without compromising the solidity of his design; it was all he could do for now. He sent two copies of the plan off to the government offices in Berlin—one for Werlin and one for Hitler. It was received on January 17th, 1934. Then there was nothing to do but wait.

Hummingbird
was
the code name for the purge. Now, it’s often referred to as the Night of the Long Knives. The Reichstag fire had helped precipitate Germany’s change into a one-party state and had given Hitler more power, but there was still a great deal
of resistance and threat to that power, most of it found in the chaos of the NSDAP itself. In 1934, a part of Hitler’s own party had gotten out of hand, and its leader, the restless Ernst Roehm—one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party—had become a threat. In the early years, the NSDAP had been an assimilation of many anti-Weimar forces: the SA had emerged from the Freikorps, a nationalistic organization that carried machine guns and targeted Communists in particular with their wrath. The Nazis had used this army to their own benefit—the hundreds of street battles and deaths that the SA caused in 1932 had contributed greatly to the sentiment that had ushered Hitler into power—but now its volatile leader had become too much for him, and the two men were at odds about what role the SA should play.