Thinking Small (23 page)

But it was probably not only the conflicting views and the souring of relations between Germany and the United States that made the visit with the legendary automotive man a rather cold one: Ford might also have been a bit distant with Porsche because at the very moment of their visit, he was in the midst of one of the hardest battles of his life, and his relations with Germany were tangled up in it. A newspaper Ford owned had published some terribly misinformed pieces about Jews, pieces with titles like “Does a Definite Jewish World Program Exist?” and “Will Jewish Zionism Bring Armageddon?” These articles were stupid and dangerous, to be sure, but one must realize that such stupidity did not mean Henry Ford wanted to exterminate Jews, as Hitler eventually would. Even so, it had been these articles, eventually published as a book called
The International Jew,
that had become one of Hitler’s favorite books, one he passed out to people on his staff. In 1926, Ford had issued a public apology about his campaign against the Jewish people, but not everyone believed he was sincere.

Thus, Ford was getting lumped together with Hitler, and many felt that he wasn’t doing enough to change that view. In fact, Ford sometimes seemed to have turned into a different man altogether. Whereas he had once been considered an international hero and the most popular man in America, he was now the recipient of a lot of animosity, and it had made him bitter.

A lot of that bitterness came from his problems with his workers. Workers had once been Ford’s main focus and his most loyal fans. But things had changed, and conditions in the plants had not evolved; indeed, they had worsened. Ford was not the only automaker in the States experiencing such problems. The whole country was experiencing a wave of uprisings. Workers had started forming groups and asserting their rights in ways corporations and the government could no longer avoid. By the end of the 1930s, those problems that Nordhoff’s old professor, Georg Schlesinger, had noticed back in the 1920s had now become political problems that threatened chaos and violence in Detroit.

The national economy of the United States was changing and with it, so were expectations for a better quality of life: Industry, especially automotive industry, was an essential part of that. President Roosevelt understood this, and in an attempt to alleviate the tension, he established the Automobile Labor Board. This board conducted hearings that scrutinized the production centers and factories of automotive companies all across the country, exposing subhuman working conditions, hours, and pay. Until this point, workers had no legal representation, as unions were not sanctioned. Their treatment within the factories had gone unheeded and had thus deteriorated. Roosevelt’s administration worked to pass controversial laws that would protect workers: The National Industrial Recovery Act and the Wagner Act gave American workers the right to organize legally.
The Congress of Industrial Organizations was formed, and from this, the United Automobile Workers Union, known as the UAW, gathered workers from all the major automotive companies together in 1935 in an open campaign demanding adequate working conditions and pay from the corporations that employed them. In 1936, the UAW took on the nation’s largest corporation—GM. A forty-four-day sit-down strike against General Motors began in Flint, Michigan, and swept across the nation to other General Motors plants. The strikes turned violent. The public opinion of General Motors began to suffer—which meant business began to suffer—so the company acceded to the workers’ demands and met with the UAW to officially work out a deal. It was the first time an automotive workers union had been recognized by a major company as having a direct say in their conditions, of where and for how much they worked. Many business owners felt Roosevelt had given the workers too much power, and at their expense. The proper balance between the workers and their bosses was still being sought.

Henry Ford resisted the United Automobile Workers Union for as long as he could, but in the spring of 1937, that resistance erupted into violence, sparking an event now known as the Battle of the Overpass, a day when members of the Auto Worker Union clashed with Ford’s security force. Men and women from the unions were beaten and thrown down steps. Much of it was recorded in photographs. One man’s back was broken. Ford was soon charged and ordered into court. The company claimed that the entire thing—even the back breaking—had been staged by the union, but Ford signed an agreement with the UAW nevertheless.

Porsche and the others visiting the United States on that 1937 learning trip were oblivious to this rioting and violence that had occurred just months before their arrival at Ford. Their eyes were trained on different things; they wanted a River Rouge of their own—the factory, and its machines and technology, was the filter for what they experienced there. Their notes are unemotional
and precise. In one of the voluminous notebooks of thoughts and ideas from this time, Ghislaine wrote:

The new Volkswagen factory would use Ford’s River Rouge plant as its structural and technological model, but it was taking its cues from American plants in more ways than one, and it would take them to even uglier extremes. Whatever lessons Ford was learning were lessons Germany would have to learn for itself, and even more violently. In a more extreme echo of Ghislaine’s notes, the technical director and general manager of the Volkswagenwerk in 1941, Otto Dyckhoff, would deliver a lecture entitled “Automation in Production, with Special Reference to the Volkswagen Plant”:

As had been the case during America’s industrialization, great amounts of workers would be needed and would be thought of as a “mass” rather than as individuals: It was easier to avoid the inhuman connotations of this thought process if the
mass was from a faraway place or of a different race. The assembly-line production employed at the factory and this mind-set would, for a while, go hand in hand. Ultimately, however, it would prove an impossible way to proceed economically, socially, and psychologically—just as Ford and America had learned, so too would Europe have to learn that to be profitable in the long-term, inhumane conditions could not endure. Ignoring basic human rights might produce more in the short-term, but it always inevitably proves to be an unsustainable, unprofitable path.

Upon returning from this second trip to the United States, in much the same way he had been made a German citizen, Porsche was made an official member of the NSDAP. And while he never officially signed his Nazi card—though he was prompted and urged numerous times to do so—there is no denying that he had made a Faustian bargain. Having the chance to build his own car in its own factory was the undisclosed dream of Porsche’s life; it was also the beginning of the end for him.

Hitler sounds nearly schizophrenic
at the 1939 Berlin Auto Show as he makes a sincere plea to German drivers to be more careful on the streets. It is extremely distressing, he says, that the death toll from traffic accidents has risen so sharply during his rule. The number of Germans killed by cars has reached the same number of deaths that occurred in the Franco-Prussian War. This cannot be tolerated, he tells the audience: Anyone who causes a traffic accident is “an unscrupulous criminal
¹
who sheds the precious blood of the nation.” In the next five years, millions of Germans would die in Hitler’s war, but he was lecturing them about traffic accidents.

There were no angry words at the 1939 Auto Show for the other companies of the RDA, though. All of that was in the past. The Volkswagen was on its way to production now. The factory was planned and rising, and once completed, the towering brick façade would be unlike anything that had ever been built in Germany. Modeled on the American style that had been pioneered by Henry Ford’s chosen architect, Albert Kahn, the huge rooms were built to be spacious and bright. The Volkswagen factory, like Ford’s factory at River Rouge, was a stark contrast to the dark, tight factory spaces that had come before: This new style of factory had a “sense of spaciousness almost unmarred by interior columns.”
²
They were, and still are, majestic pieces of architecture that catch and hold the eye.

In the shadow of this looming factory, an entirely new town would eventually rise: The Town of the Strength through Joy Car. Designs for it were already being made, having been delegated by Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer, to a young architect named Peter Koeller. Under Nazi patronage, thirty-year-old Koeller was told to design a “workers’ city” to accommodate 90,000 inhabitants, one that would accentuate the factory and its automobile. In his designs, Koeller looked at the empty farmland and tried to predict what functional traffic patterns might emerge there once a motorized population arrived. With Nazi social-utopian ideas in mind, Koeller wanted to meld a “return to nature”—an idea popular at the time that prescribed living close to the earth and growing one’s own fruits and vegetables as the native tribes once did—with the industrialization of city life and autobahns. He resolved this seeming contradiction by creating a town that had forested housing communities and estates dotting its circumference, all of which linked back through looping roads to the industrial heart. The diameter of this circle would be cut by the town’s main street, a line stretching from the factory up to a little hill known as the Klieversberg that formed the other visual boundary of the town. This long straight pathway would be the heart of the city, eventually replete with bakeries, grocery stores, small businesses, and clothing shops.

Koeller aimed this main road at the car factory on purpose in order to connect the factory “visually with the center of town
³
 … and establish it in the consciousness of each citizen.” For that reason, even today, all subsequent developers have “considered this axis
⁴
more or less sacrosanct.” This particular area had been chosen for the new town because it was close to the train line and close to the water—two things that would help when it came to transporting supplies and parts. The town was also located centrally in Germany, which would give everyone fairly easy access to come and pick up their new cars.

It was an extraordinary project, and an expensive one, which is precisely why Hitler had chosen the German Labor Front to fund it, headed by the hard-drinking Ley. In fact, it was from the
German Labor Front that the town and the car got their names: Since motorizing the population was inherently tied to ideas of labor and recreation, Hitler felt he’d found the perfect match in the division of the Labor Front known as Strength through Joy. This particular division of Ley’s organization dealt with holidays and free-time activities. Strength through Joy offered an array of carefully chosen cultural activities and opportunities to travel, always accenting the idea of the
Volksgemeinschaft,
the people’s community: The trips were supposed to unite people through participation. By calling the new car the “Strength through Joy Car,” and the town “The Town of the Strength through Joy Car,” Hitler and Ley attached the Volkswagen to the usual Strength through Joy mottos such as “Service not Self,” and made it feel like a community project.