Thinking Small (32 page)

While the Americans had a very big economic voice and a very big stick, they did not have control of the areas of Germany with the highest concentration of industry and industrial supplies (the Ruhrgebiet was with the British, the Saar with the French, and the Silesian industrial basin had been given to the Soviets for occupation). All this made for a very interesting Allied tug-of-war; but one item all of the zones agreed on was the
need to uncover
any technological secrets Germany was housing, because they knew that all the money Hitler and the Nazi Party had put into industrial innovation had produced some strong results. In that spirit, the Allies harvested copious amounts of technology from German factories, offices, and think tanks, rooting it out from underground hiding places and questioning the country’s scientific elite. As a result, the formulas and plans for innovations in electric condensers, jet propulsion,
guided missiles, milk storage, and the production of colored dye (just to name a few) were sent back to all the Allied countries.

Together, the United States and Britain set up a special committee, the CIOS, to deal with this technological harvesting. Its specific aim was to find and use any information of an industrial or scientific nature to help the Allies win the ongoing war with Japan. CIOS was eventually split into two divisions: The British side took the name BIOS while the Americans continued using CIOS. Even after all fighting ceased, these organizations would continue collecting
information that could advance civil industry. The technological secrets were written up as reports and sent to universities, research centers, libraries, and journals. Sometimes, the actual technical objects that were found were collected and displayed on traveling shows throughout Allied countries. Through its Office of Technical Services, the United States made all German technological secrets available in the public domain. According to a
Harper’s Magazine
article
from 1946, “a certain American aircraft company”
³
used one such secret to save “at least a hundred thousand dollars.” And another businessman at the OTS offices claimed that the information he found there was worth at least a half a million dollars in business for him.

In the American sector, it had been just this group, the CIOS, that had first sought out and questioned Ferdinand Porsche. Then, Porsche’s recently orphaned Volkswagen project had been entrusted to British soldiers for foster care, and once it was
in the British sector, one of the missions of BIOS was to evaluate its technology and create a report. The first British reports were positive; they thought the original car design showed promise,
and they were also fairly impressed with the modern machinery in the factory. They even said that the VW might offer “with a few modifications,
⁴
a possible solution of the cheap utility vehicle which would be acceptable to [Britain] and in overseas markets.” When the British had a Volkswagen sent to Britain for tests by the Reparations Assessment Team, the
people there did not agree with BIOS’s first reports. The officials in Britain said the car was “uncomfortable,” “noisy,” and “backward,” claiming British designers had nothing to learn from Germany when it came to automobiles. It sounds bad, but those negative reports might actually have helped the VW survive: Because of them, few believed the Volkswagen posed a threat to their own country’s automotive business, and no one was
in a rush to carry away its machines or harvest its secrets and close it down. Even so, the VW plant existed in a perpetual state of
perhaps,
a gray area where no one knew how long it would last. But the plant had an advantage as well: the British.

Had it fallen into any other Allied zone, it’s hard to say the VW would have had the same support, though it’s true the American soldiers did seem to see a bright future for the car, even in those very early days. The Soviets, had they gotten the plant, would probably have done what they did to the other industry in their area: take it all down and ship the parts to Russia to be reassembled, leaving a trail of machines and mess along the roads between. And
though the French were certainly interested in the Volkswagen, they did not want it to continue as a German-based company.

But the plant was with the British, and they were less keen on turning Germany into a pastoral, deindustrialized country, and more concerned with figuring out a way for the Volkswagen to play a role in helping to revitalize Germany. Without the British, it is doubtful the world would have ever known the Bug.

Just weeks
into his presidency, following the shock of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death from a cerebral hemorrhage, Harry Truman was confronted with the decision of whether or not to proceed with the Manhattan Project, dropping a new kind of weapon into worldwide consciousness; one of the most important and devastating single decisions in history. FDR, who had not lived long enought to see the Germans surrender (missing it by only a matter of weeks) had overseen the secret creation of the nuclear weapon. But it was President Truman who would have to decide whether or not to use that bomb. With George Marshall and the other Joint Chiefs of Staff, Truman weighed the matter heavily; ultimately, they chose to proceed, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to Japan’s surrender on August 5, 1945.

It was in this same violent and historic week that British REME (Royal Electric and Mechanical Engineers) soldier Ivan Hirst
¹
came to the former Town of the Strength through Joy Car. He came alone, though he was newly married. He was twenty-nine years old and he was tall; too tall, he’d often thought. He wore glasses: black perfect-circle frames. His wife had to stay in Britain because living conditions in the town were not adequate, so Hirst came prepared to give all his attention to the factory for now.

The day Hirst first laid eyes on the Volkswagen factory was warm and sunny. He would later say that Wolfsburg did indeed look like an abandoned construction site. There were 25,000 people living there, and many of them were displaced persons (often known as DP’s, and including former forced laborers) or refugees. The streets were overgrown with weeds. Most of the German men were missing. Because there was little material for clothes, the girls wore red skirts that had been made from old Nazi flags. The giant brick factory seemed out of place in that
landscape so full of holes but nevertheless a clear survivor of the war, almost majestic compared to the shacks and camps that made up the majority of the town. No matter though, Hirst was optimistic; surely this place could be set right again.

Ivan Hirst’s optimism was characteristic of the British soldiers who came to occupy the plant. A high emphasis was placed on finding ways to cooperate with the foreign staff, and with dividing labor and decentralizing authority, though this would prove a difficult task. While the British were much less idealistic about democratization, they did feel it was their job to provide a new template, a new example and a new start for the German workers. In his first days at the
factory, Hirst made a point of meeting and talking with the workers at the Volkswagen plant face-to-face, a practice he would continue throughout his time there, hoping to give the workers a sense of independence and a chance to make decisions for themselves. This was a hard balance to achieve, however, because some of the Germans and members of the strange, transitory town still felt a
desire to be extreme and right-wing, sometimes “smearing the walls with swastikas and National Socialist slogans,” a trend that would continue throughout the British rule, more than two years after the end of the war. In finding a balance between democratization and occupation—two things that are in many ways inherently at odds—the British often found themselves struggling. When the workers came to Hirst and wanted to start a workers’ council, for example, he supported this initiative, but nevertheless kept them under strict watch, being sure he approved all of their agendas, and giving them only the opportunity to deal with internal social relations, not with any big decisions about the plant itself. In essence, the workers were allowed to form their own council, but the council was not allowed to influence any real decisions. This is what the British thought of as a policy of “constructive pragmatism”;
²
they had one eye on democracy for Germany, but as occupiers, they readied themselves for the long haul.

Ivan Hirst was only one of many who had a hand in the day-to-day operations in Wolfsburg. At the head of the factory, there was a kindly walruslike colonel named Charles Radclyffe: In January 1946, he had become the head of the Mechanical Engineering Branch of the Industry Division in the headquarters of the British Zone, which made him the main authority in matters regarding the Volkswagen plant. Ivan Hirst was just below Radclyffe in the hierarchy, with the official title of senior residence officer, but he was the man who had the most direct contact with the factory itself.

Walking through Wolfsburg his first day, Hirst heard languages from all over Europe, a Babellian brew of Russian, French, Polish, Danish, Serbo-Croatian, South African, Mexican, Iranian, Cuban, Turkish, Australian, Swedish, Mexican, Hungarian, and English. There were also the numerous German dialects—so different that sometimes even Germans claimed to find other Germans impossible to understand. Everyone seemed
shell-shocked, Hirst thought, as he handed out cigarettes to the workers; they appeared unable to do anything unless directly told. But Hirst, as he himself would later say, knew he’d need the help of just about every person there in order to set the plant right.

According to Hirst, some parts of the factory looked as though they’d not seen a human in years, and the worst thing about the place was the smell. All the plumbing and drainage systems had been damaged in the bombing and were in desperate need of repair. It was a mess, and there was little time to clean it up because the VW factory already had quotas to fill. Thanks to British labor officials like Leslie Barber (the British Labour representative responsible for the financial and proprietary matters of the Volkswagen plant for a time), the factory had been told to build 20,000 Volkswagens for the British military and basic German transportation needs. The cars produced at the time were still the jeeplike military model, because that was what the lines were set to make. But Hirst didn’t like the idea of producing a military car in a time of peace. The British occupation was to be a civilian administration, he thought, not a further act of war. Hirst had discovered an old original VW on the factory premises, and he felt that it was the car that should be produced, Porsche’s original design. Hirst liked it so much that he had one of these early models fixed up and painted green, and he sent it over to the British headquarters to see what they thought. The military government liked the car too; they told Hirst if that was what he wanted to build, he had their blessing.

But in practice, it was not so simple. Every decision about the car was entangled in hesitation and debate, with pressures coming not only from the British, but from the other Allies as well. Labor officials made it clear to Hirst that the car was only temporary; under no conditions was it to be mass-produced. On the other hand, some army representatives and British officials were making the argument that the VW case was special: If they took out this factory, they’d be taking out an entire town. The factory should be allowed to rebuild itself, they argued, and that
would mean allowing it to sell and export cars. But British authorities in London reacted strongly, reiterating that the VW factory was being retained only in order to serve the basic needs of the city and to furnish what the occupying powers needed while they were there. Exports were out of the question.

Just simply getting permission to build the original People’s Car was a victory, though. It meant all the wartime assembly lines would be taken down and the jigs and machines and tools would now be set up according to their original plans. Things remained ambiguous, however, as the Level of Industry Plan in March 1946 stipulated only 20,000 cars and 21,000 trucks for the total zone were to be produced. Many felt these vehicles should be produced not by VW but by the Ford plant in Cologne. VW’s factory was listed as “surplus.” And once again, it looked like the factory would not survive. For his part, however, Hirst decided to more or less ignore all this bureaucratic back-and-forth and just get busy making cars.