Thinking Small (18 page)

But for Nordhoff and his colleagues at Opel, there was another side to consider as well. Even before Hitler had been elected to office, a conflicted relationship between the GM-owned company and the Nazis had emerged. With Sloan’s company owning 80 percent of their shares, Opel was technically in the hands of the Americans, and Hitler found that deeply offensive. He saw it as a surrender: In his eyes, one of the crown
jewels of German industry had been conquered by another land. Likewise, in the early years, there were many at Opel who did not like Hitler and were not afraid to say as much: In 1932, for instance, Opel executives refused to allow Hitler to use the Opel auto racing track for a campaign rally. It was something Hitler would not forget.

Later that same year, Hitler’s henchman, Hermann Goering
²
—a man who also loved industry and automobiles—unabashedly told an American embassy official in Berlin that it would eventually become impossible for Opel to remain under American control: As soon as Hitler’s party came to power, Goering said, the National Socialists would take it back from GM. German companies had to be German-owned. It was a point Hitler had made early on: Even before coming to power, he had forced the members of the Nazi Automobile Club to sign an agreement promising they would not buy any foreign cars. He wanted German citizens to feel guilty if they participated in the global market: Instead, he felt Germany’s borders should be open to exporting, but largely closed when it came to what they took in. Hitler wanted an autarky, an expanded German landmass that would eat up more and more area and thus acquire more and more industry. The German economy, he insisted, must provide everything for itself.

The feeling of hysteria that Nordhoff and many others felt descending on Germany was even more apparent a few weeks after Hitler’s first appearance at the Berlin Auto Show. On February 27, 1933, a terrorist attack sent fear soaring through Germany. The Reichstag, the main governmental building comparable to the Pentagon or the Capitol in the United States, was set on fire by a young man who had once been affiliated with the Communist Party. It would become a pivotal moment for the Nazis. After the fire, a sense of order and control was in demand, and Hitler parlayed that desire into a chance to give himself and his party much more control. In order to deal swiftly
with those who were threatening Germany, the country must have a stronger executive, a führer, he said, and in the panic of it all, he was able to blame the Communists and push new legislation through; legislation that would in effect take power away from other branches of the German government and more fully localize it in him. It was such a perfect situation for the Nazis that many would later wonder if they’d started the fire themselves.

In the following months, as the Führer Principle (Hitler’s belief that the will of the people could be expressed only through the will of their leader) rapidly moved toward becoming the law of the land, Hitler was careful to follow through on his campaign promises with incredible speed, keeping the trust of the people on his side. This was especially true when it came to transportation. In the summer of 1933, the Reich Automobile Law was passed, absolving German
states of any responsibility in matters concerning the automobile. Now the construction of streets, the ability to tax auto companies, and all other such automotive decisions would be conducted at the national level. And having such control at the national level—and thus, in Hitler’s hands—did indeed produce speed: Three months after this law went into effect, and using plans that had been drawn up in the 1920s but gone unimplemented, widespread construction of the first modern German highways began. And Hitler was sure to be there for the groundbreaking. On September 23, 1933, the new chancellor earnestly shoveled out the first plot of earth of the coming autobahns. He was wearing his knee-high black boots, and he continually reached up to sweep his hair out of his eyes as he worked. He looked sincere: As the German magazine
Die Strasse
wrote at the time: “No symbolic groundbreaking,
³
this was real work in the dirt.”

In speeches that followed, Hitler tied the idea of national progress directly to the progress made in transportation: “Just as horse-drawn vehicles
⁴
once had to create paths and the railroad had to build rail lines, so must motorized transportation be granted the streets it needs,” he said: “If in earlier times one attempted
to measure people’s relative standard of living according to kilometers of railway track, in the future one will have to plot the kilometers of streets suited to motor traffic.…” The more roads that were built, the more the country would prosper. But prosperity was not Hitler’s primary concern. There was another side to it too: The more roads the country had, the easier it would be to engage in war maneuvers, the smoother it would be acquire more
Lebensraum,
living space. It wasn’t as sly as it looked: For Hitler, motorization, war, and renewing Germany were interlinked, and he did not pretend otherwise. In the words of German automotive writer Wolfgang Sachs: “The erasure of stubborn differences
⁵
was supposed to be effected by ‘eliminating opposition’ and the highways
⁶
were the spatial expression of this venture.”

Today, perhaps it is hard to understand what a bold move the autobahn project was, but the scale of the street construction project Hitler initiated was unprecedented. Again, like so many defining characteristics of the Nazi government, the
idea
of the autobahn was one Hitler co-opted from other sources (most notably from his hero Benito Mussolini). Still, when it came to the actual creation of a network of such highways, nothing had been done like it in any other country in the world. The plan called for 6,500 kilometers of road, about 4,039 miles. And in fact 3,500 kilometers (2,175 miles) of road would be built over the next seven years. It was a huge public works project, and it was described in grandiose terms: The Nazis spoke of these new roads as “monuments” and presented them as natural accentuations of the landscape. This view melded the Nazi Party’s philosophy of a return to nature with its philosophy of industrial progress in one fell swoop. One of their announcements called
Not Roads, but Works of Art
reads: “Nothing is to cramp or delay you in your
⁷
swing from one horizon to the other, …” then adds that with highways the German landscape “will sparkle like a stone in an artfully wrought ring.”

Road building was undeniably an important project to the power the Nazis wanted to acquire. Not only was it a way to
give unemployed Germans a sense of work and purpose again, thus inspiring political loyalty to the man who had provided that work, but the new network of roads also gave the country a sense of literal unity, connecting areas of Germany that had never been physically connected before, bringing Germans from opposite parts of the country together to work on a common project, and providing a kind of metaphorical image for the population, to give them the sense of being one. The spirit it created was a hopeful one. And while the workers themselves would in truth have no direct control over what was to come from their government, for the moment, they would be made to feel as if they did. Working on Nazi programs such as this, the people could think of themselves as part of a grand project, doing what was best for Germany, acting not for individual gain, but for the greater cause.

Perhaps the strongest immediate benefit of the new road construction project was that it provided jobs for citizens in dire need of work. As many as a million new jobs came from motorization policies like this, and alongside the parallel project of rearmament, it helped the Third Reich bring the country out of its economic misery very fast. Before Hitler became chancellor, more than a third of Germans were unemployed. By 1938, the country would be working at full employment again. Automobile production tripled in Hitler’s very first year: Private car production would rise 74 percent between 1934 and 1939, and truck production would increase by 263 percent. These were extraordinary numbers, and at the time, much of the world thought Hitler was doing something right. As early as 1935, the British magazine
Motor
wrote: “German car makers have made
⁸
great progress during the past few years and have shown marked initiative in design. The encouragement which they receive from the German government, both directly and in respect of the national road-building program, is in sharp contrast with the anti-motoring policy of most British politicians.”

People liked the idea of mobility, and Hitler was certainly taking advantage of the element of fantasy within it, but one had
to ask: Who was expected to travel on all those new roads? If one had looked long and hard, it might have become obvious that the first likely advantage of such roads would be a military one. With less than one percent of the country motorized in those early years, the roads being built were nearly always completely empty and only the rich were buying more cars. In that sense, the project to build a People’s Car was necessary in order to get the common people to believe in the idea of mobility Hitler wanted to present. One in which the focus was not on “war” but rather on “Lebensraum” and a higher quality of life. The fact that this mobility would
require
war was, at least in Hitler’s mind, beyond question. But that did not diminish the importance of the automobile, or the goal of
Volksmotorisierung.

Still, at first, most car companies dismissed Hitler’s call for a Volkswagen as political rhetoric meant to get “the little man’s” vote. But after Hitler followed through on tax relief, new automobile laws, and street construction, the big auto companies began to realize that he might be serious about the Volkswagen too. Of all Hitler’s automotive moves, this one would be the most controversial. The other actions he’d taken were of clear benefit to the elite auto industry, but building a Volkswagen was an idea that they feared. Auto companies liked the thought of building a cheap car for the masses, something along the lines of a three-wheeled motorcycle perhaps, but they did not like the idea of building a car that was just as good as an expensive model, but could be sold at half the price. Not only were they feeling sure that such a thing was technologically impossible, they were also worried about having the government so involved in stipulating what kind of car should or should not be sold. In terms of the long-term health of the market, dictation of that sort was a threat.

But Hitler knew all along that he was leading the country into war, and all the momentum of reviving industry through road construction and rearmament was to be channeled into exactly that. Without war, all the money the Nazis were spending on such projects would have eventually resulted in a crash much
like the one in 1929, and some economists of the time already knew it. In some sense, the Nazis knew it too: To avoid a looming economic crisis in 1936, they instated something called “The Four Year Plan.” It was a plan to be fully prepared for war within four years, essentially creating a wartime economy in the midst of peace. This plan put nearly all of the country’s industry into the hands of the NSDAP, making Goering, in effect, every German company’s boss. Normal Germans considered The Four Year Plan a defensive measure, thinking the idea was not to go to war but rather to move into a position equal to the other countries in Europe that were already sufficiently armed. But Hitler’s wartime economy would eventually require a literal battle or it would collapse.

With plans like the road construction project and rearmament, Hitler was rallying the country in one direction, and the nation’s businesses were being trained to work in unison toward a common goal. Because Germany had been disarmed and much of its industry dramatically scaled down by the Treaty of Versailles, by (openly but illegally) restarting armament, Hitler was able to have a wartime economy for years before he had to actually have a war. All that energy and industrial activity was a way of catching up to other countries, making up for the time Germany had lost after the First World War. Soon, the internal lack of competition and the growing centralization would have proven detrimental—even Nazi economists tried at times to warn Hitler of such—but because of the strange situation Germany was in, he was able to keep the economic subservient to the political even while companies were still legally “private” ones.

The Volkswagen, however, was not merely a political ploy. Certainly Hitler knew the propagandist power in the idea, but he was also serious about providing Germans with cars: He could see no Germania that was not a motorized one. In fact, he and his Daimler dealer friend Jakob Werlin had been meeting and discussing the idea of a Volkswagen for years. Werlin often told the story of driving along with Hitler one day in the rain
and seeing a man on a motorbike drenched and struggling along the road. In this story, Hitler invites the young man into his own elegant car for a ride (who knows what they did with the man’s motorcycle!) while turning to Werlin and saying that one day he intends to give every such man a proper car. The story is most likely pure propaganda, or exaggerated at the very least. But Hitler went to great lengths to try to inspire enthusiasm for the project. He even targeted the young: Under his rule, toy stores abounded with tiny car figurines, including a black limousine modeled after the one that carried Hitler around Berlin, a toy complete with little working headlamps and an action figure of the führer sitting alongside the driver.

Automobiles were a passion for Hitler, and it was a passion he wanted others to share in, but he was a snob when it came to taking automotive advice. He considered himself an automotive expert, and he believed he knew how a People’s Car would have to be designed. According to another oft-repeated story, upon discussing the Volkswagen, Hitler reportedly told Werlin: “It should look like a beetle.
⁹
You only have to observe nature to learn how best to achieve streamlining.” In truth, Hitler probably did make a similar remark at some point, but it is likely that he was merely repeating, and co-opting, ideas he’d read about in elite automotive magazines of the time. Hitler was not shy about taking popular ideas and claiming them as his own, and that was true when it came to all his passions, especially art, architecture, and the automobile. He had not had much formal education, and he tried to make up for that by reading, or skimming, as many books as he could get, and quoting from them extensively (and without attribution to the person being quoted). He also took measures to try to silence and extinguish the very sources from which he was likely getting those same views, especially if those were Jewish voices.