Thinking Small (30 page)

In retrospect, there are many signs that things had gotten out of control very early on in Germany and that its leaders were living in an unsustainable world of personal myth. It’s probably safe to say, for instance, that when a political party passes a law to make their current active leader’s birthday into a national holiday, that’s a sure sign that something has gone wrong. Hitler’s birthday was a Nazi national holiday, and stamps were often issued to commemorate the event. It was a matter of perpetuating the mythic feeling of immortality that Hitler cultivated around himself: By doing things that were usually only done for someone after their death, such events made him seem larger than life. But the image of Hitler as savior and hero was not something he’d created on his own. People had been looking for a hero and he’d stepped into that role, believing it himself so sincerely that others around him got caught up in that belief as it took on a life of its own. Goebbels above everyone seemed ready to talk of Hitler with religious fervor. Every year on Hitler’s birthday, Goebbels gave speeches praising him, usually just before the Philharmonie played a tribute concert in Berlin.

However, in 1943, on Hitler’s fifty-fourth birthday, the mood of the country was hardly celebratory. Hitler avoided the masses. He’d become too worried about his safety and too embarrassed by German losses to be seen much in public anymore. Instead, he celebrated with his “
chauffeurska
” on a lonely section of the autobahn. German roads were still white elephants, empty because
most people in the country still did not have cars. Standing together there on the distant slice of concrete surrounded by a rolling and empty landscape, it was difficult even for Hitler’s entourage to rally their spirits. Hitler himself had lost that determined and confident gleam he’d once had. He was not the same man who had shoveled dirt nine years ago to commemorate the first autobahn.

That same year, even Goebbels began Hitler’s birthday speech in Berlin with the words: “The German people celebrate the Führer’s birthday
⁴
this year in a particularly somber manner.” As Hitler and his crew stood on the empty autobahn, Goebbels continued on to say: “Confidence is
⁵
the best moral weapon of war … When it begins to fail, the beginning of the end has arrived. No matter where we look, we see no cause for such concern. It exists only in the propaganda dreams of our enemy. The more hopes they put in the moral weakness of the German people, the greater will be their disappointment.” Now that the war was going wrong for Germany, Goebbels said it was not Germany but “the wicked forces” of the Allies that had wanted and waged this war, a statement impossible to prove in any way. While the Allies were confronting reality, Hitler was avoiding it. The German people wrote him letters daily asking him to come out and see the destruction of their towns, but he ignored them. Not once did he reach out to comfort any of the citizens or the families of those who had been killed. Goebbels lamented this turn more than anyone, and as propaganda minister, was constantly trying to get Hitler to talk to the masses, knowing that his ability to speak had been his only real strength. But Hitler could not talk because he no longer had the confidence or the energy to present “a strong will”: He waited on a miracle instead, hoping against the very clear (to others, at least) odds that things would turn in Germany’s favor again. He would only talk to the people, Hitler said, once that miracle had occurred.

In 1945,
the atmosphere of The Town of the Strength through Joy Car suddenly changed. It could be felt in the camps. The SS was on edge. The guards were jittery. For the foreign laborers, 1944 had been a year of bombing and constant sirens, of being herded into bomb shelters in the middle of the night, of less food than usual, of days of picking through debris, and of that hysterical middle ground between the fear of
death and the dream of being rescued. Over half the factory had been damaged to some extent, but wartime production crawled on. No one was getting much sleep. Everyone scanned the skies for planes.

Just before 9:00 on the morning of April 10, the factory sirens blasted once more, this time with a Panzer alert meaning enemy tanks were near. The Allies had come. German workers were ordered to go to their houses. Prisoners were sent to their camps. People whispered that the Americans were coming. Or was it the Soviets? Good news spread, but an equal number of horror stories were told. Tensions were high. Everything was overcrowded. The trains carrying concentration
camp prisoners and foreign laborers—the town had become a crossroads of sorts—stalled and backed up. The telephone services had been disconnected days before; there was no way of getting outside news. Communication and transportation were breaking down, and Nazi authority was breaking down too.

Twelve hours after the first alert, at 9:00 p.m., another shrill alarm broke through town. German workers barricaded themselves indoors. Some Nazi officials began to destroy documents, trying to erase their existence and their names. Nazi uniforms were burned; official photos of Hitler were quickly hidden or annihilated; SS leaders fled. Those still loyal to the Nazi government talked of destroying the factory, of burning it to the ground. All the highest officials knew
about the NSDAP’s policy of “scorched earth”: If the Third Reich was to go down, all was to
be set afire. At one point, Hitler told Albert Speer: “If the war is lost, the nation will also perish.
¹
This fate is inevitable. There’s no reason to take into consideration what the people will need to continue a most primitive
existence. On the contrary, it will be better to destroy these things ourselves because the nation will have proven itself to be the weaker one.…” As Speer later recalled, the list of things that were to be destroyed included “all industrial plants, all important electrical facilities, water works and gas works; all stocks of food and clothing, all bridges, all railways and communications installations,
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all waterways, all shipping, inland as well as oceanic, all freight cars and all locomotives.”

At the close of the war, the Germans began carrying out such plans not only in their own country—which was already to a great degree destroyed—but in the countries they occupied. As they retreated, they burned or destroyed as much as they could along the way. In cities of great culture such as Florence, bridges and sacred works of art were burned or blown up. In Russia, the original scores of Tchaikovsky were thrown out into the yard, and Leo
Tolstoy’s house was wrecked. The mood was one of total war, and the climax of destruction had begun. There was no reason to think it would be any different for The Town of the Strength through Joy Car.

But those who had been given orders were hesitant to follow through. Two such officers went to the mayor of the town and told him they’d been instructed to blow up the factory’s power station, the Kraftwerk, and the canal bridges connecting the factory to the rest of town. The mayor pleaded with them to reconsider their orders: The factory’s generators were the lifeblood of electricity and services for the entire town. And the Nazi Party hardly had
the power to punish the two officers for disobeying now, the mayor pointed out. Many were already on the run.

Outside the camps and around the factory, the group of SS guards continued to thin. Men left their posts and slipped off into the night. A feeling of freedom blew through the barracks and camps, but few had any clear direction of where to actually
go once they were free. After these past five years, what was home, and how could they travel when the infrastructure of their countries was being destroyed? Stories circulated among the Russian prisoners
that it wasn’t safe to cross into the Soviet-occupied areas of Germany: So much time among the enemy meant they were likely to be seen as “contaminated” and thus would be locked away or killed. The next day, a few last battles raged on. Soon, word came that the nearby village of Fallersleben had been taken by American troops. But no one showed up in the Volkswagen town: They didn’t know it was there. The city was too young to have made it onto any of the
American army’s official land maps. (The factory had only made it onto aerial maps by then.)

The chaos increased around the factory; more Nazi officials and SS troopers escaped into the night. As morning broke on April 11, the camps of the forced laborers could no longer be guarded and the prisoners—some starving, aggressive, seething with pent-up rage—broke free and moved like gangs through the town in search of retribution, attention, food. Other prisoners stayed huddled in the camps and met among themselves, sending search parties through the
factory for vittles; the more clearheaded realized that to flee would be even more dangerous than staying: The only thing to do was wait.

Still, those prisoners intent on revenge were of a large enough number to send a new wave of fear through the still-unoccupied town. German families boarded up their windows and went up to the attics to hide, watching from the highest windows as groups of prisoners celebrated and shouted on the streets. The grocery stores were looted, a local butcher was shot, there was sporadic violence and a few hand grenades were thrown. Some discovered stores of alcohol and their
drunkenness added a further layer of release. Some drank industrial alcohol and methanol in the pharmacy and died from it. Another group of laborers broke into a pharmacy storage closet and found a large bag of rice. Starving, they cooked it into a pudding, unaware that the rice was laced with poison and had been used to kill rats.

The rioting continued the entire day, escalating to a near frenzy in some places before the initial euphoria began to wear off and things quieted down. Remarkably, in all the looting and destruction, no one destroyed the factory’s machinery, and the power station remained unharmed.

The Americans were so close, but unless someone told them that the town needed help, it was doubtful they would seek out the factory themselves. A French Franciscan friar who had been a laborer in the camp—the SS men had been particularly cruel to him because of his religious ties—spoke a bit of English and offered to help; a German priest who had helped the French friar as much as he could over the past years came to him, and together, the two decided to
take a Red Cross jeep over to the nearby village to talk to the Americans. A German-born American citizen, an autoworker who had moved to Wolfsburg from Detroit in 1937, volunteered to go with the priests and help too.

The first American they found was a red-haired army soldier who was kind but cautious, not sure what to make of a German factory worker who spoke English with an American accent. That same man also claimed there were American children—sons and daughters of those who had been recruited by Volkswagen before the onset of war—living in Wolfsburg who needed help. The priests nodded in confirmation. Eventually the Americans loaded up their jeeps and gear and
moved into The Town of the Strength through Joy Car.

U.S. troops first entered the Volkswagen city late in the afternoon on April 12. American officers and tanks patrolled the streets and broke up what rowdy groups were left, arresting Nazi soldiers and collecting weapons. The noise decreased; the town grew quieter. Germans began to take the boards off their windows and came out to watch the American tanks. Soon, various officials and other citizens of the city created a small local patrol to help keep order and to try to
decide what else could be done to assist.

Three days after entering the town, American officers set up a U.S. Army post at the factory and another one by the old Castle
Wolfsburg, which had existed since the Middle Ages. For the next weeks, the army tried to find food and supplies for the town. The factory was in good enough shape for the Americans to set up a repair shop for their own vehicles. Urging from the factory staff also led the Americans to consider restarting production of
vehicles, a very significant decision at the time and one that may have saved the plant. Compared to the rest of Germany, the Volkswagen factory survived the war surprisingly unscathed. A study done by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey Team shows that there were large gaping holes throughout the buildings, but that overall, the main infrastructure was still strong. More than 2,000 bombs had been dropped in the area, but only 263 had actually hit the factory. Legend has it
that during the inspection, a dud bomb was found sitting snug between the two main turbines of the power plant. It would have been the end of the factory and town’s power and electricity source had it gone off.