Thinking Small (31 page)

In the official report, the team concluded that half of the factory was damaged to some extent—missing roofs, busted windows,
gaping holes—but that only about 20 percent had been completely destroyed. Much of the machinery—expensive new technologies brought over from the United States—had been protected by the heavily reinforced walls of the factory and by steps taken from workers to pack sandbags and bales of hay around
them. The press shop, which is the part of the plant where the metals are shaped, was miraculously still operable, meaning production could be started again, though at a limp.

The U.S. officers appointed a plant manager from the remaining German staff and the factory was ordered to continue building the jeeplike vehicles for Allied troops. At the end of April 1945 production started up again, and in the next two months the Volkswagen factory pieced together 133 Bucket Seat Cars for the U.S. forces stationed there, many of the same German and foreign workers working together as they had before the war. The Americans also took another crucial
step in ensuring the future of the plant: They had a map made, compiling the knowledge of the workers and the German staff that remained, showing where many of the parts and machines that had been taken away could be found.

As the town tried to take stock, one of the first orders of business by the community was to change the city’s name. No one wanted it to be called The Town of the Strength through Joy Car anymore. On the 25th of May, the city decided to name itself after the castle that had been there long before the Nazis, and would remain long after they had left. The town would be called Wolfsburg from that day forward.

Around the same time that the Volkswagen town was being occupied by American troops, Erich Kempka, Hitler’s private driver and friend, got a phone call from the führer’s bunker. It was the 30th of April and the call was an urgent order for 200 liters of petrol. Kempka could not believe the request. Berlin was in the midst of being taken by the Russians and the need for such a large amount of gasoline made little sense. The only
stores of gasoline were in a bunker near Berlin’s central Zoologischer Garten train station, a place being heavily fired upon and bombed. It was impossible to send men there in the middle of the day under such heavy fire, but his commander refused to listen.
Do whatever it takes, just get the gasoline and come to the Führer immediately.

The years had not been good for Hitler. He looked like an old man, and the rapid aging and deterioration that the last two years had caused were striking to those who saw him. Long before the war’s end, he’d developed a condition like Parkinson’s, trembling constantly. In the last year, there were some days he did not get out of bed. He was totally reliant on his doctor for medications. Methamphetamines were now being given out to the German
military, and it is speculated that Hitler was ingesting those as well. At the time Kempka was called for the gasoline, it was just days after Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday: There had been no speeches from Goebbels, and little celebration. The entire country was being overrun by the Allies; it was just a matter of time before the Russians would make their way to the bunker too.

In the heat of battle, Kempka refused to send his men to the Zoologischer Garten. Instead, he had them spread out and find parked or damaged vehicles and siphon gasoline from those. Collecting as much petrol from the cars as he could, Kempka rushed to the bunker, still fuming over being made to take such a risk. When he arrived, however, all that anger dissolved. The Führer was dead, he was told. The petrol he’d just gathered would be used to burn the body
before the Russians arrived.

Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich had lasted twelve years. And the Volkswagen factory he’d promised would build millions of passenger cars had produced 66,285 military vehicles for the war. By the time Wolfsburg was taken by the Americans, it was clear that Germany’s once all-power and all-knowing head, the man many had believed was ordained by Providence to save Germany, had been deeply wrong. The power of his propaganda
had
crumbled, shown itself an empty shell, with nothing of lasting substance behind it, nothing true.

What was known as the
Stunde Null,
the Zero Hour, fell over the country soon after Hitler’s death and the army’s surrender, a kind of motionless hour where the whole world seemed either to end or restart, or both. In the calm of the postwar air, visions of the rubble and debris weighed heavily. Nearly three tons of bombs had been dropped on Germany and almost three-fourths of that amount had come within the last year. After such destruction and
noise, the silence was almost impossible to endure. Some German families locked themselves in rooms and committed suicide together. Others began trying to remove the wreckage and start again, even though it felt like an impossible feat. And the truth about the numerous concentration camps, where so many innocent lives had been taken through the most horrific means, could no longer be hidden or denied.

As production resumed at the factory he had helped to design and build, Ferdinand Porsche was in Austria, unable to get any news about what was happening there. Over the past year and a half, communication with the factory had become more and more difficult, until it finally had simply ceased. His large staff of laborers, and his twelve original men (with Karl Rabe at the head) were now in Gmünd, in the new workshop they’d set up, where they were busy
building things for the local farmers like wheelbarrows, tractors, and carts.

In the early spring of 1945, in the heat of the war’s slow end, an Allied CIOS (Combined Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee) technical commission sought Ferdinand Porsche out and questioned him about his wartime work, taking him back to Zell am See and placing armed guards in front of his house for a few weeks. Two and a half months later, just before Porsche’s seventieth birthday, he was summoned by the Americans to Frankfurt for a trial. He was
allowed to drive there himself,
but he was aging now—the kind of aging that did not necessarily have to do with years. Not sure he could make the drive alone, he took his long-standing family chauffeur (and friend) with him. Soon, the men arrived in the American Zone for Porsche’s trial, joining Albert Speer and a host of others who’d been singled out as prominent members of the Third Reich.

The trials were called “Operation Dustbin,” and the men were kept in a large castle and questioned one by one. The process took nearly three months. From all the reports, Porsche seemed to exude a kind of simple innocence while he was there. He was quieter than usual. He seemed lost. Some commented that it felt strange to see him there. Even Albert Speer was upset by Porsche’s presence, feeling it was wrong that he’d been called to trial.
Speer told the Americans that it was pointless to continue interrogating Porsche over political matters; the engineer had never been privy to such things, nor would he be able to discuss them. The Americans eventually released Porsche uncharged and allowed him to go directly to his home at Zell am See.

Porsche did not seem to understand what a close call he’d just had: Many of the prominent Nazis he’d just been with would eventually be sent to Nuremberg and get the death penalty for what they’d done. Porsche was free, but was given explicit instructions to leave the country at once. Yet, he couldn’t help going by Stuttgart, wanting to know if his old home and workshop were still intact. He was happy to see that they were both still there,
and he hoped the Americans occupying it would let him come inside for a quick look. But the generals in charge of the estate refused to come out and talk to him, and he was reprimanded and warned to return to Austria at once. Porsche did as he was told this time. Ferry and Louise and the rest of the family were happy to have him back at Zell am See. But their joy was short-lived. Porsche was home now, but the Allies would come for him again soon.

People who were there
often comment on how bright the sun was the summer when Germany fell.
¹
The color footage of Berlin at the time does indeed paint a striking picture: The intense blue sky seems a profane backdrop for the piles of rubble, skeletons of buildings, and lines of people—mostly
women—emerging from the wreckage and venturing into the open air. People formed chains, passing bricks or pails of rubble to one another, starting what seemed an impossible task. An aerial view of Berlin is even more striking: Every building is a shell, streets are unrecognizable, it doesn’t look as if anything could still be alive down there at all. And for those who were still alive, what was next?

There were many differing policy ideas about what measures would be best once the war ended, but the one overwhelmingly supported by Roosevelt in 1944 and 1945 was the Morgenthau Plan. This plan would destroy Germany’s capacity of waging war by turning the country into an agricultural nation, eliminating all its heavy industry and ensuring much of its machinery was dismantled and destroyed. This meant that the automotive industries (alongside others) were to be
crippled. Germany’s economic and industrial heart—the Ruhr area, a powerhouse of coal and steel—was to be taken over by the Allies, and much of the mining was to be shut down. In the heat of battle, with so much unnecessary loss, these measures seemed to Roosevelt, and many others, as the only way to ensure that Germany was no longer a threat. Hitler had used industry to rearm and revive his country, and that dependency was now the glowing red target that many
wanted destroyed.

Not all the Allied countries were so gung ho about the Morgenthau Plan. Being so close (geographically) to Germany and thus more economically invested, and having seen what happened
with the punitive measures taken after the First World War, many in Europe sensed that turning the country into a pastoral land would do more damage than good. Winston Churchill, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, was especially hard to convince. He was shocked
upon hearing Roosevelt’s call for “unconditional surrender” and he did not agree with the Morgenthau Plan: “England would be chained to a dead body,”
²
he said.

One thing the Second World War had proved, however, was that the United States was in a new position of power in the world. After the First World War, the United States had wobbled; this time, it would not. As Harry Truman, then a senator gaining his reputation with the Truman Committee’s investigation into wartime business concerns, said: “History has bestowed on us a solemn responsibility.… We failed before to give a genuine peace—we dare
not fail this time … We must not repeat the blunders of the past.” And the blunders were not only ideological ones, they were also economic. By the end of the First World War, the Weimar government paid about $7 billion in reparations, but not a dime of it went to the United States. Instead, according to Edwin Hartrich, an American historian and journalist who was working in Germany during this time, “the German government floated one big bond issue
after another in the U.S., to which the Americans subscribed approximately $7 billion of their own wealth,” exactly the amount the Germans were paying to the other Allies, as it turned out. Needless to say, when the Depression hit, the Germans defaulted on all those bonds, in essence going bankrupt, unable to get any more monetary help from the United States, but also inadvertently causing Germany’s $7 billion of reparation bills to be paid by American investors. Having
learned that lesson the hard way, no one in the American government wanted to end up footing the entire bill for the Second World War as well.

Roosevelt and his staff got Churchill to at least nod in agreement to their terms, and the Morgenthau Plan, though never officially implemented, had the strongest influence on the
occupying armies’ stance toward Germany as the war came to an end. While there was bitter arguing among those in charge about how best to deal with Germany, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Policy 1067 was passed, directing occupying forces to “take no steps
looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany.” It called for Germany’s “excessive concentrations of economic power” to be broken apart. In this plan, automotive plants were referred to as “surplus,” meaning they could be destroyed because they did not provide a basic need. Automotive production in Germany was to be scaled back so that it would be operating at just 10 percent of what it had been before the start of the war. At least,
that was the American idea of the plan.

Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 7, 1945, and the Allies came together at the Potsdam Conference to determine the terms. In the end, it was decided that Germany would be divided equally among the Soviets, French, American, and British troops for an indefinite occupation. The United States took control of the southeast fourth of Germany and the British were given the northwest. The Soviets got the northeast, and the French the southwest. East Prussia,
Pomerania, and Silesia were taken from Germany and broken up, to be annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union. This move would send refugees flooding into Germany, many moving through Wolfsburg on their way. Lower Saxony, the area that contains the city of Wolfsburg, became part of the British Zone. Under Control Council Act Number 52, in June of 1945 the Volkswagen factory came under official British control.