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Sensing his dedication, the workers tried to do their best for him. The town itself was in terrible shape, though: Old labor camps were being used as housing, some of which were little more than breezy wooden shacks, with between two and four beds in each room. The old lodgings of the SS were also being used. And most of those still a part of VW management had homes in the only fully finished neighborhood in Wolfsburg, the Steimker Berg. For the majority of workers, accommodations felt temporary and inadequate. Many families had to separate in order to be housed. The idea in many workers’ minds was not how to make a life there, but how to move on.

It didn’t help that the factory work was grueling and that food was extremely scarce. In the spring of 1946, workers were on an allowance of 1,014 calories a day, less than half of what doctors determined an adequate provision for heavy laborers. Much of the workforce had to attend to things like rubble removal, filling craters that bombs had made, and restoring tooling and factory halls. In addition, there was no catalog or inventory of tools, so it was easy for things to be lost, taken, or simply overlooked.
Because of the lack of housing and food, workforce was in constant turnover. The town served as a kind of crossroads. Workers rarely gave notice before leaving: They would be there one day and the next day they’d disappear. By the end of 1946, more than half the employees who had been on register at the beginning of the year were gone.

In the midst of all this chaos, it was difficult to train workers or to be sure people with the right skills were performing the right jobs. The Works Council
³
and the German executives and British officers at the plant did their best to sort out the multitude of problems that presented themselves, but it was rarely quick or neat. The British soldiers—while waiting for official policies between the Allies to be solved in terms of the factory—decided to allow the workers to produce 4,000 cars per month (for the military), but that number began to look comical with time. It was all the workers could do
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, in fact, to produce just over 1,000 of them in March 1946, one full year after Germany’s surrender. Still, they were doing better than most companies in Germany. Being a publicly owned British undertaking, a
Regiebetrieb,
was an advantage for the factory: In a country experiencing a dearth of supplies, the VW factory’s status as an Allied undertaking gave it first dibs in acquiring resources.

The British staff there also made some crucial decisions about VW service and sales, changes that would profoundly affect the following years. One of the first orders of business, for example, was to initiate a service department staffed with experts to train the other workers. The British also worked on setting up an organization of dealerships and distributors for the car—something the Nazis had wanted to avoid in their policy to “cut out the middleman.” An old colleague, friend, and sometimes rival of Porsche’s named Karl Feuereissen was at the VW factory during this time too, and he worked with the British to develop a philosophy for the company that would later evolve into “the Volkswagen way.” Feuereissen’s central tenet was that service must always come before sales. In other words, the entire factory must be geared toward the customer, not toward
what would produce the most money in the short-term. Their goal was that any dealership that sold a Volkswagen should be equipped to service it too, or at least be in proximity to a station that could. A service school was set up to train the staff. Classes were taught in both English and German, and bilingual service bulletins were published as well. In these classes, workers discussed possible problems with the car and brainstormed ways to fix them. In such chaotic and unstable conditions, it’s amazing that Feuereissen and the British were able to focus on the bigger picture in such a direct way.

Reading back over the notes and bulletins from these meetings, one finds the issues discussed were of a wide variety; there are pages on the development of “silent engine techniques” and those discussing “anti-boom compound” that could take away the original Volkswagen’s classic air-cooled engine noise (it didn’t work). Paint problems were also a big concern: There was no good place to store the cars after they were painted, and thick layers of dust that still swarmed through the plant would settle on the cars as they dried. To deal with such problems, an inspection department was initiated and put into full force. In 1947, more than 200 vehicles were singled out as “inadequate for the customer” and had to be resprayed.

Ivan Hirst was a real stickler about these types of concerns. He could often be found driving cars off the assembly line in order to check them as thoroughly as possible. Under Hirst’s watch, the car’s Solex carburetors were modified in such a way that a faultless idling and transition to acceleration was achieved. A host of other changes took place: A “noise monitoring apparatus” was set up to give readouts on the volume of noise emitted when the car shifted gears or accelerated. Deflectors and new felt-element air filters helped the engine not to overheat. A change in the amount of alloy used on the cylinders gave them longer life. The crankshaft production line was modified for greater efficiency. The loosening of the camshaft wheel was eliminated by improved riveting. Frequently occurring running noises from the crown wheel and bevel gear disappeared
thanks to a new device that allowed more exact adjustment. The dimensional precision and surface quality of the gears, running parts, and bearings were improved so that the rattling of the front axle disappeared and the jar of the steering lessened considerably. When they’d first restarted making the car, its doors often wouldn’t close properly, and the front hood would not stay shut. By 1947, the car design was much more durable thanks in large part to Hirst and his constant rallying cries for improvement. The workers called him “Major” and liked seeing him around. On his birthday—March 1, 1946—they gave him a birthday card that read: “For our energetic British officer Major Hirst, the rebuilder of the Volkswagen factory.”

The other British officials there were also doing a lot for Wolfsburg as a city, not just the car and the factory. They set up a makeshift cinema inside the factory and showed whatever films they could find, sometimes as many as two a week. At Christmas, they threw a party for the workers and their children, and all the kids got tiny aluminum Beetles as gifts. Everyone was provided with an evening meal: mashed potatoes and goulash, with jelly for dessert. It was exceptionally generous at the time, as the scarcity of food was foremost on everyone’s mind.

But relations were not always smooth between the British and the German staff. Denazification was a big concern for the Allies, and for many Germans as well, and not one Hirst wanted to deal with for very long: He felt he needed every man he could get at the time, so he didn’t ask them about their pasts. Those senior to him, including many Germans, found his don’t-ask policy too lax and took the matter into their own hands. In June 1946, authorities notified 179 people of their dismissal, including the main factory director, the technical manager, a divisional manager, and four department heads. A second wave of denazification later sent the total up to 226 dismissed workers.

Many of the main staff Hirst had been working with were gone in an instant. These stringent measures created a strong feeling of unrest around the plant; some claimed the “real
Nazis” had been allowed to stay, while those who were innocent had been forced out. It was a touchy subject, to be sure, and the tension was felt on a daily basis. Sometimes when machines broke down, for example, it was due not to technical difficulties but to workers venting their frustration about certain decisions that had been made.

The Nazi issue was a potent one in the city at large as well. Because shelter, food, and clothing were in such short supply, the desire for a portion of these resources played a part in people’s attitudes. Campaigns were waged to remove former NSDAP members from their homes, and from the town. Similar campaigns were waged against Displaced Persons and refugees, a drastic push to clear the town so that there would be more space. At the same time, the factory was still in desperate need of every worker it could get. The more people they sent away, the fewer people they had to work at the plant. But the more people who came to work, the harder it was to feed them or provide housing. Every day felt like an emergency situation, and nearly every problem felt like an impossible one.

Even so, by the end of 1946, Hirst and the VW staff had managed to pull together a total of 10,000 People’s Cars. It was only a fraction of what had been originally planned, but it was a large accomplishment for Wolfsburg, and a truly extraordinary feat for the time. Two of the surviving photos from that day attest to this contradictory situation. One photo shows the tall, regal, smiling Ivan Hirst, flanked by the workers and their 10,000th car. The second photo, one
taken by workers without the eyes of management, shows that same car; but beside it there is a handwritten sign, a “list of wants,” including a hot meal, a beer, and an existence of less unbearable stress. Another handwritten sign on the car says “Ten thousand cars, and an empty stomach.
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How can we endure?”

Such desperation might be hard for us to imagine now, but at the time hunger was literally a matter of life and death in many parts of Europe. Allied-enforced price controls, a continuation from wartime, had made nourishment so hard to find that often
people did not come to work simply because they had to go out and forage for food. In
Mainsprings of the German Revival,
Henry Wallich, an economist at Yale University, writes that “hungry people traveled sometimes hundreds of miles at a snail’s pace to where they hoped to find something to eat. They took their wares—personal effects, old clothes, sticks of furniture, whatever bombed-out remnants they had—and came back with grain or potatoes for a week or two.” At the time, this was the natural condition for the majority of the population.

The black market often seemed the only market. In such an environment, cigarettes glowed like hundred-dollar bills. As Hermann Abs, chairman of the German Reconstruction Bank in 1947, said: “There was one genuine currency
⁶
 … American cigarettes. Even wage was expressed in cigarettes because that was something of value.” By some estimates, half of all business going on in the U.S. and British zones in 1946 and 1947 was done through this kind of barter. With their signs in the photograph, the VW workers were asking the crucial question of the time: What good was industry if those laboring could not be properly fed? Still, the Volkswagen cars proved beneficial. Money itself was practically worthless, but one People’s Car could be bartered for 150 tons of cement or 200,000 bricks. Lightbulbs, steel, shoes, clothing, food—all of these at one time or another were paid for in Volkswagens.

From all this, one thing became very clear: The German economy was broken and its industrial aims had hit a wall. The factory system—the mass amount of people needed, the assembly lines, the large consumer base—was not possible unless basic social and economic conditions were met first. Supplies were there—there was plenty of coal and steel in Germany, to be sure—but those supplies were kept under lock and key, and there was tremendous dissonance about how to move and manage them, or who should be allowed access to them at all. Just securing basic necessities took a lot of time and work. Every month, for example, Ivan Hirst had to take “iron tickets” and travel to headquarters to get the coal needed to run the factory
and town. Wolfsburg had the advantage of having its own power station—the factory—but coal was necessary for it to run, and when the coal was held back, or the transportation of the coal broke down, things could get very grim very fast. For many who experienced it, for example, the winter of 1946–1947 would stand out forever as the harshest of their lives. This was one moment when the factory could not get adequate supplies. Europe was literally frozen; in some of the factory halls the temperature got as low as minus 7˚ Celsius (about 19˚ Fahrenheit). It wasn’t possible to expect anyone to work. Machines broke down from the cold. Because the shipments of coal had not arrived, there was no heat. People cut down trees and made constant fires to stay warm.

In 1947, industry in Germany was a third of the size that it had been before the country went to war, and that number was descending. Food production was at 51 percent of what it had been in 1938, making malnutrition worse than it had ever been during the war. At the factory, it was not unusual to see men faint or curl up on the floor in exhaustion. One cold evening, Hirst heard an argument outside his door. A man was trying to steal another man’s potatoes. The first man killed the second with his garden tools. The situation was so bad that stealing one vegetable could get you murdered. Living in such conditions, it’s no wonder there was little enthusiasm for building cars. For the majority of Germans, buying a car was the last thing on their minds.

Heinrich Nordhoff
had a front row seat for the last year of the war. The Opel truck factory he managed had suffered heavy bombings. Berlin, the city where Heinrich and Charlotte were raising their family, was no longer a safe place to live. In 1944, Charlotte
and the girls left and found shelter at a friend’s house in the Harz Mountains. Heinrich was alone in Brandenburg, working many more hours than he slept. As the bombs worsened, he rarely left the factory grounds, spending his nights in the damp air-raid shelters beneath the plant, nights that were long, full of unexpressed questions and concern for his colleagues, his family, and the future of his country. The lack of sleep and the intensity of stress weighed heavily on him, and eventually Nordhoff fell ill with pneumonia. In 1945, when it got to the point where he could barely stand up anymore, he was ordered to go to the mountains so he could be nursed back to health by Charlotte. As spring brought a whisper of warmth to the cool mountain air, Heinrich, Charlotte, and their two girls lived together in a single room, surrounded by the rolling hills and fir trees of the Harz. The area was still quiet, but there was no telling how much longer that would remain true. The Allied forces were on the move.