Thinking Small (46 page)

By autumn of 1948, a rapid rise in car sales and car production at VW had solved early tax and liquidity problems. It was now possible to produce cars at a gain, and because Nordhoff had stuck to his export agreements even when the situation looked dire, there were plenty of potential customers, and it was now possible to produce cars for them. Among the reforms that occurred through Erhard’s new “social market economy,” there had also been a specific tax incentive, a remission of any profits earned on export sales. Volkswagen was the only car company in a position to export cars to any substantial extent. Just as Erhard’s risk paid off, so had Nordhoff’s. By October
1948, the loans that VW had taken in the summer to keep it afloat could be paid back in full.

It’s not surprising that the export side of Volkswagen would eventually become so strong. From the very beginning, there were ways in which Volkswagen was a European company as much it was a German one: It originated from, and depended upon, many different people from many different places, and without each player, the company would not have succeeded.

Take Ben Pon, for example, the man responsible for helping to start exports in the first place by bringing the Volkswagen to the Netherlands, and a man who was also one of the People’s Car’s biggest and earliest fans; Pon was of great service to both the British and Nordhoff. In fact, it was Pon who first proposed to Nordhoff that he build a transport vehicle, an idea that Nordhoff followed through on, introducing the Volkswagen Type 2 (the Bulli), known in the States as the VW Bus, in November 1949.
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Ben Pon had driven his first Volkswagen in 1938, before the factory had even been built. As a young man, he’d read about the German government’s plans to build the car and the factory, and he and his father (a man who owned a car dealership in Holland) had journeyed all the way to The Town of the Strength through Joy Car to have a look. At the time, Wolfsburg was essentially an empty field surrounded by small villages, but Pon and his father did find Professor Porsche there. In fact, it was Ben who had given Porsche the vibrant yellow tulip bulbs that Porsche would later plant around his cabin on the hill. Pon met with Porsche and Nazi officials in Berlin months later, persistent in his desire to be involved with the car, and had eventually been promised that he’d have dealership access to the car for his Dutch franchise—he’d be allowed to sell the Volkswagen there. Then, according to Pon, Ferdinand Porsche—clad in “brocaded felt slippers”
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—took him for a ride in a Beetle on the empty Berlin autobahn.

Even during the war, the Volkswagen was still on Pon’s mind. And once Germany had been defeated and the Volkswagen had
come under the control of the British, he contacted them too with the same hopes of bringing the car to the Netherlands. (He even brought fish from Holland to give as a gift for the workers, knowing they were in need of food.) He and VW made plans at the Hannover Trade Show on August 8,1947, to begin export to the Netherlands. It was Pon’s interest and the agreement that was reached between his dealership and the British that led to an export committee being set up at the factory, one that was aided and accentuated by Feuereissen’s plan later known as “the Volkswagen way” of “service before sales.”

Pon also played a role in the development and improvement of the car in those years, pointing out many defects and areas where the car could be improved that the British had not seen. On the first export models, the Volkswagen archives attribute to him having found “nonfunctioning blinkers,
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a defective hood lock, a handle for the heater that was not attached, sluggish gear shifting, dented hubcaps, a bumper that was poorly chrome-plated, a stain on the backrest, and handlebars that were imprecisely installed”—all things that were immediately fixed by the Volkswagen factory workers.

Pon was the first major export dealer for VW, a side of the business that basically had started from scratch. These early export contracts were a matter of individual cars. Ben Pon had five Volkswagens delivered to him at the beginning of October 1947 (there was supposed to be a sixth, but it didn’t make it through inspection); those five little cars that were shipped to Pon made a sensation in the press. They were praised as “the rebirth of the German automobile export business.” But really, little came from that first export, at least for a while. By the end of 1947, only 56 cars in total had been exported to the Netherlands and no new export agreements had been made. The British had hoped to make a profit on exports, but so far the only dollars trickling in were through sales to the Allies and the foreign press. Still, while on the surface the numbers and the profits were extremely small, the potential of the export possibilities had been released—it had become a tangible idea in German
minds again. Thus, when Nordhoff arrived at the beginning of the following year, he was able to use his own experience, skills, and will to develop that side of the business.

Before the partnership between Pon and the British, it had seemed impossible that anyone would ever want to buy a German car again; the Nazi shadow was still too dark. But the gates had been opened, and Nordhoff kept them open through 1948, all the while improving the car to a level of quality that had also been thought impossible just a few years before.

As far as Heinrich was concerned, the problem was
not
one of demand—in Nordhoff’s first months at VW, he received requests for Bugs from Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, and Norway—it was one of logistics. From the very beginning he had made it clear to the British that he wanted to have control of the plant when it came to the big decisions, and in his mind, exports fit the category of big decisions. A large part of the problem, Heinrich thought, was all the red tape he had to go through with the Bizone organizations before any agreements about exports could be finalized. Finally, he asked Colonel Radclyffe to back his request to make such decisions completely factory-based. “I would like to request with all possible urgency
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to be entitled to handle export business,” Nordhoff told the British board once Radclyffe agreed. And he eventually got his way, thus paving the way for the jump in sales that was soon to follow.

By December 1949, there were 529 factory workers and 68 office workers in Wolfsburg. A Volkswagen now cost 5,300 DM. It could be had about one week after being ordered, and the Volkswagen factory was considered the leader in the field of sales and service in West Germany. By the end of 1949, Nordhoff was able to show that the VW plant was out of debt. In fact, Volkswagen was beginning to help boost the West German economy: It was now the leading German exporter of automobiles. Export figures rose to 7,128 vehicles in 1949, a huge increase from the fewer than two hundred total that had left the country in 1947. (Though, while VW was miles ahead of other German
car companies—Opel exported a total of 12 cars that year—it was still far behind others in Europe. The British, for example, exported 180,000 cars in 1949.) Internal sales in West Germany were even more extraordinary: 37,500 Volkswagens were sold in 1949 and there were now 59 German VW wholesalers, 213 repair shops under contract with VW, and 164 subsidiaries. The German population was, finally, on its way to being motorized.

The Beetle
was coming to life, like a black-and-white photo suddenly washed with color. It now had the eyes and hands of an entire factory caring for it. And the car did not have a single extraneous inch. The engineers at the Volkswagen plant found that even the tiniest change in the sheet metal would affect every other part of the car. As sales increased, Nordhoff began to focus more acutely on the details of the
car. He wanted to keep improving the mechanics, but without changing the design itself: He wanted it done
organically,
he said, as though on a cellular level, step by step. Nordhoff assembled a specialized team to comb through every detail of the car, led by a man he’d known from his days at Opel whom he named as VW’s chief engineer.

Between 1948 and 1954, every single part of the People’s Car was inspected and improved. The old gearbox was forgone for one with synchromesh shifting, meaning manual clutching was no longer needed for the second, third, and fourth gears, and the wheel diameter was reduced from 16 to 15 inches, the rim width increasing from 3 inches to 4. Because Volkswagen was one of the first companies to weld its cars, all the welding work was still being done by hand when
Nordhoff arrived (he called it “tinsmithing” and an “alchemist’s kitichen”). It was a time-consuming, labor-intensive process and one that Nordhoff eventually decided to change, opening an automatic welding shop in
1953, thus nearly doubling the gross number of cars that could be made per person per day.

Nordhoff was especially displeased with the brakes on the car, the ones Hitler had refused to have upgraded because the better version was British-made. According to Nordhoff, the Volkswagen’s brake power was only at about 10 percent of the power an Opel Olympia got at this time. He’d soon switched to Teves hydraulic brakes, so the Beetle could match the GM cars in braking action. According to the Volkswagen company archives, other “really burning
issues”
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for Nordhoff in those days were the exhaust valves and the rear axle; the valves kept falling off, and the axle wasn’t tight enough. There was also the problem of “the juddering clutch” and clutch discs that were of poor quality, alongside the fact that the front axle and the suspension system caused road-handling, steering, and
balance concerns, and the bumper seemed a little crooked, a little off. The heater also didn’t work well (and as all original Volkswagen Beetle owners of future days can attest, that was one area that never quite got fixed).

In the midst of all this improvement, the car was also fitted with better tires and would eventually lose the tiny pretzel window of the rear, getting a bigger, modern window instead, a change that increased rear visibility by almost 25 percent. The dashboard was redesigned to be easier on the eye: The speedometer was relocated to where the driver could actually see it without any strain, and the engine was enlarged from 1,131 to 1,192 cubic centimeters. Peak power went
up from 26 to 36 hp. Larger valves, redesigned cylinder heads, and a higher compression ratio were all introduced as ways of improving the car’s drivability. Fender-mounted lamps replaced the semaphore turn-signal arms. The fuel tank was reshaped in a way that gave the car more trunk space. The team also tried to give the car a new horn, one more elegant and “up to date,” less “sweet.” Complaints poured in, however:
Don’t mess with the
horn!
There were certain things about the car, Nordhoff was learning, that its drivers were very attached to and did not want changed.
And that was especially true when it came to the overall look: Porsche’s original design was kept in place even as nearly every inch of the inner car was improved. It was a healing process that, at least metaphorically, mirrored the one that VW workers and the German population were undergoing: changing the inside
rather than the outside.

It was also a microcosm of what was happening in West Germany. The Trizone Allies had put great time and effort into working with Germans like Erhard to designate and form new German states, and then to set up a committee toward the creation of a new constitution to unite those states. From August 10 until August 23, 1948, meetings were held at a convention on a Bavarian lake to discuss what would constitute this new “Basic Law.” Other than the technical
details concerning how the new German states would be governed under the new national government, the law dealt with social and psychological concerns: One of its main principles, for example, was the rejection of any belief in a “master race.” On May 23, the Allies gave their official approval of the document and it came into effect as law. West Germany was no longer a “legal nonentity,” but rather its own self-governed country again, the Federal Republic
of Germany. In response to West Germany’s actions, the Soviets came up with a constitution for East Germany, officially establishing the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The two Germanys had now been legally recognized.

Consequences from this shift of power between Germany and the Allies rained down on the still ambiguously owned VW plant. Volkswagen’s strange history meant that it was not a private enterprise like most other automobile firms of the time. And with business picking up, everyone wanted a piece of the VW pie; the question was, who should get to own it, now that the Nazis were gone? The labor unions that had been dissolved, and whose money had been taken by the
Nazis’ German Labor Front, claimed it was their funds that had built the plant in part. The
men and women who had signed up for Robert Ley’s Volkswagen Savings Book Plan claimed they should get a part, since they’d paid for cars that had never been delivered (interestingly, all that money was found untouched in the Nazi VW bank account in Berlin—it really had been intended for the production of cars—but it was confiscated by the
Soviets when they took over the capital). At the same time, the German state of Lower Saxony tried to claim the plant because it was physically in their region. And Erhard, now West Germany’s minister of economic affairs, thought it would be best if the VW factory went to the federal government, to be doled out for privatization once it had matured. But the VW plant was technically in the hands of the British, so it was the British alone who would have to make the call. They
wavered and wobbled, so earnest in trying to be fair that they ended up being completely unclear. In what Ian Turner called a “master of equivocation,”
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the British said the plant was “under the terms of ordinance of Lower Saxony” but “on behalf of and under the Federal Government.” So … who owned it exactly? The
state government or the national one? In any case, the plant was officially given back to Germany on October 13, 1949.