Thinking Small (24 page)

From the very beginning, Robert Ley loved the idea of the Volkswagen, calling it “the greatest social work of all time,” and Hitler’s “great pet.” To Hitler’s immense delight, Ley threw himself into the work of promoting the car, using the Labor Front
and Strength through Joy as a public relations company for it, and launching an unprecedented ad campaign with posters, speeches, and toys. As part of this great propaganda push, another thirty prototypes of Hitler’s “pet” were built for exhibition purposes and sent through Germany—sometimes with Ferry Porsche at the wheel—on special motor tours that paraded through town and village streets. Exhibitions were held so people could see the cars up close: Wagnerian sets and sunbursts gave these exhibitions the feeling of a fairy tale. Leaflets given out at the shows called it
The Strength through Joy Car, as willed by the Führer.

The fantasy was exciting, as fantasies often are. In reality, no cars were anywhere near the point of being produced. But there were grand plans. The first massive hall of the factory would be ready by the end of 1939, and two further equally large halls were supposed to be added in the following three years. Just the first section alone was designed to be larger than any other car factory of the time. According to the plan, a hundred thousand vehicles were to be produced before the end of 1940, and then two hundred thousand more in 1941. This would need a workforce of more than seventeen thousand men each working two shifts. By the final phase, thirty thousand workers would be making close to one million Volkswagens each year. As there were nowhere near enough customers in Germany to sustain such a plan, Hitler expected to export more than half of those cars (which, in large part, meant he expected to sell them in the countries he was preparing to conquer).

All that was an elaborate dream, however. The reality of 1939 was that The Town of the Strength through Joy Car was still a pasture with one giant brick building rising out of it and none of the necessary manpower to run such a plant. For that reason, training camps for German workers were set up in the nearby town of Brunswick instead, and recruitment began. As it was hard to find German workers to come and build the town—Germany had full employment now—Italy’s leader Mussolini sent three thousand Italians over to join the German workers
and help build the factory; they were housed in makeshift wooden barracks. Overseen by Ley’s Nazi forces, they swarmed toward the canal each morning and back again each night. The popular German magazine
Der Spiegel
reported that “Chianti bottle and dagger ruled”
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alongside the “crocodile whip in the wooden watchtower of the SS.” There was also talk of all the babies of “Mussolini’s unemployed” that soon began to appear in women’s arms along nearby German streets.

Needless to say, the Volkswagen project had turned into an extravagant enterprise. The scale of the project would have been impossible for any other car company in Europe, but even for the German government it was not an easy task. By the end of 1939, the plant had already cost 215 million RM, and only eighty percent of the first section was complete. For that reason, Robert Ley came up with another way of getting immediate funds—the Strength through Joy Car Savings Book Plan. Perhaps drawing on ideas from the United States first initiated by General Motors and their installment plans, the Volkswagen Savings Book Plan was a noncancelable and nontransferable contract with the German government. It was created, Ley said, to help Germans save their money
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for the purchase of a car: The people would pay about $2 a week (5 RM). For every such payment, they were given a stamp to place in their booklet. Once that booklet was full of stamps, the customers could come to the factory and receive their car.

The idea was drenched in expectation: There was so much propaganda leading up to its introduction that on the day the stamp books were officially available, long lines snaked around the post offices where the books could be purchased. In practice, however, trying to keep up with the stamps would eventually prove too difficult for most people: the fee of two dollars a week was still beyond their budgets and had to be lowered to two dollars
a month.
That meant a subscriber could expect to have his or her car in about sixteen years! Nonetheless, 253,000 German citizens subscribed to the program before the war broke out. And another 83,000 Germans would sign up even after the
war had begun, pushing a total of 267 million RM into the Nazis’ Strength through Joy Car account.

Once the factory was up and the machines ordered from America were flowing in to fill the rooms, Porsche wanted to be as close as possible while things were gearing up for the production of his car. He found a clearing he liked on the Klieversberg, the hill that is the city’s highest point, and had a lonely little cabin built for himself there, fir trees and wilderness all around. From the back door of this cabin, he could step out and look over the space that would eventually be the town and watch the factory rising in the distance just over the canal. Porsche planted yellow tulips in the cleared area around his house. On their off days, some of the guys liked to hunt in the forests behind Porsche’s hut. Ferdinand often went on those expeditions, but according to a later story told by Ferry, “nothing would induce him to pull the trigger.”
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He’d shot a roebuck once, and that had been the end of it.

By 1939, all the things Porsche had wished for seemed to be coming true. More than $12 million had been spent on testing and perfecting his Volkswagen design, and in the midst of all this, a rounded little car had appeared. It looked plump, to be sure, but in reality there was hardly an extraneous inch of metal or steel to be found on it. The car had been tested and tweaked more than any other single car model in history to that point, and it was now as simple and precise as a Mies van der Rohe chair, its headlights a little larger than most, perhaps, giving it a perpetual look of youth. A majestic factory was being built for it, as was an entire city. For Porsche and his car, things looked good. Few on his team expected that the darkest times were drawing near.

Heinrich Nordhoff, however, was much less excited about the way things were going in his country, and even less enthusiastic by Ferdinand Porsche’s fat little car. He’d set foot in one of them only one time—a friend of his from the RDA had once picked him up from the train station in the little car—but he had not been impressed. The whole idea of the car and its factory
and town seemed ridiculous to him. In fact, there were a lot of things in Germany that were beginning to feel ridiculous to him. And he wasn’t the only one thinking in such a way. In 1939, not long after the redbrick factory in Wolfsburg had begun to rise, Nordhoff took what would be his last visit to the United States for Opel, though he would never have suspected such a thing at the time. Still, he did feel trouble was coming. Walking through the General Motors plant in Detroit, another colleague would later remember how Heinrich took a long and pensive look at the humming machines and lines of metal and steel, and then wondered aloud if all those machines might soon be working against Germany in a war.

By that time, Nordhoff was the father of two little girls, Barbara and Elisabeth, and perhaps he was also thinking of them as he looked at the machines and considered the possibility of war. After all, he’d been standing in just that same town when he’d received the call telling him that his second daughter, Barbara, had been born. Even for Nordhoff, it was hard to believe that only twenty years after the First World War—a war he’d fought in as a boy—the world was already gearing up for a second one. Few in Germany thought it was coming, and even fewer thought
it would last long if it did arrive. Certainly, it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as the last. But Nordhoff could feel the darkness closing in. When he boarded the ship back to his country, there were only a few dozen passengers on the entire ship. No one wanted to go to Germany; it was about to become the enemy again.

It was a celebration
of the first incandescent lightbulb. It was also a tribute to the life of America’s father of electric light, eighty-two-year-old Thomas Edison. All the big men of business were there: philanthropist and Standard Oil heir John D. Rockefeller Jr.; one of the brothers who had experienced the first successful flight, Orville Wright; the first leader to explicitly champion capitalism as an
essential part of democracy, President Hoover;
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banker, industrialist, and current treasury secretary Andrew Mellon; and the man who had changed the economic and geographic face of America by building the world’s first People’s Car, Henry Ford. The event was held in Ford’s hometown—the Edison Institute was being opened there under Ford’s
watch—and a very big deal was made about the meeting of these two men, the work of whom had changed the nation in rapid and extraordinary ways. Reporters of the most prominent newspapers in the country were also invited, as were a slew of photographers. The main man behind the event was Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and the personality who had made public relations into a new field. In 1929, Bernays was hired by Westinghouse and General Electric to coordinate a
nationwide event to mark the lightbulb’s fiftieth anniversary. Bernays called it
Light’s Golden Jubilee.

During the 1920s, electric light had experienced a rise similar to the automotive boom in customers and profits, and while state regulation had played a part in that success,
Light’s Golden Jubilee
was sculpted as a tribute to the innovation of the individual and the private sector. Stories about Thomas Edison were
sent out to the managing editors of newspapers in cities all over the country. Reading about the upcoming national event,
citizens began planning local light celebrations in their own towns. A commemorative stamp was issued. On the day newly elected President Hoover dedicated the Edison Institute in Dearborn, Michigan, there was a “moment of silence” as utility companies all shut off their power at the same time in Edison’s honor. The event set a new bar for public relations, showing that mass communication could be joined with the interests of big business and used to unite the
country in a feeling of celebration, joy, and respect. It was a crowning moment for the power of the free market and for all the important businessmen gathered there, but in the midst of the celebration, news began trickling in from Wall Street that something was wrong.
Light’s Golden Jubilee
ended on October 21, 1929. Just a little over a week later, on October 29, the stock market crashed. Men like Ford and Edison had created a new industrial wave in the United
States and the social and economic wake from it would be rough.