Ferdinand Porsche – A Dark History Documentary

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#Biography #History #Documentary

The man known to history as Ferdinand Porsche was born on the 3rd of September 1875 in the town of Maffersdorf in the Bohemia region of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but which is now Vratislavice nad Nisou in the Czech Republic. In 1875 Maffersdorf lay just ten kilometres from the border of the recently established German Empire and Germany was the country which young Ferdinand would become most closely connected to as his life progressed. His father was Anton Porsche, a prosperous tinsmith who employed two dozen people at the height of his business success, supplying metal goods and plumbing equipment to the townspeople and local region at a time when there was a high demand for such products as Germany entered the Second Industrial Revolution, an era in which homes were electrified for the first time and new household appliances like the first primitive washing machines appeared. The Porsche family were Roman Catholics whose origins can be traced back in the Maffersdorf region to the 1670s, when the name had probably evolved from ‘Borso’, a version of the given name ‘Borislav’. Ferdinand’s mother was Anna Porsche, née Ehrlich. She and Anton had married in 1871. Ferdinand was the third in a quick succession of children, Anton Jnr. and Hedwig having been born before him. Another son and daughter, Oscar and Anna, arrived after Ferdinand. While child mortality levels had declined dramatically over the past century owing to new innovations in the management of childbirth, natal care, and through the introduction of vaccines for smallpox and other deadly ailments, Anton Jnr. sadly died young nevertheless as a result of an accident in his father’s workshop. In part because of this, young Ferdinand began training under his father from a young age as the next in line to succeed him as the owner of the family business. The years that Porsche grew up in were exciting ones for any person interested in engineering, transportation and technological innovation. The First Industrial Revolution had begun in Britain back in the 1770s, and had mostly centred on the revolutionising of the textile industry, with factories emerging in which cotton was spun to make cheap clothes, or to produce linen from flax, but in terms of the emergence of modern society, the Second Industrial Revolution that began around 1870 and continued through to the early twentieth century was much more significant. Electrification, home appliances and many other things emerged at this time. Transport was another sphere in which incredible changes were occurring. The railways and the steamships had been developed between the 1820s and 1840s as a way of using the steam engine to allow people to travel far longer distances in much shorter periods of time. However, these were forms of mass transportation, and it wasn’t until the Second Industrial Revolution that major breakthroughs in personal transportation began. First the bicycle evolved from awkward three and four wheelers to the two-wheeled safety bicycle of the 1880s, but more innovative was the building of steam-powered carriages in the 1860s and 1870s. The real breakthrough came in 1885 when a German engineer called Carl Benz patented a design for a petroleum-fuelled motorcar and began building what are considered to be the first modern automobiles. As a result, as he grew into his teenage years, Porsche would have witnessed some of the first automobiles arriving in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ferdinand’s youth in Maffersdorf reflected this changing world. He grew up receiving a piecemeal education in the local school. More important for his future path was the informal education he received working in his father’s workshop, though his relationship with Anton was a difficult one, the head of the Porsche household being a domineering and uncompromising character. In 1886, when Ferdinand was eleven years old, electricity arrived in Maffersdorf, piped in by the Austrian government so that the large textile factory, which employed upwards of one-third of the townspeople, could benefit from it. Ferdinand peppered the workmen who came to install the grid with questions. Months later he developed a small battery circuit to generate electricity in the attic of the Porsche’s house, though his father was displeased with his son’s interest in a technology which, like all such innovations, bred disquiet for people who feared it would damage their own livelihood. Anton’s reservations were only partially allayed when the Ginzkey Brothers who ran the local textile mill informed him of their son’s skill in wiring electrical components and creating motors some years later. By then Ferdinand had wired the Porsche household to receive electricity from the newly arrived town grid. Seemingly reconciling himself to the fact that Ferdinand would not be following in his footsteps as a panel-beater and tin-worker, Anton began training his other son, Oscar, to take over the family business one day. Ferdinand’s fortunes lay elsewhere. In 1893, when he had just turned 18 years of age, Ferdinand left Maffersdorf and headed for the bright lights of a newly electrified Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Ginzkey Brothers back in Maffersdorf had facilitated him in finding a position as an apprentice working with Bela Egger and Co., an early electrical utility company in the Austrian capital. Here he studied electrical engineering through the mid-1890s, growing his skills as an engineer and also tinkering around with electrical devices in an age of endless innovation in this sphere. However, while his work with the Egger company primarily focused on electrical grids, Porsche’s attention was increasingly drawn to motors and motorised engines as the automobile revolution, which had been sparked by Benz’s innovations in Germany back in the mid-1880s, began to result in a growing number of automobiles on the streets of Vienna. He spent time studying at night at the Vienna University of Technology learning about such things, though he never gained a formal qualification. Meanwhile, by 1897 he had built a wheel-hub motor and incorporated it into an automobile, the principle of which was a motor which was built into the wheel almost like a powered dynamo, the same principle which underlies many modern-day electronic-bikes. In 1898 Porsche was hired by Ludwig Lohner, a pioneering automobile developer in Vienna who had heard about Ferdinand’s skills in developing innovative motor engines through his contacts within the Egger Company. Over the next several years, Porsche would work with Lohner through his father Jacob’s company in Vienna to develop some of the most innovative automobile designs being produced in Europe at the turn of the century. It is very peculiar to think of it from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century and the supposed electric car revolution of our times to learn that most of the automobiles which Porsche and Lohner developed in the late 1890s and into the 1900s were electric vehicles and hybrids. The Lohner-Porsche Mixte automobiles that they produced during these years, of which there were several different models, were generally powered by both a petroleum-fuelled engine which then ignited four electric motors that ran to the wheels of the automobile. In this sense they incorporated the wheel-hub motor design which Porsche had developed himself before he began working with Lohner. This was all symptomatic of how eclectic automobile and motor design was at this time and biofuels and coal-powered steam engines were also being experimented with in various places to power automobiles. The subsequent ubiquity of petroleum-based engines would have surprised individuals like Porsche in 1900. By 1900 the Lohner-Porsche Mixte automobile designs were advanced enough that they began entering them into races and presenting them at expositions. One such race was an endurance trial sponsored by the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland which was held in November 1900, while the same year a model was exhibited at the World Fair in Paris. In 1901 Porsche justified his early interest in electrification and motors when he drove one of his Lohner-Porsche Mixte automobiles back to his hometown of Maffersdorf and showed it off to his childhood friends and parents. These models were relatively fast by comparison with other automobiles of the time, and it was especially noted that they were much quieter than other engines. But Lohner and Porsche had only a limited manufacturing capability and while they sold several hundred models in the early and mid-1900s, they did not scale up extensively. Instead that task was being undertaken by Henry Ford in America, who was pioneering the use of assembly lines to build his Ford Model-T, the first mass-produced automobile that could be purchased by a growing middle class at a relatively affordable price. Although Ford himself had been an advocate of the idea of using biofuels and ethanol to power automobiles early on in his career, eventually the methods he developed in his Detroit plants, along with the growing availability of petroleum from the Middle East after the First World War, and other technical developments, would have a detrimental effect on the taking up of the electric motors which Porsche and Lohner were working on in these years. This was a period in which Porsche also developed an acquaintance with the imperial family. In 1902 military manoeuvres were held in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and vehicles which Porsche designed the engines of were employed. The manoeuvres were attended by Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the empire, and an enthusiast of the new technology who was anxious to drive some of the vehicles. Porsche showed him the ropes and the two were seen to speak animatedly together. As a result of this acquaintance, when Porsche was called up to do a brief stint of training as a reservist in the Austro-Hungarian military, he was given a comfortable posting driving the Archduke around. These were also important years in Ferdinand’s personal life. Back in 1896 he had met Aloisia Johanna Kaes while working in Vienna, who went by ‘Louise’. After what was an unusually long courtship by the standards of the time, they finally married back in Maffersdorf on the 17th of October 1903. A peculiar honeymoon followed, in which they toured Austria, Italy and France so that Porsche could meet with several business contacts and discuss the rapidly changing technologies being used in motorised vehicles. They would have two children. A daughter named Louise was born in August 1904, followed by a son in September 1909. He was named Ferdinand after his father, but would go by ‘Ferry’ throughout his life. By 1906 it had become clear to Lohner that the cars he and Porsche had been working on for several years, although they had been successful from a technical perspective, had failed commercially, particularly so because he and Porsche had expected a large government contract after the successful demonstrations to the Archduke and others in 1902. However, none followed, and from 1906 Lohner began focusing more on the emerging technology of airplanes. This led to Porsche moving to the Austro Daimler firm, an automobile company which had been established in 1899, but which had struggled through the mid-1900s. Although Daimler had excelled in producing an armoured car in 1904, one which could be considered a precursor of the tanks that were subsequently developed during the First World War, the company needed a technical innovator that could produce faster automobiles for the consumer and believed Porsche was the person to lead the company to new heights. New models quickly followed and by the end of the decade some of Porsche’s designs were being raced in a number of speed trials in Central Europe. One of these was the Prinz-Heinrich-Fahrt or Prince Heinrich Tour, a race held in Germany and named after Prince Albert Wilhelm Heinrich of Prussia. It is often viewed as a precursor to the German Grand Prix. One of Porsche’s designs, named the Prince Henry Austro Daimler for the occasion, sped to victory over the 1,200 mile trial. Porsche’s attention to detail was clear in his statement that he had covered all of the nuts used to fasten the exterior panels in order to reduce wind and air resistance and maximise the speed of the car. Daimler had already been involved in the production of military vehicles for the Austro-Hungarian government for several years when Porsche began working for them. This avenue of product development continued after he joined the company and Ferdinand was central to the design and development of a series of artillery ‘tugs’ which Daimler built for the imperial government in the late 1900s. These were essentially a kind of tractor that would be used to pull the heavy artillery guns which were being produced in ever greater numbers across Europe as the continent’s great powers became more and more fractious in their relationships with one another and military alliances developed. There were several kinds of tugs that Porsche played a part in designing for Daimler, running through the M-08 and M-09 artillery in the late 1900s to the larger and more powerful M-11 and M-12 tugs of the early 1910s. The size and power of these was evident in the christening of the M-09 as the ‘Titan’, while the M-12 was named the ‘Hundred’ as it was the first of these tugs with a 100 horsepower engine. Porsche was not just involved in developing automobiles in the 1900s and 1910s. This was also the golden age of the airship. It is hard to remember today, but back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, airships such as those developed by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin were considered to be the future of air travel. Even after the first airplanes were developed in the aftermath of the flight of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk in December 1903, airships were still considered the best way forward in terms of carrying large numbers of passengers or cargo by air. Many countries were looking to incorporate the latest technology into their armies and in 1909 the Austrian Ministry of War began introducing airships into the military. These were called the ‘Parsevals’ after a Prussian Major by the name of August von Parseval who had developed some of the technology used. The Austrian government sub-contracted Daimler to produce the engines and it was Porsche who designed the 70 horsepower, four-cylinder motor that powered these. Airships such as the Parseval were used extensively at the beginning of the First World War, but eventually they were superseded by biplanes as the technology of these advanced rapidly during the conflict after first being used for reconnaissance missions. In the course of the early 1910s a large part of Daimler’s operations, a subsidiary called Wiener-Neustadt, was taken over by Skoda Works, a company which had originally been founded as an arms manufacturer in the Czech part of the Austrian Empire back in the middle of the nineteenth century. Skoda ended up acquiring many of Daimler’s military contracts with the imperial government and Porsche was co-opted into Skoda as an operating executive within the company in 1913 at just 37 years of age, effectively becoming the design leader of a team of 1,000 individuals working with this branch of Skoda. Little could Porsche have suspected when he took the position that Skoda would soon be extremely busy. Just over a year later, the First World War erupted across Europe after Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire whom Porsche had demonstrated his designs to back in 1902, was assassinated in the streets of Sarajevo in the midsummer of 1914, triggering a diplomatic crisis which escalated into war across the continent from late July onwards. As Austria-Hungary and its allies Germany and the Ottoman Empire went to war with Britain, France and Russia, there was suddenly a need for ever more powerful military hardware. Porsche’s early designs for the artillery tugs would be expanded further, eventually resulting in the M-17 artillery tug, nicknamed the ‘Goliath’, a tug which was more like an articulated truck than a tractor, and which was capable of pulling artillery the size of large automobiles to the various fronts the Austrians were fighting on in the Alps and the Balkans. Meanwhile, in 1916, Porsche was given an honorary doctorate in design and engineering from the Vienna University of Technology in recognition of his designs and his work for the government over the years. That same year he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Emperor Franz Josef for his service to the Austro-Hungarian state during the war. Porsche’s military hardware and armoured vehicles ultimately could not prevent the Austro-Hungarian Empire from being defeated in the First World War and in the autumn of 1918 its empire began to collapse and fragment as revolutions broke out in regions such as Ferdinand’s native Bohemia and in Hungary, where a communist regime briefly came to power, employing Porsche-designed vehicles that they had captured from the government in some cases. As imperial authority collapsed, so too did the military contracts which it had issued and Porsche spent the late 1910s trying to keep the factory he managed for the Wiener-Neustadt subsidiary afloat and his workers and their families supported. It was a difficult period, for Porsche and for a great many people throughout Central Europe, as the end of the war simply ushered in a period in which civil war and social chaos followed. Porsche maintained his employment by recommencing car manufacturing with Daimler, but by the early 1920s, he was experiencing problems with the management of the company and these creative differences led to him looking further afield. His eyes soon turned to Germany, which after years of disorder, unemployment and hyperinflation managed to begin a pronounced period of economic growth from 1923 onwards. The opportunity for Porsche to relocate to Germany came about in 1922, when Paul Daimler, whom Porsche had succeeded as director of the factory at Wiener-Neustadt years earlier, quit his position as chief engineer at the Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft in the city of Stuttgart in Germany. Porsche was soon contacted and for the second time succeeded Daimler in a position when he and his family relocated to Stuttgart. He hadn’t been there long when Daimler entered into a protracted negotiation with the Benz automotive company which eventually resulted in a merger in 1926 to become Daimler-Benz. Porsche was responsible for overseeing the merging of the engineering departments at Daimler’s Stuttgart facility and Benz’s plant at Mannheim. It was a complex operation, but one he managed with what had become his trademark directness. Ferdinand was known for simply telling staff if something wasn’t good, with little effort made by him to spare their feelings, but when he saw something he liked he also didn’t attempt to co-opt it and would give credit where it was due. Despite his efforts in managing the merger between Daimler and Benz he was soon out of a job himself. In November 1928, after a board meeting in which he defended his department’s escalating operating costs on the basis that they had revolutionised Daimler-Benz’s motor department, devising new engines and models for not just cars, but also trucks and even on submarine contracts, the board decided that Porsche’s services were no longer needed. He was let go in what looks retrospectively like a blatant act of intellectual property theft, as Daimler-Benz would continue to make most of its profits for years to come from Porsche’s designs. Porsche was entering his mid-fifties when he was let go from Daimler-Benz at the end of 1928. He was a successful figure who had earned a lot of money over the years and under normal circumstances could have considered retiring at this juncture. But his mind was too restless and he also had a lot of overheads, having become accustomed to living an expensive lifestyle since his days with Daimler and Skoda back in Austria. For a time he took up a position with a small auto-manufacturer, Steyr-Werke AG, back in Austria, developing the Type XXX Steyr model in the course of 1929, a car whose engine became the basis of every Steyr car manufactured in the 1930s. Then he was let go again, just one year into a three year contract. In this particular instance, the directors at Steyr were able to point towards the Wall Street Crash and the horrendous economic environment of the Great Depression that followed it as their reason for letting him go, but Porsche was clearly frustrated, telling his son Ferry around this time that companies kept hiring him for a few years and then letting him go, only to live off of his designs for a decade afterwards. He now sought to break the link and in 1930, despite the poor economic environment, began setting up his own engineering studio and practice, one which would produce designs on a freelance basis for the large automotive makers and for the government. Getting one back on his former employers, he poached some of his most promising and accomplished engineers from Daimler-Benz and Steyr to come work for him. While Ferdinand was making headway in setting up his own company, his career would gain an enormous lease of life in the mid-1930s owing to the changing political environment within Germany. As the Great Depression had continued, Germany had been harder hit than most other European countries, a result of its crippling war indemnities payments from the First World War and many macro-economic circumstances within Germany itself. Porsche was far from the only person who lost their job and in the course of the early 1930s the country’s political landscape shifted enormously, with support for the centrist political establishment evaporating and more left and right wing groups such as the German communists and the Nazis ballooning upwards. New support for the Nazis was particularly extreme, with them rising from being a political non-entity that garnered less than 3% of the vote outside of their stronghold in Bavaria in the 1920s, to suddenly becoming the largest party in Germany during Reichstag elections in 1932. With between one-third and two-fifths of Germans voting for them, the political and business establishment could not resist calls for the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, to be appointed as German chancellor early in 1933. As soon as he entered that office he and the Nazis transformed Germany into a one-party dictatorship. The Nazis had as one of their key goals the lifting of Germany out of the Great Depression and also the creation of a vibrant, prosperous middle class of ethnically German people. One element of this would be the building of new roads across Germany and the expansion of car-ownership. Hence Ferdinand Porsche would find himself moving in Nazi political circles before long. Porsche would eventually work on a wide array of government contracts for the Nazis, ones which reflected his mixed background as both a car designer and someone who had produced military vehicles during the First World War. His first involvement with Hitler and the Nazi regime was when he was issued a contract to design the new Volkswagen, meaning ‘People’s Car’. Only one out of every fifty or so Germans owned a car by the early 1930s and the Volkswagen project sought to alter this. The idea behind this was to mass produce a car that could be purchased for just under one-thousand Reichsmarks, or a sum equivalent to about 400 US dollars at that time. This ultimately proved to be too low a price to ever be achieved without state subventions, but Porsche’s design was successful and he began working with the German Labour Front to put the model into production as part of the Strength Through Joy program, an initiative begun by the Nazis to foster an ideological form of social life across Germany, one that had disparate elements that ranged from organising swimming lessons in local communities to encouraging car ownership amongst middle class Germans. The Volkswagen would have a lasting impact on the German car industry, though the number of cars ever built in the 1930s was limited as factories were turned over to making war machinery just as they were scaling up to mass produce the Volkswagen in the late 1930s. The issuance of the government contract for designing the Volkswagen was not Ferdinand Porsche’s first interaction with Adolf Hitler. They had met very briefly in the summer of 1926 at the inaugural German Grand Prix, where a Mercedes car that Porsche had helped design had won the race. Anxious to curry favour with him, Porsche had sent a telegram to Hitler in February 1933, just days after he became German Chancellor, congratulating him on his appointment and hoping that the new head of state would continue to support the motor industry. The pair had certain things in common. Both were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but had risen to positions of esteem within German society. It was the beginning of a close relationship. Hitler favoured Porsche as a paragon of German design and industrial prowess, while for his part Porsche made every effort to conform to the regime. In 1934 on Hitler’s advice he applied for and received German citizenship, superseding his Czech nationality, although ethnically he was a German Czech. Three years later he joined the Nazi Party, though by then there were over five and a half million official party members and it had become more of a prerequisite for being at the peak of German economic life than any particular sign of one’s ideological stance. Much more controversial was his membership of the SS, the paramilitary wing of the Nazis which would eventually administer the concentration camp system across Europe. Porsche would gain the rank of Oberfuhrer, a kind of lieutenant in the SS, in the early 1940s. His legacy is tainted by his associations with the Nazi regime, which, as we will soon see, became worse over time. Similarly, the Porsche family can be accused of being more than innocent bystanders in the Anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime. Back in 1930 when he set up the Porsche consultancy, Porsche had gone into business with his son-in-law, Dr Anton Piech, a lawyer who managed the company, and also Adolf Rosenberger, a Jewish race driver turned automotive businessman who provided a significant chunk of the capital that was used to get the firm established. In 1935 Ferdinand and his son Ferry, the latter of whom was now in his mid-twenties and anxious to join the family business, took advantage of the notably more hostile environment for Jewish people in Germany to force Rosenberger out of the company he had helped to found, with Rosenberger’s shares being apportioned to Ferry Porsche after he chose to leave Germany altogether, eventually settling in the United States. Later, in 1976, Ferry Porsche would publish an autobiography in which he presented a highly skewed version of Rosenberger’s departure from the company which obfuscated the manner in which the Porsche family took advantage of the Anti-Semitism of the regime for their own benefit. Much of the mid-1930s was spent by Porsche working on various elements of the design of the Volkswagen. One of the key stipulations imposed by Hitler was that the Volkswagen should be built for the average German family and so it should be able to transport two adults and three children comfortably and be able to hit a speed of 100 kilometres per hour while doing so. Many mass produced cars of the 1910s and 1920s had effectively been two-seaters with a soft retractable roof and travelled significantly slower. As such, the design problem for Porsche in the mid-1930s was to produce an engine that was powerful enough to be able to carry the weight of five people, as well as the weight of the full bodied car itself, while being able to travel at a comparatively high speed without the engine overheating. In order to achieve this he and his team spent much of the mid-1930s experimenting with different types of coolant. Eventually the design solution that was arrived at was to install an air-cooled engine, rather than using any type of liquid. Porsche had experimented with this in various designs since the 1910s, but the Volkswagen air-cooled engine represented the most advanced form of such engine that he designed. It would also be placed in the rear of the car, rather than the front, thus beginning Volkswagen’s long history of rear engines. The design was finished by 1938 and was ready to go into mass production thereafter. Porsche largely arrived at the design himself, though it did mimic some of the elements used by the Tatra car company in Czechoslovakia. A patent dispute followed, one which was conveniently dismissed when the Nazis invaded and annexed Czechoslovakia in March 1939, although Volkswagen reached a settlement with Tatra years later after the Second World War had ended. The Volkswagen models, of which the distinctive looking Volkswagen Beetle was one of the main designs, was to go into mass production from 1938 onwards at a new manufacturing plant which was established by the government and overseen by Porsche in north-central Germany. The site was known as Fallersleben at the time, but it is more commonly called Wolfsburg today. Today Wolfsburg is a small city of approximately 125,000 people, but it was virtually non-existent as an urban centre prior to 1938. It was a planned town developed solely for the purposes of building the new Volkswagen in Porsche’s factories here. There is no greater indictment of Porsche’s role in the Nazi regime than a picture that was taken in May 1938 as the cornerstone of the site was being laid down, with Porsche standing next to Hitler, flanked by two dozen or so Nazi and SS officers, their swastika armbands in clear view. The full name of the city as established was ‘The City of Strength through Joy car at Fallersleben’. Thousands of people were soon living here as hundreds of workers began working in the factories, with hundreds of others, plus their families, working in the shops and other service sectors which sprang up around Wolfsburg almost overnight in 1938 and 1939. Ironically, after all the preparations, and the establishment of a planned town to build it, very few Volkswagen Beetles or other Volkswagen cars were ever produced here during the Nazi era, as the factories were soon repurposed to produce military vehicles and hardware. Wolfsburg though has remained the centre of Volkswagen’s operations down to the present day and is home to the world’s largest car manufacturing facilities today. The plant facilities at Wolfsburg were influenced by American methods. In 1936 Porsche and a small group of his colleagues and employees from Stuttgart visited the United States. Their main destination was Detroit, the home then, as now, of the American automotive industry. Ferdinand’s primary concern was to visit Ford’s factories and see how they operated, though he also consulted with Chrysler. His main goal in doing so wasn’t to see what cars they were designing, though doubtlessly this would have interested him. Instead Porsche’s primary interest lay in viewing the operations of the factories and the manner in which Henry Ford had revolutionised production through not only his assembly lines but the entire management of his staff. Ford’s success had not been based on a race to the bottom where his staff were paid the bare minimum, but instead rested on paying them an above market value wage which engendered the loyalty and hard work of his staff. These and other features of the Ford ethos were observed by Porsche and some of what he noted was later applied in his design offices in Stuttgart and the factories in Wolfsburg and elsewhere in Germany. He also took the opportunity to poach some of the engineers who worked at Ford. One of these was Joseph Werner, a German-American who Porsche was particularly keen to bring over to his team in order to advise back in Stuttgart on how to scale up production so as to mass-produce the Volkswagen on the scale that the Model-T had been produced in Detroit over the last quarter of a century. Photos from the time reveal that by the late 1930s Porsche’s design offices in Stuttgart had become a jungle of design boards and sketch easels showing potential models for Volkswagens and other vehicles. Added to the mix after a certain period of time were models for the Auto Union cars. These were racing cars that Porsche was involved in designing for the Auto Union motor company headed by Baron Detlof von Oertzen, a major player in the German automotive industry, though one who needed to rely on Porsche’s connections to the Nazi regime to gain funding for his ideas. The goal of von Oertzen and Porsche from the mid-1930s onwards in developing a series of racing cars known as the P-Wagen cars was to try and overtake the French and Italian companies such as Bugatti, Maserati and Alfa Romeo that dominated European motor racing in the interwar period. The P-Wagen soon joined new models being built by Mercedes-Benz, collectively termed the Silver Arrows on account of their silvery-grey shells and pointed, arrow-like look, in becoming the dominant racing cars in Europe between 1934 and 1939, as Porsche’s innovations allowed the Germans to outpace their Italian and French rivals. Porsche also began work during this period on the Porsche 64. This was a prototype car which was a combination of both a speedy racing car, yet one which unlike the Auto Union vehicles could be driven as an everyday car on German roads. In essence, it was an early version of what would now be termed a sports-car. It was an eclectic design, one in which Ferdinand incorporated certain elements taken from the VW38 and other cars and vehicles he had designed over the years. The outer casing was closed with a hard roofing, something which was fairly novel still in the 1930s after two decades of flat-top, retractable hoods on cars like the early Model-T Fords. The engine used for this was ramped up from the VW engine to achieve a horsepower between 32 and 40, a significant improvement on most engines for cars in those days. However, only three models of the Porsche 64 were ever made, as war interrupted Porsche’s plans. The Porsche 64 is regarded as the prototype for the earliest Porsche cars to enter mass production after the war. One of the three models was used by Allied troops to joyride around Germany for a few weeks in the summer of 1945. Another, the sole remaining one of the three models, was on sale in the US in 2019 with an asking price of 19 million dollars. The Porsche 64 was not alone in being shelved. Many of the designs which Ferdinand had made in the 1930s would never enter mass production. This had nothing to do with the designs of his cars themselves, but rather was connected to wider developments in Germany and Europe. As is well-known, the Nazis had come to power with a clear desire to reverse what was perceived as the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles that had brought the First World War to an end. Hitler quickly began remilitarising Germany and so sluggish were Britain and France in responding to the threat of German rearmament that in 1938 and early 1939 the Nazis pushed forward their war plans and annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia in just over a year. Without firing a shot the Nazis became the masters of Central Europe, but when they invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany in response. All of this had implications for the German economy, as factories were repurposed to support the war effort. Car factories such as those run by Ferdinand Porsche were soon used to produce tanks, armoured vehicles and other war materiel. This process would only intensify from 1941 onwards after the German invasion of the Soviet Union that summer led to the inception of the total war economy back home in Germany. The German invasion of Poland and the inevitable outbreak of a wider European war which followed saw Porsche returning to activity he had been heavily involved in with the Austrian imperial government a quarter of a century earlier, as his engineering skills were repurposed to focus on producing armoured vehicles. A good example was when Hitler’s government asked both Porsche and a rival, the Henschel and Son Co., the latter of which is usually more associated with German warplanes, but which was also involved in armaments and vehicle production, to submit designs for a new tank. Porsche’s design resulted in the VK45.01(P) or Porsche Tiger Tank. The specifications were that this needed to be a heavy tank which could carry an 88 millimetre tank gun and so needed to be roughly 45 tons in weight. This was an extremely heavy vehicle, but one which also needed to be able to travel relatively fast by the standards of a heavy tank. Porsche’s design was innovative again in that it was a hybrid gasoline-electric tank. This latter element was introducing electric engines to a design that had never been used to propel such a heavy vehicle and, perhaps not entirely unexpectedly, there were numerous development problems which led to Henschel and Son’s design being chosen over Porsche’s to become the Tiger tank used by the Nazis towards the end of the war. It’s notable all the same that in the early 1940s Porsche was able to produce a working design for a hybrid tank. While the VK45.01(P) was not selected by the government for mass production, another of Porsche’s models was. This was the Elefant heavy tank destroyer, a tank fitted with a very large anti-tank gun. This enormous machine weighed some 65 tons. Several dozen were built and they were employed at the Battle of Kursk on the Eastern Front against the Soviets, the largest tank battle in history. Thereafter modifications were made and the resulting units became known euphemistically as the ‘Ferdinand’ after Porsche himself. Beyond designing tanks, the enormous factory at Wolfsburg, when it was finally completed in 1940, began manufacturing parts for all aspects of the German military, notably the production of component parts for the Junkers Ju 88, a multi-purpose aircraft used for bombing and transport missions. Repairs were carried out here too. And there were other activities which Porsche engaged in as well as part of the Nazi regime. In 1941, as part of the expected German conquest of Eastern Europe and the colonisation of the Lebensraum or ‘living space’ there by German settlers once the Soviet Union was defeated, the Wind Power Research Company was issued with a government contract to develop wind turbines that would be ideal sources of energy on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. Porsche was involved in designing the motors for the turbines working on a hill near Stuttgart. Porsche was already well and truly tainted by his associations with the Nazi regime by the early 1940s. For instance, to add to his being a party member and a member of the SS already, in September 1938 he was awarded the National Prize, the highest civilian honour given out by the Nazis, at their annual rally at Nuremburg. Still, the worst element of his complicity in the regime’s crimes came from 1940 onwards following the full opening of the Wolfsburg plant, as slave labourers were increasingly employed to manufacture goods there. The Nazis racial hierarchy dictated that Slavic people such as the Poles and Czechs were to be utilised primarily as slave labourers, while those who were found guilty of relatively minor crimes against the occupation government in places like France and the Netherlands also often ended up working in factories in Germany during the war. Although the Porsche company has been reticent about investigating the full extent of this, once claiming that no more than 50 slave labourers passed through Ferdinand Porsche’s factories during the war, it now seems that approximately 300 slave labourers from various parts of occupied Europe were involved, particularly so in 1944 when the number of slave labourers in German factories and other parts of the German economy exceeded two million. The increasing resort to slave labour in German industrial factories like those operated by Ferdinand Porsche was in many ways a sign of the desperation of the Nazi regime by 1943 and 1944. The result of the Second World War was, with the benefit of hindsight, sealed in the space of a few weeks in the early winter of 1941, as first the Germans failed to capture Moscow and Leningrad before the Russian winter set in, and then the Empire of Japan attacked the United States, bringing the great power of the New World to the rescue of the Old. 1942 saw intense fighting on many fronts, but by the spring of 1943 matters had shifted irreversibly, with the Allies about to bring the North Africa campaign to an end, the Japanese onslaught turned back with victories like the Battle of Midway for the US and Russian victory over the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad. In the course of 1944 and early 1945 the planned thousand-year German Reich was conquered by the Allies and the war came to an end in Europe early in May 1945. Porsche, like so many other Nazi scientists, was in high demand once the conflict came to an end and in the course of late 1945 and early 1946 he came to an agreement with the French carmaker, Renault, a company which he had done consultancy work for during the Nazi occupation of France between 1940 and 1944, for him to undertake similar work for the company in the post-war period. Porsche’s situation was somewhat unusual in these months, as he had been arrested in the Baden region of western Germany on the 15th of December 1945 on account of his wartime activities and associations with the Nazi regime. As such, his consultancy work with Renault was being undertaken during a period when he was technically a prisoner working under duress and awaiting trial. Later the Porsche family would argue that the charges against Ferdinand were trumped up in order to force him to divulge his engineering skills and designs to Renault. For a period of a year and a half he was shuttled between house arrest around Paris to Renault factories and offices. It was May 1947, seventeen months after his arrest, when the charges were finally heard, and testimony was offered. When this occurred, it soon became clear that the German armaments minister, Albert Speer, had appointed Nazi overseers to manage the slave labour at Porsche’s factories during the war. Hence, despite the dubious ethics of it all, the judges quickly decided that Porsche had not been responsible for the use of enforced labour in the factories and had little choice but to conform to the regime’s demands. He was released from his detention in October 1947, though full pardon would take time as the de-Nazification process continued in Germany. While Porsche was in France in the immediate aftermath of the war, the Allies were reshaping what was left of the German economy, the goal being to make sure that Germany was allowed to recover successfully in a way which had not occurred after the First World War. In the process it was hoped that a reformed Germany would emerge and a future conflict could be avoided. As part of this process, the German automotive industry was reorganised and West Germany would develop, much like the Japanese automotive industry, as one of the most successful car-manufacturing nations in the second half of the twentieth century. The bulk of the Volkswagen factories were in western Germany in the occupation zone of the British, Americans and French and the Western Allies soon brought them back into production, with the British military placing an order for tens of thousands of cars by the end of 1945. Thus, Volkswagen survived the war and quickly emerged as a major German car manufacturer. The Auto Union factories were located in eastern Germany and their factories were shut down in 1945 and largely dismantled by the Soviets, who decided on a more punitive approach. The company did not die though. It soon re-emerged with a new operation in the city of Ingolstadt in southern Germany, rebranding as Audi in the 1960s. Thus, the businesses which Porsche was involved with under the Nazi regime became major players in the German car industry after the Second World War. Ferdinand would not be involved with Volkswagen or Audi in any significant way after the war. Instead, after his time in France as an enforced consultant to Renault and once it became clear he would not be further prosecuted for his wartime activity, he headed home to Stuttgart. By then he was an aging man, into his early seventies, and the baton was passed to his son Ferry. Back in 1944, the Porsches had been granted property in the town of Gmund in the Carinthia region of Austria for them to work from in order to avoid the disruptions which were growing in Stuttgart as Allied bombing of German industrial cities increased exponentially. Ferry returned here after the war and began work on a new Porsche car, in part because the Allies had prohibited him from recommencing work at Stuttgart. It was here in a fairly rural region of Lower Austria that Ferry largely hand-built the first Porsche 356, the car that would launch the Porsche elite car brand. It was completed according to plans Ferdinand had drawn up years earlier and partly realised in the model for the Porsche 64, while also incorporating Volkswagen parts designed by Ferry’s father in the 1930s. He also travelled to Gmund to inspect his son’s work, so while Ferry manufactured the first Porsche car, it was very much Ferdinand’s legacy. Ferdinand spent his last years largely living in Stuttgart. In 1950 he was allowed to visit the Wolfsburg plant with Ferry, where the Volkswagen Beetle was entering mass production as the West German economy made significant strides in the post-war years. Ferdinand was offered some consultancy work with Volkswagen and he was granted a small royalty on sales of the Volkswagen Beetle in recognition of his role in designing the engine and other aspects of the vehicle. Just weeks after his visit to Wolfsburg he suffered a major stroke, late in 1950. He never fully recovered and was left partially paralysed by the incident. Confined to a bed in Stuttgart he died in hospital there on the morning of the 30th of January 1951 at 75 years of age. His views on the Nazi regime were extremely problematic to the very end, claiming that Hitler had not known about the concentration camps and the Holocaust and on the few occasions in which he discussed the war seeming to suggest that he had contributed to the goal of building a Greater Germany. At the time of his death, it was debateable whether the company which Ferdinand Porsche had founded would survive in any fashion going forward, such was the fluid state of the German automotive industry in the years immediately following the war. However, it soon became clear that it would survive and flourish. In 1952 a new version of the Porsche 356 was launched, one which became commercially successful. Then in the mid-1950s, Max Hoffman, a luxury automobile importer, agreed a contract to open the American market to Porsche automobiles. Various improved models of the 356 boosted sales throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, making Porsche a well-established manufacturer of high-end cars. By the early 1970s, Ferdinand’s son, Ferry Porsche, was moving towards making the company a public limited operation as it had outgrown being a family business. Much of this success was as a manufacturer of sports-cars, of which the Porsche 911, first introduced in 1964, would become the greatest, selling over one million and coming in at fifth on an authoritative list of the most iconic cars of the twentieth century. Porsche is a major player in the European automotive industry today and matters have come full circle in a way, with Porsche having formed a working partnership with Volkswagen in 2009, one which counts Audi as a subsidiary. The Volkswagen Beetle remains the most successful car that Ferdinand Porsche was involved in the development of, having become the first automobile in history of which twenty million units were sold. Ferdinand Porsche left behind a complex legacy. There is no doubting that he was one of the most original and accomplished engineers of the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning in his twenties while working in Vienna he began introducing ground-breaking designs in the manufacture of automobiles, with his hybrid and electrical vehicles being almost a century ahead of their time. If his designs had entered mass usage, the automotive industry would have taken on a very different shape in the twentieth century, with all the associated differences for the environment and even geopolitics in terms of the reduced reliance on petroleum which would have ensued for western nations. He was also an incredible innovator when it came to heavy machinery, airships and airplane engines, while in the 1930s he pioneered innovations in engine design which would shape the European car industry down to the end of the twentieth century. Yet there is no denying that his legacy was poisoned through his associations with the Nazis and his use of slave labour in his factories during the Second World War. In this respect he was one of a long list of German engineers and businesspeople which included the likes of Wernher von Braun whose ties to the Nazis have poisoned their legacies in many ways. These individuals might have claimed after the war that they had little option but to conform to the regime and that somebody else would simply have taken their place if they did not work with the Nazis, but in all instances a desire for personal success skewed their moral compass. Porsche was a great designer, but a flawed human. What do you think of Ferdinand Porsche? Was he simply a car manufacturer caught up in a war or should he be judged harshly for his complicity with the Nazi regime? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.