Date: Fri, 25 Dec 2009 16:14:08 -0800
Reply-To: Zoltan <thewestyman@GMAIL.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Zoltan <thewestyman@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: VW History - revival
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I'm not sure how many of you know about what happened to the VW factory after WW II.
The factory was bombed to pieces just as the whole Germany.
When the victors were estimating the worth of the remains of the country in attempt to give it back to the Germans for the equivalent value of a "loan", the VW factory was declared worthless and more of a liability.
The loan was actually not a loan to Germany, but a certain amount of payment to the victors to have their country back for themselves, the value what the country was worth at that time. The Germans paid it off in about thirty years or more. They also received a real loan in dollars from the Trumann adm. to rebuild the country. Which they also repaid in time.
The VW factory was very badly damaged. It used to be a new factory where they only made about two thousand vehicles only. The building, the machines almost destroyed beyond repair and had to be fixed and it took a long time. The solders coming back from the battlefields, thin and hungry, found their homes destroyed, their families killed or missing. They lived in the factory after they fixed some of the roofs. Slowly they started to put some cars together and exchanged them for potatoes, onions, corn and meat, sausages, pickled fish and all kind of food they could find for them. There were no fridges yet. The machines were fixed well enough to press out the parts, cast the crankshafts and the blocks, grinding and honing the parts, etc. Many of the engineers and top workers were killed in the war. Ferdinand Porsche was put in prison for years but the VW got a manager from the victors who was dedicated to bring back VW to as high as possible, and he did.
The workers rebuilt their houses. In Europe it was customary for a big company to buy a large area of land and build houses with gardens for their workers to have them stay with the company for a long time. Thousands of them. They looked the same, they were one room and a kitchen only but anyone could make it bigger. The toilet was outside and not flush in those days yet.
It took a long time for them to rebuild the factory to acceptable condition and have all the machinery working to it's highest standard.
But the quality was the same as anytime before. The sole of the workers were poured into the product. For a long time they did not received any payment. They were glad to be alive.
A buyer had to pay in advance in full for the car and could only get it when VW sent them a letter that his car is ready for being picked up. Buyers had to come to the factory and take delivery of their cars. They arrived by train and drove away home in their first car. A new car. A German made car. Very few people had cars those days. Even bicycles were very few.
The whole country was busy shovelling the rubbles onto trucks that took them out of town and that's how the little hills got created next to towns, that eventually got grown over with weed and did not look like broken bricks anymore. Berlin has several of them. Some of them got housing built in them already, with view.
The rest of the history of VW we are more familiar with. They improved, got advanced, modernized, a new generation put it to the top of the car making world eventually.
Today, there is a big building on the most famous road in Berlin, very close to the Brandenburg Gate, which is the most recognizable landmark in Germany, where they show all the cars they make, together with all the other ones that the companies they bought make, like Bugatti and a Rolls Royce product, Skoda, Seat of Spain, etc.
Some of you may add to this more details I did not mention. I only tried to write down in a nutshell how it started up again.
Merry Christmas 2009.
Zoltan
I'm glad to be one of you.
