I hate that VW became the Nazi car when it was really a way to scam people, and BMW and Mercedes get a pass despite making war machines the whole damn time.
Don’t ask about Porsche, Opel, Bayer, Adidas… basically any German company that existed in that period.
With one honourable exception: Leitz, who made Leica cameras. A privately held company, they hired German Jews and immediately posted them abroad as “sales representatives”, delivering them to safety. This was explicitly on the orders of the Leitz family, who also insisted on keeping the programme secret even after the war rather than claiming credit.
Hugo Boss designed all those cute uniforms.
Now we have Florsheim and WTF these are…
I used to work for a German chemical manufacturer. One of the things they highlighted in their history is that in the lead up to WW2 they moved their headquarters and German factories to the UK and started making aircraft paint for the RAF. Overall they were a good company to work for.
What’s the name? I want to read about that kind of organization.
To be fair, the BMW museum in Munich has an entire section on their participation, and atrocities and an apology for it.
VW were also building V-1 bombs.
The machinery paid for with money scammed from people who thought they were buying VWs built V-1s.
A British officer was actually the one to get the factory to start making cars.
Say what? Who did they scam?
The German people. They had coupon books where you could save up for a car or a vacation but used all that money to build factories to build war materiel. They never actually built a single consumer car.
Damn. Nazis gonna grift, I guess.
Yeah. The current crop of fascists would be proud. I got the same sort of vibe when I was asked to create a “Trump account” for my kid when I was doing my taxes.
Have you seen the plastic parts in BMW or Mercedes now? Even Maybachs are fragile shit. VW really hasn’t kept up scamming with it’s brothers.
Dieselgate was a pretty big scam. Though they bought back my old car for the original purchase price so I’m not mad.
Behind the Bastards has a really good episode on Volkswagen. I might have some of the details wrong, but the German government was subsidizing them for a while with the dream of having every citizen driving a Volkswagen. After the war they ended up getting involved in slave operated meat farms in Brazil.
Behind the Bastards has a really good episode on Volkswagen. I might have some of the details wrong, but the German government was subsidizing them for a while with the dream of having every citizen driving a Volkswagen.
Correct! The Nazi government tried to push a payment plan onto people, even. The people who paid into the
scamfundraising effort but did not receive a car (ie all of them, as no cars were actually delivered) eventually sued after the war to get some small percentage of their money back.They were never delivered?? I was familiar with the story but no one had ever mentioned that before, that seems pretty fuckin important 😅
Explanation: The car manufacturer Volkswagen has its origins as a Nazi initiative.
… they are generally not very proud of these origins, and prefer to emphasize their post-war revival by occupying Allied powers.
It (volkswagen lower case) was part of the government prior and during the war.
It (Volkswagen, the company, upper case) only came into existence after the war. Not a single person involved in the first was involved in the latter.
It would be wrong to ignore the Nazi connection to the design of the Beetle. But it’s not quite right to say the Volkswagen that shipped the first Beetles was the same as that under the German Labour Front / KdF. The same cannot be said about Mercedes.
Please stop spreading this myth. You and I had this same discussion last year.
There was never any “uppercase/lowercase” distinction.
For the sake of anyone else who hasn’t seen this, here is the number plate out of a 1943 Kubelwagen (Nazi military vehicle) with capital-V “Volkswagenwerk G.m.b.H” across the top.
And here’s the number plate from a 1959 beetle with the exact same name across the top over 15 years later, long after the factory had been returned to German control after being restarted by the British. The company didn’t become Volkswagen AG until 1960.
Even when referring to the car itself as “the Volkswagen,” it’s still a proper noun and Germans capitalize all of their nouns anyway.
