Great stuff, Zoltan:

Enter Major Ivan Hirst pursueding the Brits to buy 20,000 Beetles from
the partially rebuilt factory,, Heinz Nordoff and Ben Pons and it all
rolls out.  What a great story.

On 12/25/09, Zoltan <thewestyman@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

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