Original subtitles

The second World War began

when Adolf Hitler

tried to redefine what it meant to be German.

Hitler has this whole idea that everyone

is gonna have, in the new Germany, after the war is over,

everyone's gonna have a house

and they're gonna have a place to park their car.

The man to help him realise the new Aryan dream

was an unemployed engineer

looking for a second chance, Dr. Ferdinand Porsche.

And as a teenager, you find the young Ferdinand

fitting his family home with electric lighting.

He certainly had something creative about him.

From my mind,

he was the most productive engineer in both World Wars.

Porsche's directive

was to restore Germany's national pride

and imagine the future of the victorious Third Reich.

But to do it, he'd have to betray the man

who believed in him when no one else would.

What they have in common is this passion for cars,

but Rosenberger was now an embarrassment to Porsche.

The idea was that it would be a modern technological state

with a happy army of Germans running things

with a cowed slave population of lesser races.

That would've been the vision.

Engineers were the beating heart

of the Third Reich,

forging advanced weapons,

feeding the Nazi war machine,

and motivating the masses.

They executed history's greatest horrors.

And yet, for some,

their true role would remain hidden for decades.

By 1930, Germany's social fabric was starting to fray.

In the doll cues, white collar workers joined blue,

most producing nothing, doing nothing.

These people have been through the First World War.

They've been through the absolute humiliation

of the Treaty of Versailles.

6 million people were unemployed

as a result of the Wall Street crash.

Among them was a car designer in Stuttgart,

Dr. Ferdinand Porsche.

Ferdinand Porsche was the Henry Ford of Middle Europe.

In other words,

he was the leading automobile car entrepreneur.

Porsche was not someone to shrink

from the more challenging aspects of the car world.

He would say, "If he wants it, we can do it."

That was his philosophy.

By age 50, Porsche had cultivated a reputation

as one of the greatest minds in the automobile industry.

But now, he was unemployed.

As a final roll of the dice in 1931,

he started a business with two men.

Anton Piech was a lawyer by trade and a Nazi sympathiser.

He was also Porsche's son-in-law.

The other partner was a Jewish man called Adolf Rosenberger.

Adolf Rosenberger was from a Jewish assimilated family.

He was a designer, a racing driver,

and a terribly creative man.

But the new company

was failing to weather the recession.

Rosenberger left the firm,

instead working on a freelance basis,

selling Porsche patents abroad.

On the very same day, another man came to power,

promising to reverse Germany's ill fortune.

Hitler is talking about the fact

that we're going to create a Volksgemeinschaft,

a people's community.

He's talking about iron Volk.

He's talking about one people, one nation.

That is a huge reason

why people voted for the Nazis in droves

because they've promised people two things.

They promised people work,

and they promised them bread.

The Nazi leader poses with his cabinet,

which includes von Papen sitting on his left.

This was the start of Adolf Hitler's crusade

to reimagine what it meant to be a citizen of Germany,

a job for every man,

a home for every family,

and national pride for every worthy journal.

He called it his glorious Third Reich.

Germans didn't wait long to be told

how their lives were going to change for the better.

On Hitler's 12th day in office,

at the opening of the Berlin Motor Show,

he laid out his plan.

Just as the horse

and cart once burned their trails

and the railroad built its required track network,

so must motorize traffic

be supplied with the requisite roads.

These are momentous tasks, which are also part

of the programme for the reconstruction of the German economy.

The speech went down a storm

with Germany's automobile manufacturers

who themselves were equally crippled by the recession.

Porsche is listening to this and thinking,

this is music to his ears.

This is an opportunity to jumpstart that career

and maybe get that recognition that he so desperately wants.

Ferdinand Porsche wasted no time.

Apparently undeterred by the party's fascism,

he sent a telegram to Hitler.

As the creator of many renowned constructions

in the field of German and Austrian motor and aviation,

and as a co-fighter for more than 30 years

for today's success, I congratulate your excellency

on the profound opening speech.

Porsche attached a copy of his resume

and expressed hope that he would gain Hitler's attention.

Three months later, he was granted an audience.

The meeting was to take place at the Reich Chancellery.

It was Porsche's chance

to kiss the ring of the new chancellor.

Hitler and Porsche had similarities in that they both came

from a very similar part of the old Austro-Hungarian empire.

They spoke a similar dialect.

Porsche knew that Hitler

had given 500,000 Reichsmarks

to Mercedes to build a new race car.

Germany had lagged behind other nations on a circuit.

Mercedes promised that they could reverse that fortune,

but Porsche had a design of his own.

He called it the P-Wagen.

With a new 16-cylinder engine,

the P-Wagen was designed

to outpace Europe's greatest racing cars.

Porsche had taken the unprecedented step

of putting the engine behind the driver.

It made the rear heavier, giving better traction.

The P-Wagen was exactly the kind of showstopper

that Hitler was looking for.

He was very interested

in showing Germany as a shop window to the world.

This is the new Germany.

We are the leaders.

We are at the top of our game.

We are at the cutting edge of modern technology.

We are the best.

Porsche bet his reputation

that he was the man to make Germany world champions.

Hitler split the money.

250,000 for Mercedes, 250,000 for Porsche.

It would keep his Stuttgart company afloat a little longer.

For the ageing engineer, the future was looking bright.

Hitler's regeneration programme

was plunging the country further into debt.

So, the new Germany was presented to the people

in shiny wrapping paper, with the commissioning

of a new bureau in charge of raising national morale.

KdF stood for strength through joy.

The KdF is essentially its social policy as propaganda.

So, the idea is,

is that it's almost like a reward system for workers.

Workers can get subsidies on holidays.

So, for example,

they could get a 75% discount on train tickets.

They could get a 50% discount on hotels.

But we're also talking

about really big things like going on cruises.

Everything's underpinned by propaganda.

So, if you are lucky enough to go on a KdF cruise,

you are going to hear Hitler's speeches on the Tannoy.

You are going to have to attend political lectures,

as well as going sightseeing.

The KdF delivered a taste

of a distinctly Aryan American dream.

Hitler decreed that every man would have a job with purpose.

His family would have a vacation hotspot to enjoy.

And one day,

they would have their own motorcar to get them there.

Dr. Porsche saw himself

as the man to help realise Hitler's vision.

Frank Jung is head

of the historic archive at the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart.

Inside its collection

of 50,000 original documents from the history of Porsche,

but one item

is perhaps more historically significant than any other.

Yeah, this is something very special

we have here at the Porsche Corporate Archive.

This is the first proposal,

the pitch Ferdinand Porsche wrote to the political leaders,

mainly to Adolf Hitler.

The proposal contained a detailed plan

for a Volkswagen, a car for the people.

The people's car,

or a small-scale car, was always in his mind.

When he was opening together with his son-in-law

and with Adolf Rosenberger,

when they were opening the construction office in 1931,

they had a Volkswagen in their mind.

Hitler had seen proposals for people's cars before.

If he was going to put money into a project,

it had to meet certain specifications.

It needed seats for four people.

The engine must be cooled by the air.

It had to be fueled by Germany's plentiful diesel.

And it could be converted for military purposes.

Porsche has a conclusion, his idea of a Volkswagen.

It should be able

to drive at least 100 kilometres per hour.

It should be able to climb hills with a percentage of 30%.

It should be a closed body to carry at least four people,

and it should be quite cheap.

Most important to Hitler, the people's car

had to be affordable to the average German worker.

It would have to cost no more than 1,000 Reichsmarks.

This document is actually the start of the Volkswagen

because within this document,

the basic ideas are mentioned.

And with this document,

he was able to convince the political leaders

and Adolf Hitler so that he later on got the contract

to build the Volkswagen or to develop the Volkswagen.

Hitler granted the funds to build a prototype.

200,000 Reichsmarks paid in monthly instalments.

Porsche stood to win the contract

to build 1 million vehicles for the people of Germany.

For Porsche, this is the project he's been dreaming of.

It's a chance to use maybe his genius

to make a mark in the world,

and it's got the blessing of the German leader.

If Porsche played his cards right,

he's gonna finally see his name in lights.

While the Porsche company had much to celebrate,

its Jewish co-founder, Adolf Rosenberger,

got some disturbing news.

Rosenberger works freelance for Porsche

because he works for him abroad in France and in Britain,

and gets customers in contracts.

But it is becoming more

and more evident that Porsche finds him embarrassing

because of his Jewish background.

His 10% share of the company

was being bought off him.

He was one of the first victims of Aryanization.

Aryanization is a Nazi word

and that's why many historians don't want to use it.

One can also say it was organised theft.

The Nazis got the word Aryan

from a theoretical advanced ancient civilization.

They believed Germans were Aryan.

People who were Jewish, Roma, or Black were not.

The Aryanization of Germany began first

by boycotting Jewish businesses.

They do not see that Jewish people

are part of what their future is.

They want the Aryan race, as they say,

to lead on this new German empire,

and they don't see that Jewish people are part of that.

For companies,

it meant removing the non-Aryans from their boards.

Porsche made a decision to protect the firm

and his blossoming friendship with the Fuhrer

by severing ties with the company's co-founder.

But the rules of Aryanization were designed to be cruel.

Part of this voluntary Aryanization

is that when these businesses are bought out,

that they are bought out

to essentially screw over the business owners

as much as possible.

Rosenberger was given 3,000 Reichsmarks

for his shares,

only a fraction of their true value.

The terms of Aryanization would become enshrined in law.

Germany is a very bureaucratic country,

and we do have contracts for everything.

So, they give it a sort of air of respectability.

You sign contracts

and you get stamps on your contracts, and so it looks legal.

But of course, it was daylight robbery.

Back in Stuttgart, Porsche wrestled

with designing a car fit for the new master race.

With a curved body for carving through the air,

low to the ground,

small enough to fit anywhere, and finished in black.

Porsche created in car form

the example for new German living.

Uniform Aryan design for the uniform Aryan family.

The Third Reich is absolutely underpinned by propaganda.

And really, the people's car

is its social policy as propaganda.

Richard Hausmann is a collector

of historic people's cars.

The idea of the car when it was started

to be developed was to motorize Germany,

not only the rich people, but the whole population.

This was quite a challenging task.

To satisfy Hitler's vision,

it had to have space for the average Aryan nuclear family.

The car is designed for five people, five adults.

If you have a family with two adults

and four kids, I think it would also work.

It's super comfortable.

I drove with such a car from Germany to China,

and there was the original seats in there.

I can tell you this is comfortable.

Of course, no seat belts,

no headrests.

That's all not necessary at that time.

But Porsche's real achievement

didn't lay in any one single design choice.

Hitler said,

"You can charge anything you like

for this car here, Porsche,

but it must be less than 1,000 Reichsmarks.

And 1,000 Reichsmarks was about what it cost

to buy a fairly decent motorcycle at the time,

let alone a car.

Porsche set very high standards for his creations,

which meant that his designs

were often very elaborate and expensive

and far more so than his bosses wanted.

Porsche had to reinvent his method of making cars.

No longer could he use an unlimited budget

to achieve perfection.

A lot of people look for the engine in the front nowadays,

but this car has the engine in the back,

and that was one of the design principles of this car.

And this engine fascinates me always the most.

The whole goal of the car

was also that it shouldn't be weighed so much

because the more it weights,

the more expensive the production costs.

From that point of view, it's a very compact,

very cost-optimized, but also very, very reliable engine.

The design was inspired

by the tent poles of the Third Reich,

power, prosperity, and image.

Porsche's people's car was like nothing he'd built before.

Adolf Hitler, now impatient to see where his money had gone,

demanded a demonstration.

The demonstration took place in 1936, 15 months late.

Porsche had already asked

for an extra 1.5 million Reichsmarks

just to finish the project.

For the ageing engineer,

there was no more second chances.

The presentation would be made at Hitler's mountain retreat.

All the Nazi bigwigs,

all the entourage is there, including Goring.

A demonstration was made of the fact

that you could take the body off the civilian body

and put on a military body.

The generals saw potential.

But not all of Hitler's demands were met.

Porsche had failed to deliver the desired diesel engine.

Instead, it ran on the more volatile petrol.

But Hitler recognised that the boundaries

of engineering economics had been pushed to their limits

and gleefully signed off on the prototype.

Hitler actually reminisced to a journalist about that day,

and he said, "The way these Volkswagen

whizzed up the Obersalzberg,

buzzing around and overtaking big Mercedes cars,

they were like bumblebees."

The people's car was to be the way

that Nazi citizens

would travel on Germany's new sprawling Autobahns.

Soon, the Volk would learn the good news.

But not everyone was invited to the new Aryan utopia.

Porsche's former business partner, Adolf Rosenberger,

had been arrested while walking the streets of Stuttgart.

He was held on the charge of race defilement.

He was a bit of a ladies man.

He had an Aryan girlfriend

and they accused him of sleeping

with an Aryan woman, which, of course,

was against the law, the Nuremberg Laws from '35s.

In September, 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were enacted.

They removed the Jews' right to vote,

to hold office,

even to fly the German flag.

This essentially takes away citizenship

from Jewish people,

and it it considers them

to be subjects rather than citizens.

That detail means

that they are not protected by the law anymore.

Part of those laws is this idea of racial defilement.

So, it's the idea that now, if Jewish people have marriages

or relations with non-Jewish people,

that is punishable by imprisonment.

At a time when Jews were disappearing,

never to be seen again,

Rosenberger made a desperate plea to the only person

with enough influence to get him a pardon.

He appealed to Porsche.

The response was silence.

Porsche certainly distances himself entirely

from Rosenberger at this point.

We know that Porsche has got deep connections

to the highest powers in the regime,

but he does not use those connections

to do anything to help Rosenberger.

After 22 days of incarceration,

Rosenberger was suddenly released.

An employee at the Porsche company,

Rosenberger's successor, made an appeal on his behalf.

It's not known if Ferdinand himself was involved.

By 1937, Hitler had transformed society within Germany,

but he was about to grab the attention of the wider world.

In Derbyshire stands Donington Hall,

a fine old edifice

sit amidst the wooded glories of Donington Park.

Today, this peaceful setting is the battleground

for a fight to the finish between some

of the finest racing drivers in the world.

In October of 1937,

Porsche's racing car came to Britain.

Motor racing had been going on worldwide

since the early 1900s,

but it was only because of circuits like Donington

that motorsport became so popular.

John Bailie has chronicled what happened

when the Germans came to Donington Park Raceway.

Well, 1937, the Donington Grand Prix

were a completely different spectacle

for the British motorsporting audience.

60,000 people attended at Donington Park that day.

Time for the start is drawing near,

as the fans take up their positions.

At target points around the course,

there is an air of eager anticipation.

Porsche's car formed one-half of the German team.

Joining forces with Mercedes,

they became known as the Silver Arrows.

The German teams brought not only a different spectacle

in racing terms,

but the whole way in which they presented themselves,

the way the cars were prepared, the engineering expertise

that went into them, was another dimension altogether.

For the past three years, the Silver Arrows

have been dominating racing all over Germany

and Italy and France.

But if you could win in Britain, then you were talking.

Sound of those cars was something

that the British public had never heard before.

It was like a rocket ship.

The Silver Arrows

reached speeds that no other car could match.

The cars at this point would be accelerating rapidly

as they approach the apex of this,

what is almost a tarmac wall.

This is about a one in eight incline.

At the top, the speeding Silver Arrows

left the ground, making for an iconic photograph.

Germany was thought to be this nation of people

who had lost the war and suffering terribly from depression,

and this goosestepping maniac in charge.

But hang on a minute.

Here they are showing the rest of the world

what real engineering looked like.

The Silver Arrows took first,

second, third, fourth, and fifth place.

The top spot belonged to Porsche.

Together, Porsche and Hitler demonstrated

that the Third Reich's engineers

were a force to be reckoned with.

They sent a message to the rest of the world.

The Germans were coming.

Be out in the streets to yell delight

as Hitler returns to the capitol.

Hitler's popularity was getting stronger by the day,

and the Third Reich was getting larger.

Hitler's armies rolled into Austria,

on roads strewn with flowers,

as crowds celebrated unification with Germany.

Hitler was very, very popular at this stage

because millions of Germans at this stage in 1938,

thought that Hitler had achieved in five

and a half years what the democratic governments

of the Weimar Republic did not receive in 14 years at all.

And in spring, 1938, the time had come

to unveil the people's car to the German Volk.

Porsche had achieved a lot within the automobile industry,

but his name was still only known to industry insiders.

You know, what Porsche wanted was to do something great

and to be recognised for it.

Porsche really wanted his name immortalised.

In a place just outside the town of Fallersleben,

50,000 spectators came

to witness the Fuhrer lay the foundation stone

for the new people's car mega factory.

At the grand ceremony,

Hitler praised the Reich's engineering prowess

in a speech to the crowd.

What is possible in other countries

is also possible in Germany.

The automobile must become the means

of transportation for the Volk.

The job of motorizing the German people

had been handed

to the same bureau in charge of worker happiness.

The KdF group did unbelievably reasonably priced holidays,

but the key to the operation

of the holidays was that people paid in advance.

They had books of stamps.

When they had enough stickers in the booklet,

they could go on their holiday.

The people's car would be sold in the same manner.

Hence, I believe there is only one name

that can be given to this car,

a name I shall give to it on this very evening.

The name shall be KdF-Wagen.

Now, apparently, Ferdinand Porsche

was absolutely horrified at that statement.

He didn't like KdF-Wagen at all.

He didn't think

it was gonna sell internationally with a name like that.

And he had rather hoped, egoist that he was,

that the car might be named after him.

It seemed like all this excitement, all this opportunity,

after all that, his name isn't gonna go down in history.

Hitler left the ceremony,

waving to the crowds

from the passenger seat of the KdF-Wagen.

Porsche sat in the back.

A week after the ceremony,

a letter was sent to Rosenberger's apartment in Paris.

Due to certain aggravations in the internal situation

and on higher authority, Porsche was cutting all ties

with Rosenberger, including his freelance work.

Rosenberger packed his bags

and sought to start a new life in the United States.

It proved a timely escape.

In this historic hour,

the fate of Europe

and perhaps the whole world trembles in the balance.

Will not now be necessary for Britain

to stand to arms and cry hot.

Aggression must be stopped.

When Hitler marched his armies into Poland,

Britain and France declared war on Germany.

All industry in the Third Reich turn to war production,

including the now completed KdF-Wagen factory.

Dieter Landenberger is the head

of heritage at the modern Volkswagen Company.

When the war started, this became a, yeah,

production site for all kind of military goods.

Mainly, they were producing, yeah, parts for aeroplanes .

The Junkers factory was not very far away,

so 50% of the production were aeroplane parts.

Like in so many factories in wartime Germany,

this one would be manned

by captured slaves of the Third Reich.

Between 1940 and '45,

more than 20,000 people

had to work here against their will.

Most of these people came from Eastern Europe, from Poland.

Many prisoners of war from the Soviet Union.

Porsche used prisoner labour in the First World war.

And he was accustomed to that

and he made sure

that they were adequately fed and housed

because otherwise, they wouldn't be productive people.

And in the Second World War,

he did have forced labour for sure.

This factory would be run by his son-in-law,

Anton Piech, who'd been a Nazi member since 1933.

Anton Piech was the first one

who asked him for slave labour,

for concentration camp inmates to work for Volkswagen.

He used concentration camp inmates from all over the world,

from France, from the Netherlands.

He just exploited and worked everyone to death.

The KdF-Wagen was successfully converted

to military purposes,

becoming the Kubelwagen,

a vehicle capable of transporting people over rough terrain.

Two years into the war,

Hitler appointed the 66-year-old Porsche

to be head of the Tank Commission.

His first task was to develop new tanks

to traverse the muddy plains between Berlin and Moscow.

This was the first such commission

that had been established, and he put it Porsche in charge.

And in a way, that was a sensible idea

because Porsche was not,

at that time, very active himself in tanks,

but he had some tank experience.

Porsche worked on several tank designs,

including a 190-ton giant called Maus,

but none past the testing stage.

Porsche's engineering successes now seemed a long time ago.

They did several approaches and developments on the tanks,

but none of them were produced in mass production.

Some of them were slightly too big and too expensive.

As the Germans started retreating,

Porsche became less important to the ailing Fuhrer

and Ferdinand began planning his own end game.

By May, 1944,

the dream of a victorious Third Reich was over.

Germany's tanks sank in the Soviet mud.

Germans once destined to find strength

through joy were now dying for a failed state.

As German cities were turned to rubble by allied bombing,

Porsche fled Stuttgart

and carried out his final duties

from his Austrian retreat with his family by his side.

When Hitler shot himself in his bunker,

Ferdinand Porsche was again out of work, now 69 years old.

But opportunity came knocking once more.

In November, 1945,

you have this French army lieutenant knocking on the door,

if you like, of the Porsche-Piech estate in Austria,

and he issues his invitation.

"Please come to France and build us a people's car."

So, a month later,

Porsche and Piech go along to another meeting.

And rather than talking about cars,

they're actually arrested for war crimes.

The French authorities held Ferdinand

and Anton Piech in captivity in Dijon.

Porsche's assets were frozen.

Bail was set at $8,400, a sum he couldn't pay.

Ferdinand spent 15 months under arrest.

In desperation, he turned to an old colleague

who'd made a new life for himself in America.

For Rosenberger, it is very, very tough

to start a new career,

to start all over again in America,

even though he's still young.

But he does survive

and he builds a bit of a career again in Los Angeles.

Porsche, when he is in prison,

he suddenly remembers Rosenberger

and suddenly ask him for money.

Rosenberger helped pay Porsche's bail.

In the following years,

lawyers hashed out a settlement

between the two former colleagues.

Rosenberger continued to work in motorsports in the US.

Ferdinand Porsche enjoyed three years of freedom

before he died after a stroke in 1951.

The Porsche company would go on

to make luxury sports vehicles.

But Porsche's humble Volkswagen design survived the war

and became an unlikely icon for a new subculture.

♪ Ah, ah, ah

♪ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh

♪ Ah, Ah

When I first went to Germany as a student,

all the Germans, all my contemporaries, young Germans,

they all, with almost without exception,

drove around in VW Beatles.

♪ Ah, ah, ah

So, Beatle became an icon for the Volkswagen brand.

Between 1945 and 2003,

more than 21.5 million units were built,

what became one of the most successful cars.

And not only in numbers, it also became a cultural icon.

Ferdinand Porsche spent a career

pushing at the boundaries of engineering.

♪ Ah, ah

On an invitation from Adolf Hitler,

he was able to glimpse

at how engineering would transform the next century.

♪ Ah, ah

To get there,

he made decisions that would forever tarnish his record

♪ Ah, ah

and he didn't survive

to witness his name finally up in lights.

♪ Ah, ah