It "seems like the only good idea Hitler had," says one vintage Volkswagen hobbyist quoted in Bernhard Rieger's The People's Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle, an engaging history of how a failed Nazi prestige project became a national icon in three different countries. Rieger's account highlights the fact that Volkswagen is not simply a German company that cooperated with the Nazis in order to survive, it has its origins in a key component of Nazi ideology.
Inspired by the success of Henry Ford, with whom he shared both a hatred of Jews and a belief in the power of mass industrialization to improve society, Adolf Hitler first called for the construction of a Volkswagen, or "people's car" in 1934 (he didn't use the term at first but it quickly became ubiquitous in the German automotive press) as part of the creation of a "traffic community" for the emerging Aryan middle class that also included the construction of the Autobahn highway network.
Hitler was a big believer in car culture, telling a Berlin autoshow in 1933 that the motocar gave "manking a mode of transport that obeyed one's own orders... Not the the timetable, but man's will." (Modern alternative transport activists can make of this what they will.)
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