The Iconic, Complicated VW Beetle

The VW Beetle is the best selling car of all time. The story behind its creation is a bit complicated though. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I guess I should
say beep beep and welcome to the podcast. This is
stuff you should know. It's a love bug of podcasts,
and the reason why is because it features Charles W. Chuck,
Wayne Chuck, Tran Bryet.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
Is it a reference to my first car or just
me just you you love bug? Oh? Okay, I got you.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah. Jerry's a love bug too, but much more insect.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Like this was my first car.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
I know. Is that why you selected this? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (00:46):
I mean I've always had a soft spot for the
old VW Beetle. I had a sixty eight that my
parents bought new in nineteen sixty eight, which, as we'll see,
was the year they boomed in the States.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
Know, I do know that. Yes, I didn't know if
there was more to your story.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
No, No, I thought, no, I mean, I'm continuing my story,
so yeah, I just thought that you might react or something.
It's fine. Then I later had a seventy five super
Beetle Liar, and then I had a square back, a
Type three square back I think it was a seventy
five as well, and that was actually my favorite of
them all.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
But I'm not familiar with that last one.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
You'd recognize it. It was sort of a it was it
was their version of a station wagon.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Oh, you're talking about the thing.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
No, no, no, no, thing wasn't a station wagon at all.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
No, I've never seen a Beatle station wagon in my life. Dude.

Speaker 1 (01:42):
Okay, Welston, you picture.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Okay, Yeah, that's cool. I guess it was roomy trunk wise.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Oh no, not at all. It was you know about it.
It was probably in the chassis of a Beatle, so
it wasn't like it was big. It wasn't like the
huge station wagons of its day.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
So it was basically just the the shape of it
kind of was station wagon esque.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
Yeah, I'm going to send a picture right now, buddy.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Please do. I don't have my phone near me, but
I'll pretend I saw it. Okay, have you sent it yet?
Not yet?

Speaker 1 (02:15):
Just say, oh my god, I have seen one of those.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Okay, tell me when you sent it.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
Well, just continue because it's taking longer than I thought.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Okay, I have a riddle for you, Charles. Okay, what
do the foreign words babble? Cosinel Tortuga Subpito, Buba, and
vo Cheeto all have in common.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Well, I mean, they are all various names in various
countries of the Volkswagen Beetle.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah, that's long and short of it. They have nothing
else in common except for that. But that's pretty cute.
All of those names are pretty cute. And the reason
why is because the VW Beetle is a very cute car,
which is kind of a strange thing to say. If
we were to go back to the fifties, old old timey,
nineteen fifties, post war American suburban dudes would probably beat

(03:05):
us up for saying that the Beatle was cute. Yeah,
say no, it's an ugly car. Everybody knows that, and
no one thinks that anymore. Everyone loves the Beatle. And
that's the end of the podcast.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Yeah, good night, I sent you the picture. I'll see
you tomorrow.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
Hold on, Oh yeah, I've seen one of those before.
They're great.

Speaker 1 (03:24):
Well, I look forward to your real and your rear
response later. But I called mine the Type three. It
was a Type three square back. But the original name
of the VW Beatle was a Volkswagen Type one, and
the Germans themselves kind of renamed it der kefer K
a umlaut fer, which is Beatle in German. But Volkswagen,

(03:49):
I mean they kind of just took that name upon
themselves because people were calling it that already.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yeah, they stole it from Dervaulk der.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
Volk, yeah, the people.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
Yeah, because it was der Volk who came up with
the name Beatle, like you said, but it was der
Volk for whom the Beatle was created, Chuck. Which is
the reason why Volkswagen is called Volkswagen. It means the
People's car. And that is the basis of the entire
story of the Beatle. The whole thing was started off

(04:21):
in the nineteen thirties, championed by no less than Adolf
Hitler in Germany, I mean, where else. And the point
of the car was to create an affordable car that
the average German family could use on the newly built Audubonds,
which Kraftwerk famously sung about, and which would also bring

(04:47):
the German economy out of the slump that it had
been in during the Weimar Republic. And I don't know
if you remember or not, but we talked about the
German hyperinflation many times around this time. In my twenties
early thirties, and get this. There's a stuff you Should
Know listener. Dave Kusten sent this to us yesterday. I
don't know if you saw, but there's a stuff you

(05:09):
should Know listener named Scott Seligman, and he created a
like a search tool where you can search keywords and
it will bring up every Stuff you Should Know episode
that we mentioned, say the word hyperinflation in so that's
how I know that it was in our episode on
currency that we talked about that. So hats off to
Scott Seligman.

Speaker 1 (05:29):
Yeah, can people use that?

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Yeah? So the URL is just too cluegy to say
out loud, so I would encourage people. I think he
posted it on the Stuff you Should Know subreddit, and
that would be a good place to go. Get it.

Speaker 1 (05:44):
You should have made one of those little URL shorteners.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
I don't know if that's legal to do that to
someone else's u R l.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
Oh, I don't know. I thought that was just a
way to send out like, hey, just go to you know,
keyword syskkeyword dot com or something and it would reader.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
Well. Yeah, I'm not that sad of each Okay, I'm
forty nine years old. For PiZZ sake.

Speaker 1 (06:04):
Hey, speaking of that and craft work, that leads me
around to this. Did you notice that I used craft
work on your stuff? You should know birthday post?

Speaker 2 (06:12):
No I didn't. I saw that post. Thank you very
much for super sweet, But no, I didn't notice. What
was the craft work reference?

Speaker 1 (06:18):
Did you know I had the craftwork song playing to
the post?

Speaker 2 (06:21):
Oh? I know, yeah, I never have my volume up
for stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (06:26):
Which one I got you.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
A model? I don't know it would be appropriate.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
I'm not sure which one it was. I wish it
was autobunding because I'd really bring this sing full circle.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
It really would. But still the craft work mentioned, I'm
gonna go back and listen to it. I appreciate it.
I'm gonna look at the picture of your your station
wagon and listen to the kraft work song that you
posted for my birthday. I appreciate that. Man.

Speaker 1 (06:50):
I mean, it's only a station wagon in the purest
sense of the word. It's more like a stretched hatchback.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
It's too late, Chuck, you really built it up as
a station You can't back title now.

Speaker 1 (07:01):
But they also had and you know this is along
the same lines instead of the actual squared back that
was oh what did they call it? Not the round
back or did they the green back? I don't know,
but they had a similar model, except if it wasn't
as boxy. It was a little rounded, but it still
had the hatchback.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
I don't know. I'm totally lost. Now I know about
the Beatle, but that's about it.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
All right. Well, let's keep talking about the Beetle then,
like you said, the People's car, We're going to tell
you about the history here, because the history is a
little complicated. And I don't mean like, oh, it's complicated
because the Nazi Party, you know, commissioned it. It's complicated
because there's a bunch of different people who they borrowed
heavily from to kind of make the Beatle. Hitler and

(07:47):
there are also, you know, various stories, depending on who
you want to listen to, about whose initial idea it was. Hitler,
if he were alive today, would say that it was
his idea first and foremost, and he picked Austrian, a
gentleman named Ferdinand Porsche mm hmmmm, porsche mm hmm, to

(08:10):
design the first Volkswagen, and that Porsche came up with
that iconic shape, you know, that round looking weird looking
car for the time. I mean, we're so used to
him now because it's literally the best selling car of
all time by a long shot, that everyone's like, no,
it doesn't look weird. It looks like a beetle. But
back then it looked very strange.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
It did, and that was essentially the end of the story.
Fernand Porsche came up with the design. He also came
up with the the Beatles iconic characteristics, which is that
the engine is in the rear, it's air cooled, it
saves on space, you don't have all those tubes or
whatever for water fuel, liquid fueled or cooled engine, and

(08:52):
that it had real rear whale drive. So essentially, the
Beetle was created a whole out of out of the
first time out of the gate by ferinand Porsche under
orders essentially from Adolf Hitler. That's like the story that
most people know. Even Volkswagens like, yeah, that's not quite right.
There's some other details in there that are a little different,

(09:14):
and yet they still give all credit to ferinand Porsche, which,
as we'll see, is misplaced. Really, if you drill down
into it.

Speaker 1 (09:22):
Yeah, supposedly it could fit for adults. That's the party line. Well,
I guess that's really not the right thing to say there,
although it was the Nazi party. Yeah, but you know
what I mean, it's just an expression. Sure, but two
adults in that back have to be pretty small adults.
The backseat didn't have a lot of room, it didn't
go super fast, but it could top sixty miles an hour.

(09:42):
At the nineteen thirty four International Automobile and motor Cycle
Exhibition in Berlin, Hitler came up on stage gave a
speech basically saying that you know, I have called for
the creation of this car, car of the people. Something
it would be affordable, something that you can drive on

(10:04):
the Autobon, unless you're Jewish, of course, because Jewish people
were not allowed to drive on the Audubon. And the
initial price was nine hundred and ninety reich marks, not
Deutsche Marx but reich marks, which was about thirty one
week salary for the average German worker. So not a
lot of money, but a lot of money at the

(10:24):
time for sure.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
For sure, but still affordable, right, I mean this is
unless they made you pay it all at once, then
it probably wasn't very affordable. The point was to make
an affordable car for Germany and then also create what
almost amounted to a national state owned car company, yeahs Wagon,

(10:47):
and to create both this car and ultimately the company
that made the car, Volkswagen. In nineteen thirty four, the
Reich Automotive Industry Association was formed. And that right is
kind of a giveaway that the Nazis ran this consortium
of privately owned car manufacturers in Germany. Brought them all

(11:10):
together and said, defur really would like you guys to
get together and make this people's car, and if not,
you will all be summarily shot, and so will all
of your family. I don't know if they said that
last part, but I think basically everything that was said
in Germany during the thirties had that unspoken attached to
the end of it.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
Yeah, for sure, And you know, just to be clear,
because I think I was probably confusing things a little bit.
The two versions of that story is one Hitler said
it was his idea, and then two Volkswagen said no,
it was really Porsche's idea to begin with.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
Yeah, that Hitler took and ran with it exactly, But
I don't know that he is said to have given
Porsche the credit probably not. But the upshot of it
is that this consortion of German automakers hired for Nam
Porsche to create and design and create this Volkswagen. So

(12:05):
there's no question about that. Like the original Volkswagen Beetle
was created by Ferdinand Porsche. What makes this whole story
even more convoluted. You thought that was convoluted, everybody buckle.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
Up, Well, they didn't have seat belts either.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
Hang on to your oh shoot bar, yeah exactly. It
gets way more convoluted than that because it turns out
that Ferdinand Porsche either took credit for a lot of
other people's ideas or just over time was given credit.
They're kind of like, you know, the short sketch version
of the story. Most people don't go into this much
detail into the story of the VW. But we're stuff

(12:43):
you should know, so we're going to do that. But
there were a few people that kind of along the
way contributed to the what would become the Beatle very directly.
It wasn't like, hey, we should make a car and
call it the Beetle. Their ideas were essentially taken and
adopted and turned into the Beatle. Sometimes like as a whole.

Speaker 1 (13:02):
Yeah, I mean it was. It's pretty blatant when you
look at these designs and these sketches and drawings and
stuff like that. The first guy we're going to talk
about is Joseph Ghanz who was a Hungarian Jewish engineer,
and he came to Germany after World War One, and
from almost the beginning of the twentieth century, I guess
it was like nineteen oh four nineteen oh five, people

(13:24):
were talking about like a people's car. You know, motorcycles
were the only kind of inexpensive way to get around,
and they thought, hey, if we could get a car
that's you know, not too much more than a motorcycle,
it could actually hold a few Germans, then we'd be,
you know, doing pretty well for ourselves. And he was
a editor of a German car magazine, so he was

(13:47):
he knew his way around the idea of like an affordable, lightweight,
kind of smallish car.

Speaker 2 (13:54):
Well. Yeah, he also used that position to promote and
try to drum up support for the idea of a
German and people's car in the pages of that magazine too,
which I think was Car und Driver. He even went
so far as to design a prototype that he actually
called the may Coffer the may Beetle. Yeah, nineteen thirty one,

(14:16):
this is long before the Beatle was even called the
Beetle popularly. And he had there was another car called
the Standard Superior. Did you see a picture of one
of those.

Speaker 1 (14:26):
Yeah, I mean it looks like a Volkswagen Beetle exactly.

Speaker 2 (14:29):
And so the apparently that was based on one of
Joseph Gonz's patents. So this guy definitely had a lot
of contribution to the development of the Beatle. And we're talking,
I mean nineteen thirty one. The Standard Superior is built.
In nineteen thirty three the Beatles started to start to
be built, and I think nineteen thirty four, thirty five,

(14:51):
thirty six, So this is like, it's not like the
Ferdinand Porsche was totally unaware of the Standard Superior. It
was a car you could buy in Germany at the time.
So you might say, well, why was Joseph Ghans not
credited for this, Why wasn't he hired instead of Ferdinand Porsche.
Well he was Jewish and he was arrested by the
Gestapo before the Volkswagen Beetle was ever created, but right

(15:13):
before it, so it was very easy for Ferdinand Porsche
to be like Joseph, who these are my ideas?

Speaker 1 (15:18):
Yeah, exactly. He was arrested in thirty three and fled
the country in thirty four, and that was kind of it.
He never got any kind of compensation or anything or
any recognition either, even except for I mean us and
other people on the internet.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
I guess sure, and that's what counts, right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:33):
The second guy we're going to talk about, another Hungarian engineer.
I don't know what the little accents mean as far
as pronoun pronunciation goes in Hungarian, but I'm just gonna
say bella bargni.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
Okay, good enough? Sure, all right.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
So he also wanted to build like a people's car,
sort of a small and expensive thing. This was like
he was a kid, He was a teenager in the
mid nineteen twenty when he came up with an idea
for a rear wheel drived, rear engine, air cooled engine.
And if you look at the sketch that he set

(16:10):
out in nineteen twenty five, and this is what eight
years before the standard Superior, even this thing looks a
lot like a Volkswagen Beetle.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Oh yeah, the Chess is exactly the same essentially, and
then even the body he drew like a side view
of the car and it's a Beetle. I mean, like
he's creating this in nineteen twenty five, like you said,
as an eighteen year old, and this one is so
irrefutable that in the fifties he apparently sued Volkswagen and

(16:42):
they said, Okay, from now on, we will refer to
you as the intellectual father of the Beatle. Could you
definitely lay down all the stuff that later became the Beatle,
even though you weren't given credit at the time.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
Yeah, And he was like, does a check come along
with that title?

Speaker 2 (16:58):
And they said nine, yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:00):
They probably did. It's interesting though, if you look at
the I'm getting confused now. I think the Standard Superior
is the one that looked like a Beatle ekscept the
front end had a little kind of squared off center.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
I'm not sure about the front end and all the
squared off business, but I do know that the lines
were more right angled rather than rounded.

Speaker 1 (17:24):
But yeah, I think that's the one I was thinking of.
Like what it looks like actually is people VW Beetles
are highly have always been highly modifiable as far as
people making them look and as we'll see later, like
dune buggies or like this or that, and one of
the kind of I never really liked them that much.
But one of the kind of fun things you could
do with the Beatle was put a little front, squared

(17:47):
front end on it instead of that big rounded scoop,
you know, a square front like a Model T forward huh.
And that was something that people do to modify their Beatles.
And it looks a lot like the Standard Superior that way.

Speaker 2 (18:00):
Oh like the hood, yeah, turning that Yeah, okay, I gotcha.
I got your I wasn't I'm not up with the
jargon and the lingo here I could Yeah, yeah, I
don't know this front and end thing.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
Yeah, that's where the beat is.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
I think the standards, right, I think the Standard Superior
did have a squared off hood as the way people
call it.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
I'm a front ender. My bad.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
And then there was one other guy too who was Austrian.
His name was Irwin Comenda, and he's the one who
actually filed the patent for the body that became the Beatle.
This wasn't like he drew something along the way. He
was working for Porsche. Porsche produced this design for this car,
and the guy who actually drew the design and patented
what the car ultimately looked like was a different guy.

(18:49):
Yet if you just listen to all the stories, essentially
it was Porsche Hitler Porsche Hitler overtime. V W would
try to get away from that story a little bit,
but it would come back to him. They had to
finally kind of deal with it head on. Yeah, as
we'll see. But in the meantime, Chuck, while we wait
for VW to reckon with their Nazi past, I say

(19:10):
we take a break.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
We'll be right back, all right. Earlier you said it

(19:36):
was thirty five, thirty six or so, it was in
fact thirty five when they delivered the first prototype. At
this point it was the VW Series three. Dave helped
us out with this, and he was keen to point
out it was made from steel and wood, which sounds
weird when you think of a car being made of
steel and wood, but back then cars were made of
steel and wood generally.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
Right, Yeah, And this was the prototype, but I think
the the eventual ones that came out were made of
the same stuff. And if you look at it looks
like a cross between a beatle and one of the
black cabs in the UK. Yeah, like those things, like
one mounted the other, and then the The Beatle Series
three came out. Sure. A little fun fact of the podcast,

(20:19):
Hitler never knew how to drive. He never had a
driver's license, and yet if you step back, he was
like directly in charge, or not directly in charge, but
he was overseeing this Like this, he knew what was
going on. Maybe not day to day, but generally he
was getting updates on the progress of this car and
how it was coming. Like this was not like he

(20:40):
said something at an auto show once and then from
that point on it was kind of taken over like
he had like some sort of hand in it, which
is just crazy if you think about it, because I
remember being a teenager and hearing like, man, you know,
like the Volkswagen. It was like a like a Nazi car,
the Beatle was or something.

Speaker 1 (20:58):
I was that teenager who owned it the time, so
it was a little okay.

Speaker 2 (21:01):
All right, I was the one throwing exit your car. Okay.
But you know when you hear those things, like in
college or high school or something like that, as you
get older, you're like ninety eight percent of that stuff
is totally wrong. It's just off. It's sometimes just totally untrue.
This is one of those rare ones that's not only true,

(21:21):
it's even worse than it seemed in college.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
Yeah, you were throwing exit my car and sucking down
your fan of orange.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
I was very confused at the time.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
Yeah. So in nineteen thirty eight they built a factory
in Stuttgart to start building this car, like, you know,
this tremendous you know, people's car factory. The original like
off the line edition, like for real finally was called
the Volkswagen Type thirty eight KDF Wagon Big K, big
F little D. That stood for Kraft d'ur freuda, which

(21:59):
is strength through which is was a literal Nazi propaganda.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
Slogan because you associate joy.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
They named their car often with the Nazis, for sure.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
So their plan was this nineteen thirty eight. The plan
was to produce one point five million of those a year.
That is ambitious in the nineteen thirties, but that's what
they were going for. They ended up producing two hundred
and ten.

Speaker 1 (22:22):
Right, not two hundred and ten thousand.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
No, two hundred and ten two to one zero niner.
And that's it. The reason why, in large part was
because the war broke out in nineteen thirty nine. The
reason the war broke out was because the Nazis started everything. Yeah,
I just want to make sure no one forgets that.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
Yeah, that's true. And they immediately started sort of reconfiguring
the the KDF to suit their military needs. So they
came out with different types of Type eighty seven, which
was a four wheel drive, and I guess that German
officers would drive one. They had a Type eighty two,

(23:02):
a Kubelwagen, a bucket seat car, and that was armored.
It was on that Beatles Beatles like the band you
get it, m It was on a Beatle chassis, but
it was armored and so therefore safe. And I'm sure
some of the higher ups right around in that one
for obvious reasons.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
That one, very clearly to me, became the thing, the
VW thing.

Speaker 1 (23:26):
Yeah. I knew one person in high school, Mary Francis Shepherd,
had a VW thing, and I thought it was so cool.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
Oh yeah, it was cool, especially in high school. It
takes some gall to drive such an unusual cool car.

Speaker 1 (23:39):
Yeah, I admit you were a little bit the same
with me. I was the only person with a beatle
in my whole high school because everyone else wanted like
a Mazar X seven or something.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
Right exactly, Yeah, yeah, so that they also had a
modified version of the Type eighty two or Type eighty Yeah,
Type eighty two called the shwim Wogan the swimming or
swimming car, and you could drive around in the water
with it. I saw a picture of some dude in
his vintage shim Bogan like in the water, and it

(24:10):
looks so nerve wracking. Like the water the thing is
maybe eight inches above the water line. The rest of
the car is below the water to comfort. Yeah, way
too close for comfort. Apparently it went six full miles
an hour on the water, and there weren't very many
of those made, so I imagine that that dude probably

(24:30):
paid a lot for that.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah, probably so. And I don't know if you can.
I doubt if you can still find one of these.
But they had a during the war, they had some
gas shortages, some fuel shortages, so they developed a wood
burning conversion kit for that cube of Bogan, so the
bucket see car. And you know, I'm sure you looked
up pictures of this thing. It had a little you know,

(24:52):
round hatch in the front of the car. What do
you call that the hood? Yeah, and you would open
up that hat like a wood burning stove and put
wood in there to power this thing.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
That's how you remember, it's called the hood. That's where
you put the.

Speaker 1 (25:08):
Wood, right, that's right.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
Those are slogan, and that would power the card, not
through combustion, but through pyrolysis, where the wood was gasified,
and then those gases would be transferred to the pistons
to make them go up and down, and then make
the wheels on the bus go round and round.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
I didn't know that was even possible, not the wheels
on the bus, but I didn't know that you could
use wood in such a way to power a card.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
It's kind of cool, yeah, and it did work, but
it didn't work very well. Yeah, to answer your question,
I read some article on it, and the people said that,
as far as anyone knows, none of those survived, so
you would not be able to find one of those.

Speaker 1 (25:48):
Yeah, sadly. So. In the end, while they were pumping
these things out, what they would use was force labor
they had, and this is another horrifying fact of the show.
They were for literal concentration camps and eight forced labor
camps on the grounds of the Volkswagen factory complex. And

(26:09):
that's just like, that's his not only was it a
Nazi car, like they were exploiting labor to make them.

Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yeah, and it gets even worse because Ferdinand Porsche specifically
asked for forced labor to be assigned to build the
Volkswagens because he wanted to keep costs down. So you
put all this together, Hitler's directly involved in the creation
and manufacture of this car. They use slave labor and

(26:37):
concentration camps built into the automotive factory complex. And the
reason that they're using slave labor is because the chief designer,
Ferdinand Porsche asked for slave labor. VW eventually had to
like face this as the world kind of continued on.
People are like, guys, this is we have to talk
about this because this is not okay to just ignore.

Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yeah, I mean, you wonder, like could they literally arrest
fer An end Porsche for this. He was held by
French authorities at one point, but he was not convicted
of a crime. But in the nineties, I think it
was the early nineties, Volkswagen started a couple of different payouts.
They paid twelve million German marks deutsch marks, which is

(27:19):
about sixty three million bucks today to some of the
survivors who were those forced laborers from that factory. And
then about eight years later in ninety nine, Porsche actually
set up a fund even they were like, yeah, you know,
Volkswagen's taken all the heat on this, but it was
really our guy, so maybe we should pony up some dough.
So they ponied up five million euros about ten million

(27:41):
bucks a day to compensate some of those same laborers.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeap. So remember they only produced two hundred and ten
of what became the Beatle What the type thirty eight,
Is that correct?

Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (27:53):
I think that was it, or the Series three, one
of the two. They only produced two hundred and ten
of those before during the war they changed the whole
VW factory to a defense vehicle factory. And then after
the war when they started to get back to business,
it was under oversight from the British authorities. So it actually,

(28:14):
in a really weird way, was the Brits who first
fully realized Hitler's vision for a people's car for Germany.

Speaker 1 (28:22):
Yeah, it was in their occupation zone, so it was
kind of theirs. I guess they renamed the factory to
the Wolfsburg Motorworks because of the Wolfsburg Castle that was
close by and that you know that. I don't know
if you would recognize it depends on how much you've
been in like these old Beatles and Volkswagens, but a
lot of them, like later on would be like the

(28:43):
Wolfsburg edition, if they had a special edition of a
golf or something.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
Even I know about that, Okay, all right.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
Good, But they would have that little symbol, this little
castle with a wolf there on the center of the
steering wheel, just sort of an iconic logo.

Speaker 2 (28:57):
I haven't seen that.

Speaker 1 (28:59):
Yeah, you might recognize it.

Speaker 2 (29:01):
Maybe is it on the hood.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
I don't know what that is.

Speaker 2 (29:06):
So with the Brits, they made twenty thousand of those things,
twenty thousand essentially Beatles in nineteen forty six alone, but
all of them were to be used by Allied occupation
forces in Germany at the time, right, So they weren't
the people's car yet, it wasn't and I think the
Brits ran it from nineteen forty five to forty nine.

(29:28):
In nineteen forty nine they finally handed it back over
to the West German authorities, and in the interim, I
think nineteen forty eight, they hired the guy who would
essentially be who you could truly call like the real
actual father of the VW Beetle, a guy named Heinz Nordhoff,
who took the control of this factory and like ran

(29:50):
with it and introduced the Beetle to the world.

Speaker 1 (29:53):
Yeah, I mean, he really ramped up production. He was
a very experienced car maker. He made the car a
little better, I think, gave it a little more horsepower,
but you know that's that's not saying much because the
Beatle was never known for that.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
Yeah, it would actually cough sometimes, right.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
Yeah. He gave it hydraulic brakes, which is pretty good,
and chock absorbers, but again, none of that stuff was
like it was always a car that felt a little
janky to drive.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
I remember you talking about yours, and the heater was
redirected waste heat from the engine on your ankles, is
that correct. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
They just had these little events down on the floorboards,
and we call them ankle burners because it would just
pump heat directly from the engine right out to your
feet and it would ultimately heat the car, but it
would scortch the ankles.

Speaker 2 (30:40):
Was it bad enough that you could smell the hair
on your legs burning?

Speaker 1 (30:43):
I didn't have hair on my legs then.

Speaker 2 (30:45):
Okay, so, but it didn't have ac at all, did it?

Speaker 1 (30:49):
No? I know that some of the super Beetles did later,
and I don't think my super Beetle did though, but
my sixty eight definitely did not. It was two sixty air,
which you drive sixty miles an hour and roll down
two windows. Not a dad joka, that was a joke
I heard.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
Back then, Okay from a dad probably. So heinz Nordoff,
he comes in, he takes over and he's like, look,
there's a lot of stuff we can do. Like you said,
we can update the car. The problem is, we can
sell a million of these in Germany, but German marks
are so devalued right now because of the fallout of
World War two that we need to get some dollars

(31:27):
in here. And the way that you get dollars or
start selling them in America. So he tried that and
it did not go very well at first, in large
part because America was like, that's a Nazi car and
you're probably a Nazi trying to sell us a Nazi car.
And by the way, your stupid Nazi car is ugly
as sin. Get out of here, Nazi. Yeah, And Heinz
Nordoff was like, well, let's try this again in a year.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
Yeah, And that's all it took. I think the first
Beatle and it was just a single one that came
to America was in nineteen forty nine. It was a
Dutch car dealer named Ben Pond and he had to
sell that thing for like whatever he could get, just
so he could go back home, like you know, Transatlantic
sale back home that He's like, all right, I barely

(32:10):
sold the one car, so it's probably not a good
idea to buy a bunch of these. But like you said,
just one year later, in nineteen fifty, there was a
dealer named Max Hoffman, a foreign car dealer that ended
up selling three hundred and thirty Volkswagens to dealerships that
were selling Porsches and Jags other foreign cars. So it
fit in just a little better and doesn't look that

(32:31):
much different. You know, those old bathtub Porsches, you know,
the design isn't that different than the BW beetle. They're
very round and sort of buggy looking.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
That's true for sure. So I think in nineteen fifty
they sold three hundred and thirty of them. Yeah, in
nineteen fifty five they sold thirty two thousand, six hundred
and sixty two of them. And one of the reasons
for the huge leap forward, especially considering when the year
before they sold nine thousand, was that Volkswagen of America
was formed, so essentially an extension of the America conversion

(33:00):
of Volkswagen was formed, and that really kind of helps
streamline importing, setting up dealerships, moving cars to those dealerships,
getting car salesmen to step away from their chicken fingers
in the break room and actually go out and sell
the cars for once in their life. Yeah, that's really
all those factors put together are what helped them start

(33:23):
selling beetles like crazy in the mid fifties.

Speaker 1 (33:26):
Should we take a break?

Speaker 2 (33:29):
Sure?

Speaker 1 (33:30):
All right, good, because I got a cliffhanger. A very
key thing happened in the mid fifties to really ramp
up sales of these. We'll talk about that right after this.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
So, Chuck, you left everybody hanging. You said that you
had a Cliffhanger about something that happened in the fifties
that really kind of revd the beadle up into hyper drive,
which I think is a thing.

Speaker 1 (34:13):
Yeah, and I said mid fifties, it was really nineteen
fifty nine. And anyone that has been around the advertising
industry or even knows a little bit about it or
watch mad Men, knows that there was a series of brilliant,
brilliant ads brought forth by the DDB and almost aid
insurance agency ad agency that I hate to say this,

(34:37):
but they leaned into what people didn't like about the
Volkswagen and tried to make that a selling point, and
they did so to tremendous success.

Speaker 2 (34:48):
Yeah, it was a real game changer. Yeah. So this
I mean, like everybody in advertising knows about this, and
a lot of people outside of advertising know about because
it's just talked about so much. And the reason why
it was a great ad campaign just visually speaking, they
used all sorts of different techniques that were very much

(35:09):
different than than what you would normally find to sell
American cars, which were huge land yachts at the time.
This is the I think the first compact car that
America ever encountered, but like you said, they they really
kind of took some of the criticisms of the Beatle
and turned them into selling points. One of the first

(35:30):
things they said was that it's ugly, but it gets
you there. So this this was just one example of
what came to be called an anti ad campaign. It
was like the what was that Paul Reiser movie from
the eighties where he like just turns the ad world
on its head by just speaking the truth about the
products he's selling, you know, the one? No, yeah, what

(35:54):
it was like an ad for Volva was there. They're
boxy but they're good.

Speaker 1 (35:58):
I don't remember that movie.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
I can't remember what it was called. It doesn't matter,
but it was basically a movie based on this, even
though they would it was never to be like a
fictionalized version of it. They just I think it gave
the screenwriter an idea, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (36:14):
Okay, I'll get you. One of the ads became, and
I guess it was the most famous one. It's not
the one I think at first, but it was named
ad of the Century by ad Age. It was it
just said think small. And the one I remember most
specifically was and not by seeing it you know, live
obviously because this was before my time. But I just
remember seeing I guess reading about or something. But it

(36:36):
was just a picture of the VW Beetle and it
said Lemon underneath it. Oh yeah, yeah, which Lemon is,
you know, a car that's kind of sucks.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
Right, So I'm not sure what they were going for
with that. Can you explain?

Speaker 1 (36:51):
Well, I don't know. I mean the same as the
other ones that say ugly is only skin deep. You know,
they were just sort of playing upon people it was
ugly or saying it was you know, I don't know
if people were saying it was a quality car, because
Lemon definitely indicates like it doesn't run well. So that
was a real sort of extra brave, I think, even

(37:13):
compared to the rest.

Speaker 2 (37:15):
I mean even I don't get that one at all.
It doesn't make any sense to me. I'll have to
go look further into it.

Speaker 1 (37:23):
What's your search, norm? Can someone explain to me why they.

Speaker 2 (37:27):
Yeah, I'll write it out exactly like that.

Speaker 1 (37:30):
Well, I mean, I don't think it's that much different
than saying it's ugly.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
No, it is, because ugly, it's like, that's all just
a point of view it's it's subjective and really, ultimately,
if the car runs, well, a lot of people don't
care what it looks like a lemon. Everyone cares that
the car is not going to run. Well, it does not.
It makes no sense to me whatsoever, But I'll figure
it out on all report back. How about that?

Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yeah, well maybe that's why I remembered it because it
didn't make.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
Any sense, right, But yeah, and I guess you ended
up buying one, so there you go. Uh, well, my
favorite one was lived below your means.

Speaker 1 (38:02):
That's pretty fun. But who wants to do that?

Speaker 2 (38:05):
Well, I'll tell you who wants to do that. People
who essentially were the basis of the counterculture, the people
who were the beats a few years earlier, sorted to
grow up, started to go to college, were very highly educated,
but still did not want to follow in the exact
steps of their parents, and the beetle kind of gave
them a well, a vehicle out of their parents' shadow

(38:26):
to kind of forge their own path. It was basically
a finger to the crew cut. Buying a Beetle was
in the early sixties.

Speaker 1 (38:33):
Yeah, and it's very weird that my parents bought one
brand new in sixty eight because they were not that
at all. My dad was the crew cut like literally, yeah,
And I don't know, they weren't counterculture, like I have
no idea. Maybe, I mean, maybe my mom thought it
was cute, maybe my dad did. I have no idea.
I'm gonna have to ask my mom about that. But
cost wise, it's probably because of the cost, because they

(38:57):
didn't have a lot of money, and in nineteen sixty four,
you could get a Beetle for one five hundred and
sixty five bucks compared to about twenty four hundred four
Ford Mustang at the time, or close to seven grand
for a convertible Lincoln Continental. So it was definitely affordable
and I'm sure that's probably why they got it.

Speaker 2 (39:15):
Yeah, And so they started selling a ton of these things.
In nineteen sixty eight, they sold four hundred and twenty
thousand just in America, and by this time, by this
year around the world, it was the best selling car
in the world. This was twenty years after Heinz Nordoff
took over. So we went from essentially this Nazi car

(39:37):
to the best selling car in the world in two decades,
which is quite a feat.

Speaker 1 (39:44):
Yeah, for sure, just a year after that, it got
a big bump when Disney came out with the love
Bug movies. The initial one was just the love Bug
and Herbie, of course, was the name of that sixty
three beetle that If you haven't seen those movies, they're
like those sixties early seventies Disney movies are kind of fun,
but they're not great. But Herbie was definitely a lovable car.
And you can still see Herbie versions driving around with

(40:06):
the two off center stripes. Yeah, and whatever the number
in the circle was, I can't remember what it's racing number.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
Was, sixty three or fifty three.

Speaker 1 (40:17):
Well, it was probably sixty three because it was a
sixty three Beatle.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
Oh yeah, Okay, I'm more of a Snowball Express man myself.
Have you ever seen that one? No, it's a good one. Okay, okay,
just check that one out and thank me later.

Speaker 1 (40:30):
I bet this stuff is all on the Disney app
don't they have all their classics on there.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
Snowball Express for sure, watch that one and then watch
the North Avenue Irregulars.

Speaker 1 (40:40):
Those are but I do remember that one. I love
that movie.

Speaker 2 (40:42):
Okay, So if you love North Avenue Regulars, there's a
good chance you're going to like Snowball Express, I guarantee it.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
One thing about the movie, though, was it was a
It wasn't a radio controlled car, like it's driving around
by itself. That's whole concept that this is a car
is kind of alive. And you might think, oh, cool,
they figured out how to remote control this car. It
was actually a movie making trick where they have somebody
down out of view of the windows, kind of in

(41:08):
the back seat, like a stunt driver driving that thing.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
Yeah, and we say that because there's a bunch of
people on the internet saying this is, what's the world's
first self driving car? And they're just wrong, wrong, wrong.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
Oh, I didn't know that people claim that.

Speaker 2 (41:20):
Yeah, wrongly? What about what about Mexico? Chuck, because it
turns out that Mexico and the beetle go hand in hand.
I didn't know that, though, Oh you didn't know that. No,
I mean, I know, I didn't. I'm not going to
even try to bs my way out of it. I
did not know that.

Speaker 1 (41:37):
I am surprised that you've been to Mexico City and
that you did not notice the inordinate amount of VW
beetles driving around.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
I just saw forest.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
Yeah, that's what I was kind of one of the
things I was looking forward to when I went to
Mexico City for the first time because I heard they
were just like VW beetles everywhere, and there are because
they were made there until two thousand three, which is remarkable.
Like you can buy a two thousand and three you know,
final year edition Mexican Volkswagen Beetle. I went online immediately,

(42:12):
and like you can buy one for like fifteen grand
that I saw that was looked to be in pretty
good shape. And that's kind of all I want now.

Speaker 2 (42:19):
Okay, good to know somebody's got a birthday coming up
in Yeah. They they actually the factory in Pueblo, Mexico,
which was the first plant outside of Germany, or the
largest plant outside of Germany. It outlasted the one in Wolfsburg,
I think the one in Wolfsburg shut down or the sorry, yeah,

(42:42):
the one it was in Stuttgart, the Wolfsburg plant in
Stucart it shut down in nineteen seventy four, and like
you said, the Mexican plant kept going until two thousand
and three.

Speaker 1 (42:52):
So amazing.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, and again they stopped selling new beetles in the
States in nineteen seventy nine. But Latin America is like,
we still love them, so keep them coming Mexico in
Mexico staid right.

Speaker 1 (43:03):
On, Yeah, for sure. I mentioned earlier sort of the
dune buggy conversion that some people have done. The initial guy,
I guess, or I don't know if he was the
first one, but the guy that really got famous for
it was a California kind of car guy and racer
named Bruce Myers, and he was a dune buggy guy.
He built a kit car using a beatle chassis and

(43:24):
kind of reconfigured the shell. If you've ever seen like
Wonderbug the Sid Marty Croft show from the nineteen seventies,
it's that kind of dune buggy. But it was called
the Myers Manx, very very popular, especially in California. After
he won the Baja one thousand and one of those
in nineteen sixty seven. And I went to the Myers

(43:45):
Manx website. They are building a new one, the first
one in decades. It's called the Manx two point zero EV,
and it is did you see this thing?

Speaker 2 (43:54):
Yeah? I did. They're amazing.

Speaker 1 (43:56):
Oh man. I immediately was like, should I put a
deposit down on this thing. It's like five hundred bucks
to put down a deposit, right, seventy four thousand dollars
starting price. So I immediately was like, oh, I don't think so,
all just admire them.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
Right, Yeah. They had another one. I can't remember what
it was called, but it was like one hundred and
twenty five grand starting or something. These are like these
are like doom buggies, electric doom buggies essentially, and I'm
not sure that they go off road. I didn't have
that impression.

Speaker 1 (44:26):
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean I think it's gonna if
it's a Manx, it'll it'll do all you want.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
Okay, Well, it's good.

Speaker 1 (44:31):
So it's got a pretty it's because it's so small,
it's gonna have a limited range, like one hundred and
twenty five miles. But if you're a listener out there
and you end up getting one of these, I will
meet you wherever you are in the United States to
ride around in it with you. Oh cool, you go
putting out that offer.

Speaker 2 (44:45):
Right now, I think we should talk about a few
a few stats, a few records that VW put out. Sure, Well,
one thing was that they they kept kind of upgrading
or updating or tweaking the in all sorts of ways.
But if you really look at the first Bug that
came out in the forties and you look at the

(45:06):
Bugs that were produced until two thousand and three, they
don't look very different. It's essentially the same car, which
is why it's considered the longest selling car of all time.
It's the greatest selling of all time. I think they
sold a twenty one million plus Beetles over the production run.
But it's like it was essentially the same car, and

(45:28):
so they would tweak it and release these limited editions
once in a while. One was the Sports Bug, one
was a bi Centennial Bug, and then there was one
that came out in nineteen seventy seven called the Champagne Edition.
And I looked into these and it seemed like maybe
they had like a different exclusive paint color, or there
was a slight tweak to the trim package or something.
The Champagne Edition came with a coke mer and a

(45:50):
vacuum shaped metal straw, but other than that, they seemed
like just regular Beetles. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:56):
I mean, it was a convertible, but there were other convertibles.
I always wanted a convertible to because you know, back
in those days with the Beatles, it was just like
a couple of twists of a knobs and then you
manually just sort of threw it back over your head.
Never was able to get a convertible, You're right about.
The body style never changed. The tail lights would change

(46:16):
shape a little bit here and there, and that's kind
of one of the ways you could tell what year
it was. Okay, but other than some sort of headlight
tail light stuff, it was basically the same shape. Even
through the Super Beetle. They might have been a slightly
different shape. They were a little bit bigger, I think, yeah,
but not much because I had a super Beetle and
it's not like it was roomy, you know.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
Yeah, And you had to be paying attention to probably
spot the difference between a beetle and a super Beetle
unless they, yeah, park next to each other, you know.

Speaker 1 (46:43):
Yeah, for sure. But VW Beetle owners and are still
very much known for being very into them and sort
of knowing that kind of stuff is sort of like
it wasn't just a car usually, it was like something
that you adored and we're into and you could get
parts cheap, and you know, generally work on it yourself,
because when you looked at that engine, it looked like
it had like nine or ten parts totally. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
Yeah, And apparently VW dealerships kept all parts in stock
from all years. Essentially they had huge, huge stockpiles apart,
so you could always be like, well, I can at
least go get this thing fixed pretty cheaply.

Speaker 1 (47:18):
Yeah, for sure, and we should probably close with a
car that you owned, or at least a bought that thing, right.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
Yeah, that was Yumi's car, the new Beetle. Yeah, it
was cute.

Speaker 1 (47:28):
Didn't surprise me. It was super cute and it just
fit you mean to a t.

Speaker 2 (47:32):
I think, yeah, she would do donuts in that thing
all day long. It had the best like turn radius.

Speaker 1 (47:39):
Oh really really, I mean yeah, it.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Would turn fine. But she didn't actually do donuts as
far as I ever knew.

Speaker 1 (47:47):
No, no, no, I knew that part was true, but
I thought it had like a noted turn radius or something. No, okay,
you just got me on that.

Speaker 2 (47:54):
I did. But one thing it did have, Chuck, was
a little vase, a little flower vase next to the
steering wheel. Do you remember that.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
Yeah, it's very cute, and they I think they look
pretty cool. I wish they would have made it a
little more traditionally looking like a bug like. The couple
of things that bothered me, and this is nitpicky as
a beetle guy, was the flush headlights and the flush
tail lights. I always love that they stuck out before.
But aside from that, I think they honored it quite well.

Speaker 2 (48:22):
Yeah, they did an update in twenty eleven that I
thought was pretty cool too.

Speaker 1 (48:27):
I don't know if I saw that one. I'll have
to look that one up.

Speaker 2 (48:30):
Okay, so you look that up. I'm going to look
at the text of your square back Beetle station wagon. Yeah,
I'm going to look up that lemon that confusing lemon
add okay, And there might have been something else, so
I'll have to go back and re listen to this.

Speaker 1 (48:47):
Well, I got one more quick little thing because if
you have ever been in a Beetle or owned one,
and this is something I didn't know until Day pointed
this out, there's a very particular smell that when I
stick my head in a Beetle, it's just like it
zaps me back. It smelled like no other car made
on the interior, and apparently that came from the cushioning

(49:09):
of the seats. It was made out of coconut hair,
and I remember seeing that coconut hair like falling out
from under my seats and stuff, But I never knew
that was what the smell was due to.

Speaker 2 (49:19):
Did it smell like coconuts or it just had this
distinct smell.

Speaker 1 (49:22):
Just a distinct smell. I think it was the vinyl
combined with that coconut hair. It was just super super distinct.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
Very nice. Well, I guess, well, Chucks, do you have
anything else?

Speaker 1 (49:33):
No, that's it.

Speaker 2 (49:33):
Well, since Chuck started nostalgizing, then he just accidentally triggered
listener mail.

Speaker 1 (49:40):
That's right. I'm gonna call this, I guess a follow
up on Madman Mounts because this is a pretty fun email.
Hey guys, A big fan of the show. I was
very excited listening to the topic on eight tracks and
was thinking silently, they better mentioned months. They better mentioned
months because Earl Madman Muntz was born here in Elgin, Illinois.

(50:03):
He led a very colorful life, and his part of
the A Trex story is only small portion of that wildlife.
He was an innovator in giant screen televisions, cellular telephones
for cars and satellite receivers. He started as a car
salesman and this is the basis of the typical crazy
used car salesman thing. And one of his slogans was,
I buy them high and sell them low. It's more

(50:23):
fun that way. Don't tell missus Munts. And she pointed
out he failed to mention what Missus Munds he was
talking about, because I think he had seven wives.

Speaker 2 (50:37):
I think I saw that when we were doing the
eight track research. What that ad no, that he had
had seven marriages.

Speaker 1 (50:46):
I think, yeah, you know, I'm not one to blame
a divorce on a person, but if you've been married
seven times, you may be the problem, you know.

Speaker 2 (50:54):
Sure he would.

Speaker 1 (50:56):
Smash cars with sledgehammers, where a tricorn hat with red
long John's So he was you know, he was supposedly
invented the wacky car salesman guy routine.

Speaker 2 (51:07):
It's pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (51:08):
So mad been months will be the subject of the
Elgin History Museum's podcast Echoes of Elgin on August first
of this year. If you want to learn a little
bit more, and this is coming from Rebecca Miller, who
is the museum educator at the Elgin History Museum.

Speaker 2 (51:26):
Very neat. Thanks a lot, Rebecca Chuck. I have to
say I have a terrible feeling that we're going to
get a lot of follow up emails saying it's pronounced Elgin.

Speaker 1 (51:35):
Oh is it Elgin?

Speaker 2 (51:36):
I don't know, but I could just totally.

Speaker 1 (51:38):
See it all right, Well, just pretend I said Elgin.

Speaker 2 (51:41):
If that's the case, we'll have Jerry go edit hard
g's into all the time, she said Elgin.

Speaker 1 (51:47):
Yeah, instead of giving her full read, I'll just go, yeah, Jerry, Yeah,
just lace that in.

Speaker 2 (51:53):
If you want to be like Rebecca and bring us
up to speed on somebody we just kind of mentioned
but really walked past. Love that kind of thing. You
can do what Rebecca did and send us an email.
Send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot.

Speaker 1 (52:10):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.