Who has heard of Josef Ganz? No one, or almost no one. His name is forgotten, just as his work is forgotten. Yet without him, several generations would have driven differently. He was the creator of the most popular car of the 1950s, the father, so to speak, of the popular Beetle. This pleasant, durable and economical car even became a symbol of the hippie movement, which is actually strange given its origins and the desire of its creators to become the people’s car of Nazi Germany.
It is generally believed to be true that Adolf Hitler commissioned Ferdinand Porsche to develop a people’s car, or Volkswagen, with state money. What is less well known is that Porsche took the technical idea from a Jewish engineer, Josef Ganz. He himself developed the basic principles of the small car and promoted the idea for many years, even driving his successful prototype, the Maikäfer (May Bug), to Frankfurt in 1933 and presenting the German Volkswagen as a model accessible to all classes and suitable for series production.
Ganz and Hitler appeared on the scene almost at the same time, at a time when Germany was going through a severe economic crisis. Ganz advocated modern innovative cars as a replacement for the heavy and bulky cars of the established manufacturers, which were expensive and difficult to sell. But Hitler gave Germans hope that one day they would do better. The fact that Volkswagen was first conceived by a Jewish engineer did not stop Hitler from appropriating his idea and thus banishing Ganz from world history. Porsche, on the other hand, was given a place in history as a world-famous designer and carmaker, giving VW a magical status. But let’s be honest. Porsche has done its job very well and the quality of its Beetle cannot be faulted in the least.
Ganz’s name reappeared only a few years ago in the American magazine Automobile Quaterly. The authors mentioned that Ganz was the forerunner of Porsche and that he had developed the Volkswagen many years before it, with its typical features such as the engine in the rear of the car, the aerodynamic shape and the moving axles. What made Ganz fade into obscurity?
On the morning of 11 February 1933, the streets of Berlin were covered with a thin layer of snow. The roads were still icy and cars were driving slowly. This slowness was in stark contrast to the speed of the political events of those days. Twelve days earlier, an economically almost ruined Germany had received a new government – a Nazi Party government.
On 30 January, Adolf Hitler is sworn in as the new Chancellor. But 11 February was also a special day for both Hitler and Ganz in its own way, as it was the day of the official opening of the IAMA International Motor Show. For both men, this event was a moment of great success. Hitler wanted to open the exhibition with a speech in which he would announce the new government’s plans to motorise Germany as quickly as possible. Although he did not even have a driving licence, he was crazy about cars and an advocate of mass motorisation. At the beginning of February, the Ministry of Transport had already announced that, in future, small four-wheel cars could only be driven with a motorcycle licence. With this decision, Hitler made possible in just a few days what Josef Ganz had been advocating for a very long time.
For Josef Ganz, nine years younger, it was the crowning of five years of hard work. As an independent engineer and editor of the renowned Motor-Kritik, he set himself the goal of revolutionising the outdated and moribund German car industry with his ideas. For five years, he has been greying German manufacturers with his critical articles, claiming that their cars are expensive, clumsy, too heavy, unmanageable, unreliable and old-fashioned. He was accused by the manufacturers of sabotaging the car industry and his newspaper was called sensationalist.
Hitler saw a small Ganz car at the exhibition – the cheapest four-wheeler in Germany, which was supposed to be able to be driven with a motorcycle licence. The combination of a technically advanced Volkswagen and its corresponding legislation was so spectacular that the news went around the world. However, for this to have happened, it is necessary to understand the life of Josef Ganz, who was born in Budapest in 1898 to a German Jewish correspondent in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, originally from Mainz. Shortly after the birth of little Josef, the family moved to Vienna, the cultural and intellectual centre of Europe, where Josef saw the end of the horse-drawn tram and the first electric tramway. It was here that Siegfried Marcus made the world’s first petrol-engined car in 1870, although it was still some years before Karl Friedrich Benz and Gottlieb Daimler started mass-producing their models in 1890.
Josef Ganz was only 16 years old at the outbreak of the First World War and was not mobilised. But the war must have been interesting for him from a technical point of view. For the first time, new technical means, automatic weapons, tanks and aircraft, were used on a massive scale. In March 1917, he was assigned to the air force in Wilhelmshaven. While serving in the air force, he met Dr Michael Munk, a pioneer in the field of aerodynamics, and his account of the importance of aerodynamic lines is deeply etched in his memory.
The Ganz family has since moved back to Germany. After the end of the war, Ganz returned to Vienna and enrolled at the Technical College, later working in a chemical factory in Worms. As soon as he had enough money, he bought a motorbike, but cars were still out of reach. He took great pleasure in completely dismantling and reassembling the motorcycle several times, thinking of ways to improve it. Even then, it was not clear to him why cars had a motor at the front when it would have been logical to have one at the back. Cars were, after all, rear-wheel drive, and the long path of the drive axle from the front to the rear wheels caused a lot of friction and unnecessary vibration.
He was delighted to see the first post-war car show in Berlin in 1921, with the latest models from Adler, Benz, Daimler and Opel, as well as models from Laurin & Klement, Tatra and Puch & Steyer. Among all these classic models, there was only one that was radically different from the others and that made a great impression on the young Ganz. The Tropfenwagen was the name given to the car by the Rumpel Werke, after the ideal aerodynamic line of a falling drop of water.
At the time, Rumpel presented his model to the public for the first time, with its eel-like lines, slightly sloping windows and body-mounted headlights, large rear fins, rear-mounted engine and two moving colossuses. Although the Tropfenwagen was a large car, when Ganz returned to Darmstadt, where he had moved, he already envisaged it as a small car that anyone could buy and the maintenance costs should not be higher than those of the engine.
Josef Ganz the Sensationalist Motor-Critic
Already in 1924, he drew up plans for a small car with revolutionary innovations. But for a student without a break of steam, the project was not feasible. He applied to the patent office, but he didn’t have the money to pay for the patent, so his patent rights fell through. In those years, Germany boasted an economic conjuncture that benefited only the richest class. Class stratification was increasing, and this was also evident in the car industry. Cars were getting bigger and more expensive, and there were no technical innovations in new models that made them lighter, more reliable and cheaper. The articles that Ganz sent to various magazines seemed to fall on deaf ears.
Then the owner of Klein-Motor-Sport called him and offered him the position of Editor-in-Chief, with broad powers. The magazine was published irregularly and the number of subscribers had slipped to only three hundred. The first issue under his editorship was published in January 1928, with the title “For the German People’s Car” on the cover and a detailed analysis of the German car industry, where, unlike in America, the car was a luxury.
In America, Henry Ford introduced his Model T in 1908 and started mass production on a conveyor belt two years later. In Germany, however, cars were still assembled by hand. Ganz was constantly attending car shows, making new acquaintances and writing new articles, and the magazine was gaining more and more readers. In one letter, a reader from Berlin complained that the magazine could no longer be obtained half an hour after it appeared in a nearby newsagent’s, and within two hours it could no longer be bought anywhere in Berlin.
The owners were pleased with Ganz’s work, and the magazine was renamed Motor-Kritik. The frequent critical and even cynical articles about hopelessly outdated German models that Ganz published in Motor-Kritik caused a lot of bloodshed in the automotive industry; it was claimed that Ganz’s ideas could not be realised and that Motor-Kritik was a sensationalist magazine.
On 24 October 1929, just a few weeks after the closure of the Paris Motor Show, the world economy received a near-fatal shot with “Black Thursday”. Shares on the New York Stock Exchange fell so fast that the exchange had to close its doors due to a massive sell-off of shares. The stock market crash left many unable to repay their loans and one by one, banks and companies collapsed. For Germany, this was the time of the worst crisis.
The worsening economic situation meant that America stopped giving financial aid to Germany, at the very moment when Germany had to pay back very large amounts of reparations to England and France. After a few years of relative stability, Germany was once again in crisis. The German car industry found itself facing factory yards full of luxury cars that nobody could buy any more. As a result, there was a growing need for a small and affordable car.
A few years before the stock market crisis, Ganz sent his proposal for a people’s car to the Zündapp plant in Nuremberg, then the largest engine manufacturer. However, the crisis put all new projects on hold. It was also at this time that Ganz was sued by Mercedes-Benz for an unpublished article in Motor-Kritik magazine, in which he described their drastic price cut for the Stuttgart 200 as a sell-out.
A fierce controversy erupted and neither side wanted to give in. In the meantime, Mercedes-Benz’s largest shareholder had to intervene, convinced that the squabbles were damaging both parties. A settlement was reached, in which Ganz admitted that the Stuttgart 200 was not being sold off, but only mass-produced. Daimler-Benz bought back the entire, as yet unprinted, issue of the magazine with the “damaging reviews” and paid the legal costs. This should be the end of the matter.
Later, it turned out that the quarrels were not over. Ganz had some copies of this issue secretly printed and stored in his archives. Three years later, during a house search, the Gestapo got hold of them and used them as evidence that Ganz had blackmailed the car manufacturer.
A bug is born
Having received no reply from Zündapp, to whom he had sent his proposal for a people’s car, Ganz sent the proposal to DKW and Ardie. Both factories made engines and wanted to expand their production to small cars. Ardie gave Ganz the opportunity to start building a prototype of his car in their factory. Of course, he was not the only one working on small cars at that time, but everyone had technical difficulties in realising such a project.
So Ganz found himself in Ardie’s factory with a pile of plans in his hands. The chassis of the car had been made for some time and Ganz started the engine, despite the fact that it was written that this was not allowed in the factory. The small two-stroke engine roared, making a lot of noise and smoke. Ganz became even braver, sat on the bare chassis, with only two seats and four wheels attached, and took to the road. The ride was jolting and bouncy, but it heralded the birth of the people’s car – the Volkswagen. The unfinished car handled well and took all the bumps in the road in its stride. Ganz just had to make sure that the police did not see it, as the car had no number plate.
He couldn’t sleep at night from the excitement, because the driving was much better than he expected. The next morning, he found out that someone had taken unauthorised photographs of the prototype, which was parked in the factory yard. When the workers tried to find out who it was, the stranger quickly fled. So Zündapp’s competitors were not asleep. With the help of Ardie’s engineers, Ganz then added a rough version of the bodywork he had envisioned a few years earlier to the chassis. It was fitted with a large centre light and two small side lights on the side. The body was still open to make the car as light as possible. But Ganz was convinced that the future of Volkswagen lay in a closed body.
In the next issue of Motor-Kritik, which now has a print run of 13,000 copies, the new car is unveiled and the automotive industry is in an uproar. However, not everyone was enthusiastic about the innovation, as it threatened the production of large cars. But if it could still be produced at low cost, the manufacturer would have a very strong competitive advantage.
Ganz’s proposal to allow Volkswagen to be driven with an engine test was submitted by the RDA to the car manufacturers’ commission, which rejected it at Opel’s insistence. This was a heavy blow for Ganz, followed by Ardie’s decision to withdraw from Volkswagen production because of the risks and high costs. Disappointed, he turned to the Adler plant in Frankfurt with Ardie’s best recommendations. He was offered a well-paid position as technical adviser to ensure that the new models had everything that was technically advanced. Adler was also interested in Ganz’s small car and gave him the opportunity to build a prototype. Despite his new job, he was still able to stay on as editor of Motor-Kritik. He was then offered the same job by Daimler-Benz, and Ganz had three jobs at the same time.
Adler only partially implemented conveyor belt production, as the chassis were still transferred by hand from one end of the factory to the other, and then to other departments for final assembly. The most modern factories in Germany at that time were those of Ford and Opel, and from 1931 they were owned by General Motors. Ganz visited both factories to see how they worked. At Adler, he began to assemble his prototype in the same way as he had done at Ardie. At Adler, however, the chassis was fitted with the number plate IT-0444, so that Ganz could now drive at 60 km/h in the streets around the factory. The car was also fitted with a copper-plate horn with a large blower.
The only thing it lacked was an aerodynamic body shape. It would also not have doors, but only a body lowered at seat height. The Ardie-Ganz prototype was to be launched with an open body and only two seats, and Ganz planned to launch a closed-body car at Adler after two years of production. The new prototype was named Maikäfer (May Beetle) because it was built in May 1931, the month when the May Bugs start flying around. Wherever Ganz appeared with his May Beetle, a crowd of people immediately gathered around him.
Maikäfer was so short that he could have driven under the lorry without too much difficulty. Ganz told everyone, without reservation, that anyone could buy such a car for less than 1000 marks. This was a great novelty, because at that time German roads were practically empty and cars were a rarity. Even dairy farmers and bakers drove their products around in horse-drawn carriages. The Maikäfer thus quickly became the term for all non-standard light cars with a rear-engined engine. Soon afterwards, Zündapp and Daimler-Benz also announced that they were planning their own models similar to the May Beetle.
Jewish engineer
In the first weeks of November 1931, when Ganz presented his May Beetle in Motor-Kritik, Nazi Party sympathisers got their hands on a new edition of Die Nationale Front. Ganz had no interest in this insignificant newspaper, but an acquaintance drew his attention to a defamatory article in it and promised to send him a copy. It called Ganz a Jewish engineer and referred to Motor-Kritik as a poisonous excrescence.
When Ganz got his hands on the newspaper and started reading it, he froze. On the front page was a cross and a photograph of Hitler. He looked for an article entitled Motor-Kritik and read: ‘Frankfurt has always been a city of journalistic excesses. No wonder that within a few years a new quagmire had sprung up on this soil, the Motor-Kritik magazine of Josef Ganz, a Jewish engineer who had never proved his design skills, but who had taken to writing venomous reviews that were second to none.”
Josef Ganz was presented in this article as an enemy of German industry. “Josef Ganz systematically attacks one German factory after another until it redeems itself by paying for advertisements in Motor-Kritik. Another way for the factories to avoid his poisonous language is to give him a well-paid job as a technical consultant in their company. Then they have peace of mind as long as they pay him well. These Jewish reporters imagine that their scribbling will save German industry.”
Ganz feared that such articles would have a negative impact on his position as technical advisor at Daimler-Benz, and he could not afford to be criticised negatively. He wrote to the CEO of Daimler-Benz and asked him to decide how to proceed. The latter was honest enough not to want to break off his relationship with him, knowing that as a consultant he had made a major contribution to the great sales success of their Mercedes-Benz 170 model. This was good news for Ganz.
But the article in Die Nationale Front was only the beginning of a smear campaign. In the new issue of Motor in Sport, Ganz drew attention to an article entitled “The car of the future?”, which was full of cynical attacks on him and accused him of megalomania. The author thought that aerodynamic body design was only suitable for racing cars and was accused of sitting on several chairs as a technical consultant for several companies. The article ended by saying:
“Every day we receive letters and messages that prove over and over again the incredible harmfulness of Josef Ganz. The German people and the German economy want us to pour clean wine on him as soon as possible. We will continue to deal with this scandalous affair and, together with other newspapers, we will prevent this Jewish pest from doing his dirty work.”
Josef Ganz decided to take legal action and started gathering evidence, but neither party was willing to argue the case in court. A settlement followed, in which both newspapers retracted their claims in writing.
Meanwhile, Ganz at Daimler-Benz has been working for months to get his May Beetle into production. They saw the main problem here as whether they would be able to get such a car to market for the price of 1,300 marks, and therefore demanded a very precise cost calculation. Ganz set about doing the maths, and then patented all his innovations in England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and even in Japan and America. The only thing missing was a reliable car manufacturer, as Daimler was still hesitating.
Then he received a call from the director of the Standard Fahrzeugfabrik engine factory in Ludwigsburg. He knew the characteristics of the May Beetle and wanted to build a car just like it. In 1932, a licence agreement was signed to develop a people’s car based on Ganz’s patents. For each car produced, Ganz would be paid 15 Deutschmarks.
The first Standard prototype had a simple open body for two people. Test drives, during which 10,000 kilometres were driven on various roads and land, were uneventful. But Standard, to Ganz’s annoyance, demanded that the car should have a closed body. Thus, the people’s car did not have an aerodynamic line, but a semi-aerodynamic shape, like a rough beetle. The new model was called the Standard Superior and was to be unveiled at the Berlin International Motor Show in February 1933.
Josef Ganz travelled early from Frankfurt to Berlin on that cold February morning in 1933 and bought a newspaper at the station. It was full of news about Adolf Hitler, who had been sworn in as Chancellor of Germany two weeks earlier and had formed a coalition government. Ganz had many misgivings about the anti-Semitic Chancellor, but was positively surprised by the enthusiasm with which the new government set to work. One of the first measures was to declare that the government supported the motorisation of Germany, and the Ministry of Transport declared that it would be possible to drive motorcycles and small four-wheel cars with one driving licence. For Ganz, this was a godsend. Now there will be no more obstacles to building a standard superior based on his patents – a small four-wheel Volkswagen with an engine capacity of between 400 and 500 cm.
Of course, the new Chancellor was scheduled to open the Berlin Motor Show and the showroom was bustling with trucks unloading new models. Ganz’s open truck was one of the last to arrive from Frankfurt, with the standard superior safely stowed in a wooden crate. Ganz had the honour of getting in the car and driving it to his stand.
Suddenly, he noticed a Type 12 Zündapp on the side of the road, a prototype owned by Ferdinand Porsche, but larger than his model. So the competition is not sleeping, and that’s a good thing, he thought.
Hitler arrived accompanied by Hermann Göring, and Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, also appeared. In his speech, Hitler stressed the importance of passenger cars, whose sales were expected to increase as a result of lower car taxes, and promised financial support for racing cars. The procession, with Hitler at its head, then went on to see the exhibition and finally stopped at the small cars, including the Standard Superior. It was explained to Hitler that it was based on completely new technical principles and that it was the only one with a rear engine, developed by the engineer Josef Ganz.
After Hitler and his entourage had left, the gates were opened to visitors and a large crowd gathered around the Standard Superior. The exhibition was open for thirteen days and there was always a crowd around Ganz’s Volkswagen.
The Gestapo is knocking at the door
On the evening of 27 February 1933, firefighters received a call about a fire in the German Parliament. With sirens blaring, they rushed to the famous building, which was engulfed in flames. Hermann Göring was there, unusually quickly. The firefighters could have put out the blaze, but with Hitler still on the scene, the firefighting was stopped. Göring shouted excitedly, “It’s a communist uprising, they’ve just started it! We mustn’t miss a minute!”
And the Nazis really didn’t miss a minute. They took away a series of basic rights from citizens. They stepped up the hunt against communists and ‘enemies of the state’, the Dachau concentration camp opened its gates, anti-Semitic policies became state policy with a nationwide boycott of Jewish shops and the forced dismissal of Jewish civil servants. The glorification of “real” German heroes was also part of this policy.
In April 1933, a large rally was held in Mannheim to unveil a statue of Carl Benz, who had died four years earlier. Ganz was still free to attend as editor. SA troops marched past the statue, flags were waved and a procession of old and new cars and lorries followed.
In the turbulent days after the burning of Parliament, Ganz wrote an article about the Berlin show for Motor-Kritik. He was happy that he had got his way and that Standard Fahrzeugfabrik had just agreed to modify the bodywork, which had finally been given a sufficiently aerodynamic shape. One day at the end of April 1933, while he was away from the editorial office, there was a loud knock at the door and a voice: “Open up! Gestapo.”
Opened by the owner of the house. Two Gestapo officers stood at the door and demanded to be taken to the magazine’s editorial office. They also demanded access to the archives. There they began to rummage through the drawers and seemed to know what they were looking for. They took some documents with them and told those present that Josef Ganz and his colleague Frank Arnau were accused of blackmailing the German car industry and that Ganz had to report to police headquarters on his return.
The next day, Ganz turned up at police headquarters and learned that the accusation was based on an old dispute dating back to 1930 between Motor-Kritik magazine and Daimler-Benz. At the time, Benz had paid for an entire unprinted issue of the magazine, which accused it of selling off a model. Ganz had some copies of this magazine printed and these copies have now been found in his editorial office by the Gestapo. Ganz allegedly demanded at the time that Daimler-Benz pay him a hefty sum or he would publish the article. Daimler-Benz was thus allegedly forced to take Ganz and his colleague on as consultants and to give them a large salary. Ganz is now expected to reply to the accusation within a few days.
Meanwhile, the second accused, Frank Arnau, had already fled Germany during the night because he was a member of the Red Front, an illegal part of the German Communist Party, and knew that the Gestapo were looking for him. Before escaping, he had burned all the incriminating papers in a furnace, so that the Gestapo found only a pile of smoking paper. Only a few days after the Gestapo visit, Ganz received a letter from BMW, renouncing any cooperation with him.
For the next few days he worked as if nothing important had happened, preparing the next issue of Motor-Kritik. This issue must have somehow found its way onto Adolf Hitler’s desk, because he is supposed to have said to his adviser Jakob Werlin: “Damn it, is it not possible to build a car that is not more expensive than a heavier engine?”
He instructed the consultant to contact BMW, where they would “keep banging their heads on how to solve this problem”. Of course, the price of such a car would have to be under 1 000 marks, which made BMW despair. But Ganz still dreamed of being invited to join the consortium to build the car. Based on his experience with the Ardie-Ganz and Adler-Maikäfer prototypes, as well as the Standard Superior, he was already drawing up improved plans for the new Volkswagen. His proposal ended up containing seventeen pages of tests and drawings.
After watching the German Grand Prix in Berlin in May 1933, he returned to his hotel room to write a report for his magazine. Two men in black leather coats were waiting for him at the reception, arrested him and took him to the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. His day ended in a group cell where communists and other “enemies of the state” were waiting to be interrogated. He was interrogated for several days in a row, always on the same subject; the blackmailing of German car companies.
The Gestapo only handed him over to a German civil court after an acquaintance of his with Hermann Göring intervened. He was transferred to Berlin’s Moabit prison, where he waited for two weeks for the prosecution to gather evidence against him. Then one day the jailer opened the door of his cell and said to him, “You are free.”
But back home in Frankfurt, he was in for another unpleasant surprise. The owner of Motor-Kritik told him that he was being pressured and that, because of recent events, he had to be relieved of his position as editor of the magazine, but that he had no intention of giving up working with him. And so, after five years, the name Josef Ganz disappeared from the media. His articles still appeared in the magazine, but without his signature.
Meanwhile, the standard superior continued its triumphant way, taking part in numerous rallies. It covered 2,000 kilometres without repairs in the first one, was the best in the second 1,000-kilometre event and an enthusiast drove it for 12,000 kilometres in Switzerland. In the summer of 1933, this success led the Standard Fahrzeugfabrik to decide on a new version of the Volkswagen, with enough room for a family with two children, who would sit in the back on a small bench. So it said goodbye to the original two-seater model.
All that was needed was to improve its aerodynamic shape and it will be suitable for motorway driving. On 23 September 1933, Hitler planted the first shovel to build a real motorway between Frankfurt and Darmstadt. A photograph of Hitler with a shovel in his hand thus appeared on the front page of Motor-Kritik, where Ganz also presented his improved version of the Volkswagen.
Meanwhile, Hitler’s advisor Jakob Werlin tried to get support for the firer idea from BMW and Daimler-Benz, but ran into the same concrete wall as Ganz. The German car industry was not interested in innovation because it feared competition. It stubbornly insisted on developing its own conventional models of small cars at a price of around 1900 marks, as represented by the Mercedes 130H. This, of course, did not satisfy the dictator, who wanted a new, technically innovative model that would demonstrate the superiority of German science and technology – i.e. a model based on Josef Ganz’s designs.
Ferdinand Porsche appears
But Josef Ganz was of Jewish origin and his contribution to the German Volkswagen had to be kept quiet, especially since Jakob Werlin wanted to make Ferdinand Porsche the head of the National Socialist Volkswagen project. Ganz therefore received a letter from the Daimler-Benz factory, where he was still employed as a technical consultant, refusing to cooperate with him and demanding the early transfer of his patents to Daimler-Benz. Ganz, through his lawyer, appealed against the proposed early withdrawal of the patents.
While he was reflecting on how he had lost his posts as technical advisor at BMW and Daimler-Benz in a matter of months and how he had been sacked as editor of Motor-Kritik, Ferdinand Porsche sent his proposal for a German Volkswagen to the Ministry of Propaganda. He thought that it could be developed within a year and then tested, after which the German government would commission German industry to build such a car.
The International Motor Show in Berlin in March 1934 also showed that the trend was towards small cars. In his opening speech, Hitler pointed out that “it is ridiculous that thousands of brave and hard-working people cannot use the car as a means of transport”. The Standard Fahrzeugfabrik’s exhibition pavilion was also decorated with several-metre-long flags with a peg cross, and all models were presented, especially the Standard Superior as “the fastest and cheapest Volkswagen for a family with two children” for only 1590 marks.
Everyone at the show had to acknowledge the decisive role played by Josef Ganz in the development of small cars, as several manufacturers have already presented models based on his ideas.
One afternoon, however, the phone rang in the editorial office of Motor-Kritik and the Frankfurt police chief told us in a disapproving voice that the magazine was banned from now on. The ban is said to have come from the “highest circles”. In an article, Ganz is said to have made a disparaging remark about Hitler’s speech at the opening of the Berlin Motor Show, which is apparent from a letter from Jakob Werlin to the Berlin police.
A few days later, as Ganz was returning home in the evening, his sheepdog jumped out of his car and attacked someone hiding behind his garden fence with an iron bar in his hand. The stranger hit the dog on the head with the stick and ran away. Ganz later discovered some cigarette butts behind the garden fence, which proved that the stranger had been waiting for him for some time. He sent a report of the intended attack to the police, but was told verbally that they would not deal with the stories of a Jew. He was increasingly convinced that the Gestapo wanted to break him.
At the end of May 1934, the German car manufacturers and the Association of the Automobile Industry held a meeting and, despite strong reservations, decided to award the contract for the development of the German Volkswagen to Ferdinand Porsche. The major manufacturers were convinced that Germans’ incomes were still too low to buy a car and that the most suitable means of transport for this class were still the bicycle, the tram and the railway. But resistance was futile and the contract was awarded to Ferdinand Porsche.
Josef Ganz was unaware of these events and went on holiday to Switzerland to enjoy some peace and quiet after a busy few weeks in the company of a friend. On the second of July he read in the newspapers that Hitler had got rid of his rivals in the SA in a night of “long knives”. A special SS detachment had killed all the SA leadership, including the chief, Ernest Rohm. He telephoned the editorial office of Motor-Kritik to hear what was happening, but was advised to stay in Switzerland and cure his “pneumonia”.
At first he was surprised because he did not have pneumonia, but then he understood the message that it would be dangerous for him to return to Germany. The Gestapo wanted to arrest him on the night of 30 June.
Exiled abroad
He had no choice but to try to make a new life for himself in Switzerland, but he couldn’t do it without his many documents, which were left behind in Frankfurt. He decided to go secretly to Frankfurt, take the documents, plans and papers and return to Switzerland. He believed that the best time to do this would be the annual NSDAP party congress in September, when many people would be arriving in Nuremberg and border controls would not be so strict.
He was helped to return by an old friend who came to Switzerland with his car. On 5 September, they were already at the German border and nobody paid any attention to them. They arrived in Frankfurt in the evening without much difficulty and my friend went to his house to see if there were any Gestapo agents in the vicinity. Ganz entered through a side door, climbed up to the newsroom and began to collect in total darkness the documents that meant the beginning of a new life for him. In the morning, he wanted to withdraw his savings from the bank, but it was closed. He knew that he could not hesitate any longer and that he had to leave Germany immediately.
They spent the night in a village in the Black Forest, after checking that there were no Nazis there, and set off early in the morning for a minor border crossing. A few kilometres before the border, the car suddenly started coughing and the petrol gauge turned red. They were driving the last kilometres with great difficulty when the car stopped a few hundred metres before the border. Nothing helped, and they started to push it towards the Swiss border. The German guards looked at them suspiciously when they finally got it to the border.
The German guard did not let them in, but went to the phone and called his superior. After several minutes of tense waiting, he returned, lifted the barrier and let them into neutral Switzerland. They then pushed the car with the greatest of glee to a nearby petrol station. The two friends then said their goodbyes and Ganz was left alone in Switzerland. He met interesting people. A passing acquaintance told him that a group of SS assassins was circulating in Switzerland, Austria and Czechoslovakia with the mission of liquidating people opposed to the regime. Car accidents that were not, drownings where the victim defended himself, or jumps to his death from high floors were all traces of the work of the SS.
Ganz was scared. He was even more frightened when another acquaintance told him that he had befriended an SS man on the train who showed him a list of 2500 names. On the list, two crosses marked the persons who were to be arrested and sent to Dachau, and three +++ stood for the death sentence.
What scared him the most was the testimony of a German immigrant, Johann Danner, who was for a time the secretary of the infamous Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD security service. Danner had taken part in house searches in which various dangerous documents were “planted” and had helped to organise the murders carried out at Dachau. They used a poison made from proteins which, after twelve hours, caused a heart attack or brain haemorrhage and left no trace. As Danner no longer wanted to do this work, he was confined to solitary confinement for a month and then released. He took advantage of this to escape to Switzerland.
Ganz knew that as a German emigrant with no permanent address and a tourist visa, he was at risk of deportation. He moved to Liechtenstein, but after three months in Liechtenstein he was questioned by the police because his tourist visa had expired. He had to return to Switzerland. He did so at the last minute, because just a few days after he left Liechenstein, a German police agent came to the hotel where he was staying and asked for him. The hunt for the Jewish emigre was therefore already well under way.
Some time later, the German press reported that Porsche had won an order to develop a German Volkswagen. For propaganda purposes, the Association of Automobile Manufacturers protected the name Volkswagen with the patent office in Berlin, and the name subsequently appeared on all advertisements. Josef Ganz, as a “non-Aryan”, was stripped of all patents without much publicity.
However, he was convinced that his patents were at least valid in other countries. So in 1935, at the Geneva Motor Show, he noticed that the Czech manufacturer Praga had made unauthorised use of some of his patents in its new Baby model. Through his Swiss lawyer, he sought and obtained damages of 20 000 francs. But he had no peace in Switzerland either. One day, two Swiss police officers visited him because they had received a report from Germany that Josef Ganz was a fraudster and wanted to check up on the matter. Ganz knew he had to make a life in Switzerland, at least temporarily, and tried to get a Swiss manufacturer to back his plans for a small car. This is why the police extended his residence permit in Switzerland for one year.
In October 1938, a prototype of a two-seater Swiss People’s Car, similar to the standard superior model and named Silberfisch, was built and test drives began. Talks for its series production also began with the Rapid agricultural machinery factory in Zurich, which promised no more than 500 cars a year, far short of the German dream of a million-car production.
Of course, in Switzerland, they were keeping a close eye on what was happening with Volkswagen in Germany. There, on 26 May 1938, the foundation stone for a Volkswagen factory was laid in Fallersleben (later renamed Wolfsburg) in a bombastic ceremony. The first 20,000 VWs were due to roll off the assembly line in October 1939. The standard model could be bought for 900 marks, but a retractable roof would cost extra. Tens of thousands of Germans started to stick RM 5 marks in their savings books, as the car could not be bought for cash at the moment. But of course, none of them ever got the VW they wanted. World War II had begun and the factory that was supposed to produce VWs was now dedicated exclusively to war production.
Lawsuits and leaving Europe
Josef Ganz, meanwhile, was engaged in tiresome lawsuits against anyone who made unauthorised use of his patents. More and more people were involved in these disputes. The avalanche of lawsuits ended only in 1950, but it did not bring him peace. Some accused him of being a “stirrer of disorder and discontent”, others of being a Communist agent. In Switzerland, he had constant problems with his residence permit and was arrested several times. He was also in poor health, having suffered a heart attack in France. He was increasingly convinced that Switzerland was not the right country for him. Moreover, he was still afraid of former Nazi agents, as many of them had escaped punishment. He had thus become an old man in a few years of war.
One day he took a train to Marseille and in the summer of 1951 he took a Chinese ocean-going merchant ship to Sydney. The journey took two months. Among the hundreds of passengers who disembarked in Australia was Josef Ganz, a 53-year-old man seeking refuge from his troubles.
He first worked for Rubbertex Ltd. as a technician looking after safety systems on dangerous machinery. To the annoyance of his bosses, he spent long days wandering around the factory talking to the workers, so much so that many were convinced he was doing nothing. But after a while, they saw that these conversations led to very useful plans for simplifying work processes. Although he developed some very useful safety devices in the factory, his heart was still in car mechanics. So he went to work for the Standard Motor Company, where they mainly assembled models from their British sister company and adapted them for Australian conditions.
He later joined General Motors in Australia. However, he is still in litigation with German companies and the State over his lost patents. He was not a healthy man, survived several heart attacks and retired on a small pension. After his last heart attack, he was mostly confined to bed, trying to write and keep in touch with acquaintances in Europe. He died alone on 26 July 1967, just a few days before his 69th birthday. His extensive archive has decayed over the years.
The German factory in Wolfsburg was badly damaged by Allied bombers during the war, and in 1946, under British management, it began to build an almost unchanged pre-war Volkswagen. However, the first cars were destined for the British occupation forces and the German administration. After 1948, the Volkswagen factory achieved remarkable success. In 1955, the one millionth VW rolled out of the factory, and by 1961, six million had been built. The Beetle was a huge success – but with a complicated and sordid history.
