The Army era
This year (2019) marked 70 years since Volkswagen was handed back to the German people by the British Army. You may think we’ve got our arithmetic slightly wrong there because surely VW set out on its own when Heinz Nordhoff became its boss at the beginning of 1948? However, it really was in 1949, on October 8 to be exact, that the British Military Government, established after WW2 to return some order to the defeated and ruined country it controlled, transferred trusteeship of Volkswagenwerk GmbH to the Federal Republic of Germany. The civilian West German state had only been formed itself a few months previously and passed on the responsibility for VW’s administration to the regional Lower Saxony authorities. The company would remain nationalised until privatisation in 1960.
Remains of the day
“it could not fail even if you put the biggest fool you could find in charge, it would have still worked”
Major Ivan Hirst, of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME), is the man now most associated with saving the immediate post-war Volkswagen and pointing it down the
