When I’m Sixty-Four...
The success of the Volkswagen Beetle was referred to as the economic miracle in Germany, and we can’t think of a better way of putting it. The rapidity of the escalation in sales was, quiet frankly, mind-boggling. How ironic that shortly after the end of WW2, two leading automotive companies at the time had been invited to take over the production of the unorthodox car but saw no future for it. Ford and Rootes were basically offered the VW free of charge but they dismissed the car in short order.
The British Military Government had been in control of the VW factory at Wolfsburg since the end of the war and planned to pass it back to Germany as soon as the time was right. The first step to this was finding and appointing the man they felt would be able to take the company forward into the future – Prof. Dr.-Ing. Heinrich Nordhoff. He took office as General Director on 1 January 1948. At this time Volkswagenwerk GmbH employed 8,719 workers who by the end of the year had produced 19,244 vehicles. By the time Colonel Charles Radclyffe signed the trusteeship over to the federal German government on 8 October 1949, production had risen to 46,154 vehicles.
Success Story
Already proving to be the right choice, Nordhoff continued to administer VW’s rapid rise in production and sales. The
