THE MISSING GERMAN LINK

In the aftermath of World War Two, many German car manufacturers lost their production facilities in the Soviet occupation zone. Among those was Stoewer, the old family company from Pomerania, perhaps best known for its elegantly over-engineered cars.

Szczecin is a city in north-west Poland, a harbour town linked to the cold Baltic via the Odra river. From 1713 onward, Stettin (as it was called) had belonged to Prussia, and was a major trading port and industrial centre. It suffered under Allied bombing from ordnance dropped before the planes reached the synthetic gasoline factory in nearby Pölitz, and in 1945 it became a part of Poland, as the country’s border was shifted west while land in the east was made part of the USSR.

Now, here I am, riding in a Stoewer, cruising the streets of Szczecin for the first time since the world’s most significant Stoewer collection was bought by the local transport museum. Muzeum Transportu i Komunikacji, financed by the local government, managed to acquire a collection amassed over several decades by a Stettin-born German, Manfried Bauer, who had devoted his whole life to the preservation