In the 1950s, West Germany was a nation in flux, as it struggled,with the aid of a $1.39 billion handout from the USA via the Marshall Plan (equivalent to $24 billion today), to recover from the internal depredations of warfare brought about by Adolf Hitler’s psychotic delusions of grandeur. Thanks to the hard-working determination of its populace, and the astute leadership of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and, especially, his Minister of Economics, Ludwig Erhard, West Germany rebounded from devastation to economic dominance in Western Europe in little over a decade, via the so-called Wirtschaftswunder, aka the Economic Miracle.
Before this, just as in war-ravaged Italy and bombed-out Britain, postwar West Germany initially saw a significant hunger for cheap personal transportation, which meant a huge demand for whatever motorcycles could be produced by an industry struggling to recover in the aftermath of war. In many cases, this meant rebuilding factories which had been obliterated by Allied bombing – which is where that Marshall Aid money proved so useful. And one of the many firms which benefited from that was Victoria Werke AG, one of the country’s major motorcycle manufacturers, whose Nürnberg (Nuremberg) factory had been severely damaged in a 1945 bombing raid.
Like so many other firms, especially in England and Germany, Victoria’s entry into the motorcycle industry came in consequence of its foundation as a bicycle factory in 1886 by Max Frankenburger and Max Offenstein. It duly flourished, and by the time the partners built the first Victoria motorcycle in 1899, it was already one of Germany’s leading cycle makers. To begin with they used proprietary singlecylinder engines bought in from Fafnir, Minerva, FN and Zedel, but post-First World War, with its own powerplants, Victoria swiftly became one of the leading brands in the expansion of Germany’s motorcycle industry. Ironically, this meant building the first BMW-engined motorcycle before BMW did so itself.
The November 1918 Armistice and ensuing Treaty of
