Car Show! with Eddie Alterman · Pushkin Industries

From Business History: De-Nazifying the Love Bug: The VW Beetle Story Part II

·42 min·2 clips

Volkswagen's 1959 advertisement sold a tiny German car with the headline "Think small."

1. Business History's episode "De-Nazifying the Love Bug" traces Volkswagen from the 1945 destruction of Germany to the Beetle's postwar global expansion. 2. Hosts Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith connect Volkswagen's factory decisions to Allied occupation policy, German economic recovery, and American advertising. 3. The episode's central question is how a car commissioned under Adolf Hitler became associated with reliability, counterculture, and American individuality. 4. Henry Morgenthau's 1944 plan called for German industrial plants to be dismantled or destroyed within six months of the war's end. 5. British officer Ivan Hurst found roughly 70% of the Volkswagen factory intact and secured a British order for 20,000 Beetles. 6. Volkswagen fired 228 factory officials, while postwar workers faced about 1,000 calories per day and a severe winter in 1946. 7. Heinrich Nordhoff improved Beetle production after the 1948 introduction of the Deutschmark, which replaced the devalued Reichsmark at 10 to 1. 8. Volkswagen produced one million Beetles by 1955, while German living standards doubled during the 1950s economic miracle. 9. Doyle Dane Bernbach's 1959 "Think small" ad used empty space, a tiny Beetle image, and self-deprecating copy to challenge American car marketing. 10. Best for listeners interested in automotive history, postwar economics, and advertising strategy.

As heard by us

A postwar factory search exposes the moral compromises behind Volkswagen's return.

The Volkswagen factory story turns into a postwar hiring problem, with Ivan Hurst searching for someone credible enough to run the plant after Porsche and Piech are ruled out.

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Why you'd press play

You get a sharp Volkswagen-factory detour: Porsche's French talks collapse over wartime history, arrests follow, and Ivan Hirst weighs a hiring choice shadowed by Nazi-era compromises.

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