Wolfsburg Volkswagen Plant
The basis for this "people's car", the "Volkswagen" or simply VW, was the contract concluded on 22 June 1934, between the Reich Association of the Automotive Industry and Ferdinand Porsche's Stuttgart design office.The Nazi organization "Community of Strength through Joy" (KdF), part of the German Labor Front (DAF), took on the task of finding a suitable location for the production facility.The German automobile industry had no interest in producing the Volkswagen because it considered the price demanded by Hitler of 990 Reichsmarks (RM), equivalent to €4,688 in 2021, to be unrealistic.Under the supervision of DAF director Robert Ley, the "Society for the Preparation of German Volkswagens mbH" (Gezuvor) was founded on 28 May 1937, with its headquarters in Berlin.The location on the Mittelland Canal in the glacial valley of the Aller was found more or less by chance as a result of a trip by Lafferentz to the rural and sparsely populated area near the municipality of Fallersleben and Wolfsburg Castle with the Schulenbergische Gutshof estate there.[6] The three teams of architects Emil Rudolf Mewes (Cologne), Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer (Essen-Berlin) and Karl Kohlbecker (Gaggenau) were jointly commissioned to build the factory facilities.They designed the approximately 1.3-kilometre-long (0.81 mi)[7] factory front with a thermal power plant on the northern bank of the Mittelland Canal, and the new city was built on the southern side.However, there was no planned production of the KdF car (150,000 per year) because there was a lack of special machine tools due to the economy's preparation for war.With the outbreak of the Second World War, the production of civilian goods moved completely into the background and vehicles for the Wehrmacht and SS were produced in the factory: between August 1940 and April 1945, 50,788 Kübelwagen and an additional 14,276 Schwimmwagen (Type 166) were manufactured from autumn 1942 until after the last air raid at the beginning of August 1944, when Type 166 production could not be continued because important body presses were destroyed.[8] The V-1 flying bomb was manufactured in a "secret department" in the basement of Hall I. Volkswagen built wings, rudders and cabins for the repair of Junkers Ju 88 aircraft of the Luftwaffe.From 1940 to 1945, around 20,000 people had to do forced labour in armaments production at the Volkswagen plant, including prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates.In addition, production of the KdF car, henceforth called Volkswagen, began, while the other half of the 6,000-person workforce cleared away war debris.In 1963, due to the working and living conditions, a revolt by Italian guest workers resulted in one death, which led to police intervention.