Builder of the Bug

"To be poor in the fullest sense," Volkswagenwerk's Heinz Nordhoff once remarked, "has certain compensations. It strips the soul clean." When he reluctantly took charge of Volkswagen's Wolfsburg plant in North Germany in 1948, Nordhoff and his company both had more than enough of such spiritual compensation.

Built by Hitler to turn out "people's cars," the Volkswagen factory made only 210 cars before it went into war production, and after V-E day it was a shambles, 60% destroyed by Allied bombs. Nordhoff, too, was part of the postwar wreckage--a lifelong German automan who, because he had manufactured trucks for the Wehrmacht, was forbidden to work in the U.S. zone at anything except manual labor.

At the urging of British occupiers, Nordhoff moved into their zone to try to restore auto production and employment in the depressed Wolfsburg area of Lower Saxony. Had the British foreseen how Nordhoff would drive their own cars off the export markets, they might never have given him the job. By last week, when Nordhoff died of a heart attack at 69, Wolfsburg had grown from a hamlet to a bustling city of 85,000 as home base for West Germany's largest industry. With assembly plants from Africa to Australia, the bug was the new Model T, a ubiquitous symbol of the West German economic resurrection. Although Italy's Fiat last summer overtook VW as the world's fourth biggest automaker (behind the U.S. Big Three), Volkswagen's total sales last year reached $2.3 billion, even after the West German recession of early 1967 forced a temporary 25% cutback in domestic production. Soon, the 14 millionth beetle will roll off VW's assembly lines.

Only Passion. Volkswagen's massive contribution to the postwar economic recovery that West Germans refer to as the Wirtschaftswunder was almost exclusively the work of Heinz Nordhoff, a courtly engineer whose only passion, he once said, was "to build cars, sell cars and build cars." The son of a Hildesheim banker, Nordhoff served long enough in World War I to be shot in both knees. In 1925, he took an engineering degree from the Polytechnic Academy in Berlin and began his career by designing aircraft engines in Munich. Joining Opel, General Motors' subsidiary, in 1929, Nordhoff worked as a sales director, traveling occasionally to the U.S. to study American production methods and spending his vacations on Opel's assembly line.

In 1940, he got the big job of running Opel's new truck factory in Brandenburg, largest in Europe. Though he turned out 3,000 to 4,000 trucks a month for the wartime German army, he refused to join the Nazi Party. Even so, U.S. occupiers after V-E day decided that he had risen too high as an executive under Hitler, and effectively canceled his career--until the British invited him to Wolfsburg.

"A Poor Thing." Nordhoff accomplished his miracle at Volkswagen mainly by his love and knowledge of his business and an endless capacity for work. On a seven-day week, with only a few hours off for sleep, he started with 7,000 workers, and, after weeks spent clearing the rubble, began turning out the prototype bug designed before the war by Ferdinand Porsche. The product, he knew, was "a poor thing, cheap, ugly and inefficient." Its engine would expire after 10,000 miles, its brakes and springing were atrocious.

Nordhoff had his designers revamp the old model, ordered some of the original Porsche designs redrawn ten times. He boosted horsepower in the rear-mounted, air-cooled engine, installed hydraulic brakes and shock absorbers.

Under what he called pressure-vacuum production, Nordhoff kept materials flowing heavily into his plant and insisted on immediate delivery of cars to customers. The combination, he believed, exerted psychological pressure on workers to produce faster. In six months, production almost trebled to 1,800 cars a month.

Although Volkswagen over the years modified virtually all of the bug's components and introduced new models such as a microbus and station wagon, Nordhoff held to his proven formula of keeping the basic VW's lines unchanged from year to year, thus improving resale value. Last spring, his own Wirtschaftswunder long since accomplished, Nordhoff announced that he would retire at the end of 1968, and in a typically efficient manner said he intended during his last months at VW "to put my house in order." He thereupon groomed Kurt Lotz, former chairman of a Mannheim electrotechnical firm, as his successor. Last week, upon Nordhoff's death, Lotz immediately took over the Volkswagenwerk.

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