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Witness History: The Major and the VW Beetle

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The Major and the VW Beetle

06/03/2020 GMT

BBC World Service - Witness History, The Major and the VW Beetle

How a British army officer saved Hitler's Volkswagen Beetle at the end of World War Two

How a British army officer saved the Volkswagen factory in Germany after World War Two, and the Volkswagen Beetle, which would become one of the most successful cars of all time.

The story of how a car that had originally been the idea of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was saved by a British army officer at the end of World War Two. In August 1945 the British Army sent Major Ivan Hirst to take control of the giant Volkswagen plant in Germany, built under the Nazis to produce 'people's cars' for the German masses. Ivan Hirst persuaded the British authorities to allow production to restart of the Volkswagen Beetle, which Hitler had had designed before the war as an affordable car for ordinary Germans and which would become one of the most successful cars in the world. Louise Hidalgo has been listening to archive of Major Hirst talking about that time.

Picture: Major Ivan Hirst (right) driving the 1000th Beetle off the production line at Wolfsburg in March 1946 (Credit: Volkswagen AG)

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