Vintage view: Ferdinand Porsche’s VW Beetle

There are few profiles more instantly recognisable than the beaky over-bite of this motor vehicle.

The most manufactured car in the world, following a single design , the VW Beetle or Kafer is a mechanical and social icon, running all the way from the Nazis to the noughties.

It’s a measure of its appeal that something with the fingerprints of Adolf Hitler and a design by a plagiarising, morally indifferent, card- carrying member of the SS, could take the world by storm.

Czech-born Ferdinand Porsche (1875-1951) was required by the Fuhrer to present an economy car for the masses of the Third Reich. His fame followed on his success with the Lohner-Porsche Mixte Hybrid in 1899, the shaping of which can be seen in a roofless VW Beetle chassis.

With no formal engineering training, Porsche had brought to market the first petrol/electric car and the designs were later studied by NASA in its deployment of a lunar buggy.

His exquisite racing cars created in the 1920s with Austro-Daimler and Daimler Moteren Gesellshcaft in Stuttgart (later to morph into Mercedes-Benz), cemented his position as the leading automotive designer in the empire.

In 1931 Porsche and his son Ferry, set up Dr Ing hc F Porsche as part of an alliance with other car makers, formed in the pressure cooker of the depressed German economy. It led to his handshake with the Nazis, and his abandonment of even his own citizenship.

In 1933, Hitler, in a blustering speech as German chancellor at the Berlin Motor Show declared he wanted to motorise the country. The following year, Porsche won the contract for the motor for everyone “auto fur jedermann”.

Three prototypes of the type 12 were produced and known to be in working order in 1932. All were lost during the vengeance bombing of Stuttgart by the Allies in 1945. We can only imagine the value of one of these cars turning up in a dilapidated German barn today.

Despite the appeal of its striking ‘kraft durch freude-wagen’ ‘strength through joy wagon’ (Hitler’s Kdf) the shape of the Kdf-Wagen was hardly new.

To this day the whole issue of originality remains an uncomfortable moment in the Porsche opus. Ferdinand Porsche cooled the naming of his vehicles to the ‘people’s car’ (Volkswagen).

Sensing the enthusiasms of the Fuhrer, he boldly borrowed from the concept work of a Jewish-Hungarian designer Joseph Ganz, and the cars of Czechoslovakian manufacturer, Tatra.

The ultra streamlined Tatra V570 with its rear mounted, air-cooled flat-four engine designed by Hans Ledwinka and Paul Jaray in 1931, shows a Beetle in everything but the point of the bonnet, the lack of running boards and with the addition of rather dolphin-like rear fin.

The shape was based on a tier of aeroplane wings which not only spliced the air efficiently but added a jaw-dropping elegance to the car. Hitler had toured around his newly purloined lands in Czechoslovakia in a series of Tatras, so he was highly familiar with the firm’s cars.

The Tatra V97, a powerful, heavy, more middleclass object that the VW Series produced between 1936 and 1939, really gives pause for thought.

Despite their formerly cheery association as cogs in the Nazi machine, the flattery by Porsche in the VW that appeared at the 1939 Berlin Motor Show went too far for Ledwinka.

Tatra sued Volkswagen for violation and infringement of patent policy. In Porsche’s defence, we can imagine that the prize for disappointing a small maniacal despot, may have revved his pen in the right direction.

Interrupted by the war, the suit rumbled on until 1967 when the matter was settled in favour of Ringhoffer-Tatra for 3 millionDeutschmark. He may have been immersed in his work, and indifferent to politics in the insulated manner of some creatives, but Porche’s role in the war was seminal.

Before gaining Hitler’s favour he was courted by Stalin, to head a new era of industrial design, only turning down that folio out of fear of its scale.

Porsche designed a range of Panzer and Tiger tanks, contributed to the V-1 Flying Bomb and was head of Hitler’s Tank Commission. Even the Beetle’s first role was as a type 62 kubulwagen (the bucket seat car), a modified military all-terrain vehicle for the Waffen SS and the Wehrmacht on the north African front.

In the form of the amphibious 166 Schwimmwagen, it could ford water, with the waves lapping its windowsills. Only 630 civilian cars made it out of the VW factory in Wolfsburg during the war.

An investigative commission of the Allies in 1945 imprisoned Ferdinand Porsche for 22 months and in 1996 a book by historian Hans Mommsen, brought the darker history of the VW Company to light.

It became known that Jews from Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen had worked in the factory in Wolfsburg.

The Tatra V97, did not survive the war, but the Beetle and its maker were just starting their journey into popular imagination.