Hans Mommsen with Manfred Grieger, Das Volkswagenwerk und seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich. Duesseldorf: ECON, 1996. 1055 pp. DM 78 cloth.

Abstract

The name Volkswagen most readily conjures up images of the ubiquitous Beetle of the 1950s and 1960s, that symbol of postwar prosperity and mass consumption in Germany, of new leisure and mobility in the US, and of European competition with the once-dominant American automobile industry. But the Volkswagen automobile firm did not originate in the post–World War Two economic miracle. Rather, it was a creation of the Nazi regime and was intimately implicated in its consumerist fantasies, war economy, and slave labor policies. Hans Mommsen with the aid of Manfred Grieger has explored the Nazi origins and wartime practices of Volkswagen and its guiding figures, above all Ferdinand Porsche. This richly detailed investigation is a major contribution to our understanding of Nazi labor exploitation and the complicity of business in encouraging, designing, and implementing forced-labor practices. It is also a challenging argument about the irrationalities and inefficiencies of the fascist war economy and a complex illustration of the convoluted German path to mass consumption. The book illustrates how inextricably linked economics and politics were in the Third Reich for business as well as government, how closely modernity and antimodernity coexisted in the Nazi economy, and how complex the lines of continuity and discontinuity between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic are.