Nazi Porsche

It is not only Tesla boss Elon Musk’s (neo)-Nazi salute that connects cars to Nazis. Historically, there were other car companies that were linked to real Nazis – Hitler’s Nazis, that is. One of such companies is Germany’s sports car maker Porsche.

Since the rather long and equally damning history of Porsche and the Nazis, Ferdinand Porsche is no longer a role model – if he ever was. Worse, there is way more than Porsche’s self-claimed “entanglement” into Nazism.

Only recently, a local citizens’ initiative in southern Germany has been calling for the renaming of the Ferdinand Porsche High School in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen – home to the Porsche’s factory.

The factory’s founder, Ferdinand Porsche (1875-1951) is one of the luminaries of German engineering history. Yet, in 1937, Porsche joined Hitler’s Nazi Party – his Nazi party no. was 5,643,287. Ferdinand Porsche – and this is an important point – also joined Hitler’s mass-murdering SS.

Historically, Porsche’s unusually high Nazi party membership number indicates that he is not an “Alte Kämpfer”. The Alte Kämpfer were those who had joined Hitler’s Nazi party during the 1920s. Instead, Ferdinand Porsche was a latecomer to Nazism.

Beyond that, Porsche developed a KdF car for a Nazi organisation called Strength Through Joy or Kraft Durch Freude.

One of these KdF cars mutated into Germany’s best-selling car during Hitler’s regime: known as VW Beetle. Yet, the car was originally developed by Josef Ganz.

To his Nazi masters, the Jewish inventor of the VW Beetle, Josef Ganz, was merely an Untermensch – a subhuman. It appears that Ferdinand Porsche might simply have stolen the design of Josef Ganz.

Back in today’s Germany, many streets and schools are still named after Ferdinand Porsche. The myth-shrouded image of Porsche has now been cracked.

In truth, Ferdinand Porsche was deeply involved in the crimes of the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Porsche was also considered Adolf Hitler’s favourite engineer.

Much of this has been known for a long time but it has failed to change the public perception of Porsche. This is also because there are repeated, and rather successful, attempts by the Porsche company itself to portray Ferdinand Porsche as apolitical.

Much of this fits to the fairly common post-Nazi myth invented in support of many ex-Nazis that re-entered Germany’s business apparatus after 1945.

The myth is that, Porsche – like so many others – had nothing to do with the Nazi ideology. Instead, in myth-making, Porsche’s work is presented as purely technical and should be considered completely detached from the Nazi crimes.

After 80 years, there is, finally, a fierce resistance to such misrepresentations – especially in Stuttgart. In the summer of 2023, a protest rally by the Neckartor citizens’ initiative was held.

It forced the local public prosecutor’s office into action. Before a Porsche shareholder meeting, activists had displayed a banner with the inscription:

Ferdinand Porsche Nazi & Concentration Camp Overseer War Criminal

Meanwhile, the group also campaigned for the renaming of the Ferdinand Porsche Gymnasium in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen.

Until today, Ferdinand Porsche – Not my hero remains their slogan. The motto also gave the name to a workshop on the Nazi history of Ferdinand Porsche.

One of the invited guest speakers at the workshop was professor Manfred Grieger – an historian with excellent knowledge of German corporate Nazi history. He was the chief historian of Volkswagen corporation until 2016.

The workshop discussed: Ferdinand Porsche’s role as Nazi party and SS leader. About the actual role of Ferdinand Porsche and Germany’s murderous Nazi regime, there is almost no dispute anymore today, the historian Grieger says.

It is not really concealed – but not publicly discussed and virtually unknown – that:

• Ferdinand Porsche was a member of the NSDAP,
• he held the title of SS-Oberführer and that
• he had requested concentration camp prisoners to work as slave labourers for the SS-Oberführer Ferdinand Porsche.

Of course, there is Porsche’s personal benefit: handsome profits from slave labour. Porsche was a favourite of the Nazi system. He was a member of the NSDAP and it was not merely an association as so often claimed. Porsche had joined the Nazis. He was a Nazi.

Beyond all that, the SS-Oberfüher also maintained a so-called informal relationship with Adolf Hitler – two friends united. Meanwhile, Porsche also played an outstanding role in the armament and economic system of the Nazis.

The Porsche company built military trucks and tanks that were used en masse. Porsche’s slave labour had to build them. Ferdinand Porsche’s concentration camp prisoners were forced labourers working for the Porsche company during the war.

Worse, SS-Oberführer Porsche had personally recruited these concentration camp prisoners. There was no flashing of the Porsche Company business card.

Instead, SS-Oberführer Porsche directly negotiated the slave labour deal with top-Nazi Oswald Pohl.

Dressed in sharp SS uniform, SS-Obergruppenführer Pohl was the boss of the rather innocently sounding SS Economic and Administrative Main Office.

Behind this lurks the main link between corporate capitalism and the Holocaust. He ran a brutal killer system known as Vernichtung durch Arbeit or extermination through labour.

Both SS-killer Pohl and SS-killer Porsche as well as the entire system of the business empire of concentration camps were at the core of the Nazi crime consisting of concentration camp prisoners and the exploitation and murder of Jews.

Ferdinand Porsche was a role model for that. The Herr SS-Oberführer was one of the key prototypes of the Nazi’s Führerstaat. He was instrumental in a system that meted out slave labour, torture, beatings, starvation, and mass killings.

Even decades after all that, the historical facts are still not enough for the Porsche company and many other companies in Germany to comprehensively distance themselves from their Nazi bosses and their crimes during the Nazi regime.

Protest rallies at Porsche’s shareholder meeting in 2023 did not help much either. As for Porsche, the business journalist Ulrich Viehöver was the first to prove that Porsche’s proximity to the Nazis was much closer than had been admitted up to that point.

Viehöver had substantiated that several hundred forced labourers worked in Porsche’s factory in the last years of the war.

Unsurprisingly, none of this is mentioned in the, still quite new, Porsche Museum. Plenty of critical questions – many from foreign media – are still ignored by the Porsche company.

Even today, German companies either sweep their Nazi history under the proverbial carpet or present it in a rosy way.

Most German companies, benefitting from Nazism, continue to hope that there will be an examination through time. The hope is that, over time, the issue of their Nazi profiteering might be forgotten. For decades, their corporate Nazi history is belittled as no more than a dark chapter.

Yet, much of this is also the history of forced labourers and the so-called Aryanisation (read: theft) of Jewish companies.

Denying the truth is particularly pronounced in so-called family businesses where today’s company owners like to see themselves in continuity with the – of course, always positive – history of their glorious companies.

Denying their very own Nazi past and the profits they raked in from that does not indicate any “Learning from the Germans” – as a recent book wants us to believe.

Meanwhile, one of Porsche’s standard slave labour barracks – at the Strohgäustraße 21 in Zuffenhausen – could still become a memorial. It is the last remaining place that “stored” forced labourers in Stuttgart – in inhumane conditions.

Up to 100 people lived in those barracks. Until last year, the last remaining barrack was still standing. Much of Porsche’s fame and fortune were in Nazi Germany.

Typically for the hallucination of the aforementioned book: Learning from the Germans, today the site is merely a parking lot.

From there, what the Nazis called human material was driven to toil for Porsche without regard to illness, deaths, and tears.

The forced labourers – their exact number is still unknown – suffered in a Nazi camp of several barracks, watch towers and deadly fences on the Schlotwiese district.

It was with horror that the Stolpersteine initiative for Zuffenhausen noted that the forced labour shelter was destroyed last year – the barrack at Strohgäustraße 21.

On questioning its destruction in September 2017, the response of local mayor Michael Föll (CDU) was short when saying, the demolition was carried out in agreement with the city. It does not appear as if the Germans had learned from their Nazi past.

Perhaps this was because Föll’s own CDU party once housed plenty of ex-Nazis, as for example: Castens (Nazi+CDU), Filbinger (Nazi+CDU), Globker (Nazi+CDU administrator), Kiesinger (Nazi+CDU), Oberländer (Nazi+CDU), Strauss (Nazi student fraternity+CSU). The list goes on.

In the end, SS-Oberführer Ferdinand Porsche signified yet another typical German Nazi company that got rich and famous on the backs of slave labour – a fact that companies like Porsche conveniently like to push aside. Perhaps no longer.

Born close to Germany’s Castle Frankenstein, Thomas Klikauer writes on managerialism, has over 1,000 publications, and a recent book on Alternative für Deutschland: The AfD.