Who owned volkswagon before volkswagon?

Answer 1

Hi, This how I understand the beginnings of Volkswagon. In the late 1930s, Adolf Hitler establishes a directive that Germans have an affordable "peoples car" a Volkswagen. This is pre WWII. A corp. is established to design and build the cars. The engineer Freidrich Porsche (yes, the designer of todays Porsche sports car) designs the car. German citizens buy stock in the Volkswaen corp. Germany goes to war and plans for the car stop so that military vehicles can be manufactured. Germany loses the war and all the people lose their stock investments. As part of the rebuilding of Germany (the Marshall Plan), many corps., including Volkswagen, start up to employ people. Freidrich Porsche's original design (looks like todays 911 sports car) is used with modifications. It is a very inexpensive rear-engine vehicle. Freidrich Porsche leaves Volkswagen to establish Porsche sports cars, uses modifications of his volkswagen design to produce what we call todays 911. Volkswagen buys Audi. Freidrich Porsche is given an honorary doctorate before he dies.


EDIT: Volkswagen is part of the Volkswagen Group, It always was Volkswagen.

VW Group consists of Audi, SEAT, Skoda, Bugatti, Bentley, as well as Lamborgini, and for about a year VW were making cars for Roll-Royce
Adolf Hitler was trying to create a technocracy. Every family in his utopian fantasy would have their own car. He contacted Ferdinand Porsche, an automotive engineer Hitler admired, and asked him to design a car that could be made quickly and inexpensively. Hitler told him to make his car streamlined, like a beetle, for he would find that the best designs are all from nature. Hitler had the entire Nazi apparatus behind him, as you'd expect, and one of its organs was "Strength Through Joy," the Nazi recreation services organization. In German it's called "Kraft durch Freude." They were given the task of selling what was named the "KdF-Wagen." At the time, Germany was pulling itself out of a depression and people didn't have much money, hence couldn't afford cars. The KdF leadership came up with a creative plan: the KdF-Sparbuch. Sparbuch means "savings book." Its pages had 200 little squares. A KdF-sparer--someone saving for a KdF-Wagen--would buy stamps for his book at five marks per stamp, and glue them into the book. When you filled the book, they would give you the car. No production KdF-wagens were made because before they could, Hitler had invaded Poland and all the auto plants in Germany converted to production of military vehicles. The German Army even grabbed the prototypes! After the war was over, they had a lot of problems in starting production. The first problem was the unexploded thousand-pound bomb that had crashed through the roof of the KdF-wagen plant in Wolfsburg and lodged itself between two irreplaceable machines. Once they got that out, they couldn't find anyone to take the plant. Ford didn't want it. The British said they should have set the bomb off. Eventually they DID find someone to take the plant and start manufacturing Volkswagens... Oh, and the KdF-Sparbuch? They finally decided to accept them at face value toward the purchase of a Volkswagen.