A new era dawns
“Give me ten years, and you will not recognise Germany again!”
Hitler’s prophecy had fulfilled itself in the most gruesome manner possible by 1945. At the end of a merciless war, the world mourned the deaths of fifty million people. Germany was one vast heap of rubble, its cities destroyed, its industry buried in the ruins and its population in dire straits. Six million of them had failed to survive Hitler’s policies of genocide.
When at long last the gun smoke and dust began to clear, and mental desperation gave way to more sober considerations of how to survive, life began to stir again in the ruins. Machinery was dug out and cleaned, wheels began to turn on the roads and railways and an occasional factory chimney emitted a plume
of smoke. Regardless of what was inscribed on the company’s nameplate, its remaining employees set to and produced what people needed: grist mills and handcarts, hoes and cooking pots. The motor-vehicle industry was no exception, though its initial task proved to be repairing an assortment of vehicles in order to keep them mobile. The occupying powers encouraged this task: wrecked cars were collected and repaired as a means of getting local administrations moving again, and even a few private customers brought their cars in to be patched up. At two places in Germany, new cars were being built before the end of 1945: at VW in Wolfsburg and at BMW in Eisenach. Mercedes-Benz, Opel and Ford restarted production too in the years that followed.
But much of what had formerly been an automotive industry had ceased to exist. Its machines and equipment had been dismantled and taken away. The Kadett assembly line from Opel in Rüsselsheim, the engine production plant at BMW in
Munich suffered this fate. Farther to the east, however, in East Germany or what was now the Soviet Military Zone, complete factories were requisitioned. Horch and Audi in Zwickau, DKW in Zschopau and Wanderer in Chemnitz: they were all stripped bare, down to the last electric light switch, door and window frame. Where once the assembly lines had hummed with activity, there was nothing but bare walls and floors. The automotive industry in Saxony alone had to deliver 28,000 machine tools as reparations.
This scorched-earth policy was effectively a deathblow for Auto Union. To make matters worse, the occupying powers had the company’s name erased in 1948 from the trade register in Chemnitz. This was surely the end for Auto Union.
However, many of its former senior executives had already found each other again in South Germany and were negotiating
with the banks for loans and with local authorities for potential factory sites, so that Auto Union could be resuscitated somewhere in the zones occupied by the Western powers. After a year, these efforts bore fruit, and in 1949 Auto Union celebrated its recall to life in the Bavarian town of Ingolstadt. In the same year, the first new vehicles began to leave what were still temporary production buildings.
Many former employees followed the “Four Rings” from Saxony to Bavaria, inspired by the notion that Auto Union could shine forth once more in its original glory. But at the group’s previous headquarters in Chemnitz, later to be renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt, but also in Zwickau and Zschopau, something of the original company floundered along as an industrial management undertaking, the “Industrieverwaltung Fahrzeugbau” (IFA). Ninety percent of the IFA’s research and development staff consisted of former Auto Union employees. This is where the
basic technical and design principles for the German Democratic Republic’s automotive industry were formulated, developed and in due course took to the road.
The hardships of the immediate post-war period were gradually overcome. Many scars healed, many memories either faded or were suppressed. What remained was the sadness of people forced apart by a divided Germany, despite all hopes that this might be of short duration. Mobility was the dream in both German states, severely limited in one area, almost boundless in the other. West of the River Elbe, the car population rose with almost unbelievable speed, in the East, a waiting period of ten years or more for a new car soon became commonplace. Condemned to persist with the two-stroke engine and to suffer a series of interminable shortages, the automobile industry in what had formerly been Saxony found itself increasingly incapable of complying with international standards.