The Beetle had originally been planned as a prestige project of the National Socialists, but from 1939 onwards the Wolfsburg plant had produced armaments instead of passenger cars. Up to the end of WW2, only 630 units of the model (which had been renamed the KdF-Wagen, or Kraft durch Freude – Strength through Joy – in 1938) had left the Volkswagen plant, none of them destined for the German public.
As a former armaments plant, the factory was scheduled for demolition after the war. However, following the liberation of the plant, the Americans had established a workshop there. When the British entered their zone of occupation in June 1945, they took over the trusteeship of Volkswagenwerk GmbH and assigned 28-year-old Major Ivan Hirst to Wolfsburg. ‘Initially,’ Ivan Hirst said, ‘my brief was very simple: go to Wolfsburg, find the factory and sit on it. They didn’t even say it was a
