This week it is 75 years ago that the first post-war Volkswagen Beetle was built in Wolfsburg. An important milestone for one of the most iconic cars ever.
On the ruins of Nazi Germany, the Volkswagen factory was prepared for production in 1945 under British rule in Wolfsburg. The British initially saw car production primarily as a good way to put the German people to work and to make the British army more mobile. In Wolfsburg, the design drawings of the KdF Wagen were dusted and after a few adjustments it was decided that this should be the car that was to be built there.
On December 27, 1945, exactly 75 years ago this week, the first Volkswagen Typ 1 saw the light of day. The car that was built on a small scale under the Nazi regime years earlier, but was never sold in large numbers because of the war. The post-war ‘Beetle’ – as it would eventually be called by Volkswagen itself – was thus a fact. At the time, people would never have believed what a huge success it would be in the decades that followed. Beetles were built in Mexico until the beginning of this century. In Germany production had ‘already’ stopped in 1978. Overall, more than 20 million Beetles were built.
A few months after the start of production, the 1,000th Volkswagen rolled off the production line.
Earlier this year, we already discussed the post-war beginnings of Volkswagen and how it built the Beetle under the leadership of the British in the first years.