The aggressive character of the famous German sports car, in a sort of sympathetic magic, often transfers itself to owner-drivers. The joke goes: ‘When you get into a Porsche, you feel you want to invade Poland.’ In this fascinating and meticulously researched book, Karl Ludvigsen investigates the genetic spiral that gave Porsche cars the character of weaponry.
All German manufacturers were forced to supply the Third Reich. The BMW-sponsored London Olympics 2012 were held on a site devastated by Luftwaffe planes powered by its engines. But the relationship between Professor Dr Ferdinand Porsche and Hitler, a motor-racing enthusiast, was altogether wider and deeper: the engineer put his design expertise exclusively in the Führer’s service, though only after rejecting an offer from Stalin to become the Soviet Union’s ‘car czar’.
Porsche, technically what we would nowadays call a Czech, was an outstanding representative of the Austro-German engineering tradition. While Britain’s great designer-engineers have been idiosyncratic outsiders, Porsche was at the centre of a vast and disciplined caliphate of industrial alliances. He worked variously for Daimler, Steyr and Mercedes-Benz. His technical genius was considerable: his first car, designed for Lohner, had electric motors integrated into the wheels, a solution that would be remarkable today. But this was 1906.
His first meeting with Hitler was in 1926, when young Adolf introduced himself at the German Grand Prix, a race won by a Porsche-designed Mercedes-Benz. The formal meeting came seven years later. Hitler, to put it no higher, enjoyed technocratic symbolism and saw in Dr Porsche a rich source of it. Porsche became a member of the Nazi party in 1937, but this seems more professional opportunism than political conviction. Still, he returned Hitler’s compliment by designing the astonishing Auto-Union Grand Prix cars. At the same time, to motorise the Volk, he created the Kraft-durch-Freude-Wagen, or ‘Strength-Through-Joy Car’.
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