Nazi Involvement Volkswagen

People that are not familiar with Volkswagen may think that the only reason that it was made by Hitler was so that it financially supports the Nazi party. However, the main purpose was to help increase the overall morale and support toward the Nazi party. For a total of, almost eighty years, Volkswagen and its automobiles have been one of the few points of national pride for Germany. People believe that the way the Germans nationalism was impacted though Stuart Halls model which states, "The state is a historical phenomenon, it is a product of human association- of men and women living together in an organized way; not of Nature. Thus, there have been times when 'the state' as we know it did not exist” This basically means that Germany would not exist today if Volkswagen did not bridge the gap between the societies interest which was the automotive industry at the time and the Nazi party or vice versa., it is said that one of Hitler's minister of propaganda Joseph Gobbels obsession which he used to try to create a nation of a pure race and to build national identify. Also, volk meaning everything for the country or all for one mentality. However, there are many contradictions which would dismiss the strong relationship with the cars and the German people. Nevertheless, this connection between Volkswagen and German kept the national identity very prevalent during the 3rd Reich.

The German labor front was a National Socialist labor organization which had replaced various independent trade unions in Germany after Adolf Hitler's rise to power. These were set up because the people wanted to have better working conditions and this led to relatively high set wages and security of employment, and dismissal was increasingly made difficult. the DAF had 35,000 full-time employees by 1939. To help Hitler keep his promise to have every German being able to buy an affordable Volkswagen the DAF had helped subsidize the construction of an automobile factory, which was partially paid from worker’s payroll deductions. However, toward the beginning of the war, a lot of the workers were forced to help with the war efforts by either being on the front lines or to stay in the factory and produce military vehicles. Most of them were forced into the army which made the Germans come up with an alternate solution which was to, use skilled workers from the concentration camps which proved to be more efficient than meeting the requirements of the German labor front. The factory employed a variety of workers, including German employees and migrant workers, but also prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates. The Nazis even sent engineers to Auschwitz and 300 skilled metalworkers from the massive transports of Hungarian Jews in 1944. In addition, 650 Jewish women were transferred to assemble military munitions. They had such a large demand for works that they had to construct a concentration camp on the same grounds as the factory.