Legends: Heinz Nordhoff

Heinz Nordhoff grew up an adventurous boy in turn-of-the-century century Hildesheim, Germany. As a mechanical engineering student, he was interested in building ships. But when he failed to land a job after university, he fell into his first career, aeronautics, then practically stumbled into automotive work. His early days were spent bouncing from one company to the next, including BMW as an aero-engine apprentice, before the Great Depression of the 1930s kept him bouncing around in a tumbling German economy. He found a job with General Motors’ Opel unit and focused on production processes at the European automaker. By then a 50-year-old man with a varied background, Nordhoff wanted a senior management job. While working at Opel, he was noticed by Major Ivan Hirst and Colonel Radclyffe of the British Occupational Force that was running Volkswagen after the Second World War. The pair needed someone to organize the reconstruction of the VW factories that had been ruined during the war. Appointed VW’s managing director on the first day of 1948, Nordhoff flourished because he realized the potential of one little car. He actually didn’t care for the KdF, later known as the Beetle, that was originally designed by Ferdinand Porsche under the direction of Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s. However, Nordhoff sensed that the KdF was exactly what a defeated post-war Germany needed. Nordhoff rebuilt VW while building the city of Wolfsburg from the ground up. He financed the first runs of Beetles after Germany’s monetary reform in the summer of 1948 by calling dealers to Wolfsburg and asking that they bring plenty of cash. Nordhoff nurtured the Beetle dream using sales tactics he learned at GM. By the end of his first year, VW had 15,000 domestic orders and 7,000 export orders. Production went from 19,000 units a year in 1948 to 500,000 a year a decade later. With steady production and exports to the United States beginning in 1950, the Beetle eventually became the best-selling car ever made (until it was eclipsed by the Toyota Corolla), and the first to outsell Ford’s Model T. And just as suddenly, Nordhoff was gone, dead on April 12, 1968 after suffering through the lingering effects of a heart attack sustained a few months earlier. In 2003, the final year for the Beetle, the total numbers of Beetles had topped 21 million.