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Porsche: Excellence Was Expected

by Karl Ludvigsen

Excerpt from Chapter 1, Volume 1

Genesis In Gmünd 1900-1946

Prof. Ferdinand Porsche confers with engine designer Franz Xaver Reimspiess at the Kronenstrasse office in 1938.

The Allies expected no surprises in the rustic village of Gmünd, in Austria"s mountainous southern province of Carinthia. The year was 1945, the month May, and Germany had just capitulated. Scarcely a month had passed since Allied detachments had swarmed over the Bavarian Alps west of Salzburg. There they"d expected to overwhelm the high command of the Third Reich, which-according to the Josef Goebbels propaganda machine-was sealing itself into rock caverns and planning to wage a glorious last battle.

But the feared "National Redoubt" did not exist after all-at least not in the form imagined. Instead of a rocky high country honeycombed with tunnels and bristling with pillboxes, the Allied troops saw grazing cows and placid settlements of nonbelligerents who were only too happy to be Bavarians again. British forces commanded the mountainous southerly sector of Austria, near Bavaria and bordering on both Italy and Yugoslavia. The troops patrolling the narrow roads and quiet villages of Carinthia had no reason to think that they would find anything out of the ordinary in a village as remote as Gmünd.

About 25 miles north of the Italian border, on a gravelly delta at the confluence of the Malta and Lieser rivers, Gmünd was little more than a layby along Route 331, the twisting road that linked Klagenfurt, Carinthia"s capital, with Salzburg, some 70 miles to the north. With its steep-roofed houses and split-rail fences, Gmünd looked like just another bucolic Austrian village. Several citizens, however, suggested to the British officers that they pay a visit to the sawmill that stood on the edge of town in the Malta valley. There they found, clustered around the one-story sawmill and a small outbuilding, a strange assortment of vehicles: various models of the Volkswagen, the "people"s car" ordered built by Hitler.

In the Allied occupation zones established in Austria after the war, Gmünd was in the British zone, south of Salzburg and north of Trieste.

But this was more than a boneyard for Adolf"s dream car. The collection included a rare convertible, military models and a claustrophobically streamlined coupe. Inside the wooden buildings, the British found the biggest surprise of all: the chief designer, the core of the engineering staff and much of the records and equipment of one of Germany"s most respected engineering firms-the Porsche KG. This was the brilliant team that had designed the versatile military Volkswagen in both conventional and amphibian versions, not to mention such armored vehicles as the awesome Elefant anti-tank weapon and, in the last months of the war, two prototypes of the largest tank ever conceived-a machine ironically dubbed the Maus (Mouse).

No one had known the Porsche staff was there: not Britain"s MI5, the American OSS or the Soviet GRU-shrewd investigators who had every reason to want to know the team"s whereabouts. Since the autumn of 1944 these men-fully half of Porsche"s 588-man engineering cadre-had been undisturbed at their work in the peaceful haven of Gmünd. Their removal to Carinthia from bomb-shattered Stuttgart had, as intended, allowed them to work undisturbed on new tanks, engines, personnel carriers and even farm tractors for the peacetime that had now so suddenly arrived. And their evacuation to Austria had gone undiscovered by the Allies-until now.

This half of the Porsche company was destined to spend almost six years in Gmünd, not a long time for a firm that had been founded in 1930. Yet six years were enough to conceive and rear a child to school age. In this instance they were also enough to bring a new kind of automobile out of the cradle and onto its first unsteady footing. Gmünd was the birthplace of the car we know today as the Porsche.

Porsche Beginnings
The Porsche name had been part of automobile history from as early as 1900. That year, the Lohner-Porsche was being built in Vienna to the designs of the brilliant Ferdinand Porsche, a mere 25 years of age. Then, as throughout his career, the founder of the Porsche dynasty made his living by designing for others. After Lohner came Daimler of Austria, Daimler and Daimler-Benz of Germany, followed by Steyr, Auto Union and Volkswagen, to name only the most prominent firms that engaged his services.

Until 1929, the year he spent with Steyr, Porsche had been directly employed by the companies he served. But this arrangement had not always been fully satisfactory. Says Ferry Porsche, his son and successor: "My father found that when he signed a contract with a firm, they could live another ten years on his designs, but he couldn"t!" Porsche therefore decided to set up his own design office. As he told his son: "It makes no sense for me to keep going to one company after another."

Obtaining financial backing from investor friends, Porsche established his firm in 1930. Some work for the new company was being done in Austria in August of that year; a few months later, on December 1, 1930, its headquarters were opened in Stuttgart, Germany. Nestled in a natural amphitheater along the Neckar River (a tributary of the Rhine), Stuttgart was the home of numerous automotive and engineering firms. These would serve as a major source of supply and talent for the new Porsche enterprise.

Ferdinand Porsche developed the supercharged 1924 Mercedes (top) and 1927 Mercedes-Benz Type S.

On March 6, 1931, the Porsche corporation was officially registered with the German authorities. Its first project, the design of a Wanderer automobile, was designated Type 7. At the end of its first year, the new company had just 19 employees. By 1938 its payroll had soared to 176, of whom 72 were engineers and administrators. By that time, the prosperity of the Porsche enterprise-booming to meet the demands of the Volkswagen project-was such that the company was able to build offices of its own in the Stuttgart suburb of Zuffenhausen. The new headquarters offered complete facilities for designing, building, and testing motor vehicles. Moving overnight to avoid the loss of a single working day, the Porsche men were installed in Zuffenhausen in June 1938. Here, in the same year, they completed the design of the car that would become known as the Volkswagen-the car that was to make Porsche"s name world-famous.

Meanwhile, the company"s success enabled Porsche to be restructured as a limited partnership, called in German a Kommanditgesellschaft or KG. The change, which occurred in 1938, marked the rise to full ownership of the firm by members of the Porsche family, including a new generation that had begun to take an active role in the company"s affairs. Among those sharing leadership in the Porsche enterprise were the children of Porsche"s marriage to Aloisia Kaes: his son Ferry and his daughter Louise, along with Louise"s husband, Dr. Anton Piëch.

Louise, the first-born (1904), was an exceptional, determined woman whom many saw as the purest embodiment of her father"s spirit. Anton Piëch, whom she married in 1927, was from a Viennese family of French origin. Having followed in his father"s footsteps by training as a lawyer, the energetic Piëch was a founding partner of the Porsche design office and a vital negotiator of its major contracts. During World War II, he served as Ferdinand Porsche"s deputy at the Volkswagen factory near Fallersleben, west of Berlin.

Porsche"s son, Ferdinand Anton Ernst Porsche, was born in 1909. Nicknamed Ferry, he was immersed in automotive lore from his earliest days. "I have, so to speak, come into the world with the automobile," he once said. At ten he was able to drive, and at 16 he was behind the wheel of an experimental Mercedes. Trained and apprenticed in every important discipline of the industry, Ferry Porsche became an employee of the Stuttgart office in 1931. There he completed his first drawing-that of a Wanderer connecting rod. With a Wanderer, a car he had test-driven as well as helped design,

Ferry Porsche, at the wheel, helped design and test the 1932 Wanderer.

Ferry competed in the Baden-Baden trial in 1934: a 2,000-kilometer run over the open roads of Germany. In 1939 he took over the management of the Zuffenhausen office after his father was made one of the directors of the new Volkswagen factory.

Adolf Hitler laid the cornerstone of the new Volkswagen plant on May 26, 1938. Frustrated by the refusal of the existing German auto companies to cooperate with him and with Porsche in building a "peoples car," Hitler decided that the nation would build it instead. The money was to come from the German Labor Front, a pseudo-union organization headed by Dr. Robert Ley. One of its branches, known as Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) or KdF, was to handle the sales of the VW, which was henceforth to be known as the KdF-Wagen. Another branch, set up in May 1937, was the Corporation for the Advancement of the German Volkswagen, which was responsible for getting the new car on the road.

The People of Porsche
The principals of the VW-building company were Dr. Bodo Lafferentz, a Ley deputy; Ferdinand Porsche and Jakob Werlin, the Munich Mercedes-Benz dealer and representative who advised Hitler on automotive matters. Although the company officially had a Berlin address, from mid-1938 on it was actually based in the new Porsche Zuffenhausen works. These were the simplest aspects of the incredibly complex organization that the Third Reich created to build the VW. A curious entity, it at once included Ferdinand Porsche and was also a customer for his firm"s designs. Needless to say, this was an invitation to Porsche and his team to expand their operation, its turnover and its profits.

As was his custom, Porsche proposed many more versions of the VW-to-be than just the simple sedan. In its final form, the basic chassis was known as the Type 60 (marking its place in the succession of Porsche projects since the Type 7). Designed for the Type 60 chassis were sedan, convertible sedan, and cabriolet bodies-essentially those the world later came to know well.

Other variations on the VW theme were worked out by the exceptionally talented

Austrian-born Porsche staff. At its head, as chief designer, was Karl Rabe (born in 1895), who for so many years was Porsche"s link between inspiration and realization. The modest and bespectacled Rabe had been one of the first men Porsche called upon when he opened his own office. Despite his self-effacing manner, Rabe was no stranger to responsibility and would show his best in the worst of times.

Like Rabe, Franz Xavier Reimspiess (born in 1901) was known to Ferdinand Porsche from his days at Austro-Daimler before World War I. His contribution to the VW and thus, indirectly, to the Porsche car was the fundamental conception of the air-cooled four-cylinder opposed engine used in the Type 60. At Steyr, Porsche had come to know two more close associates. One was Karl Fröhlich (born in 1898), who was a gearbox specialist. The other was Josef Kales (born in 1901), an aero-engine designer. Kales devoted most of his time to the problems of the Volkswagen and remained with that firm after the war. Joseph Zahradnick (born in 1900) was also among those whom Porsche and Rabe first hired to help them in Stuttgart in 1931. He was responsible for steering and front-suspension designs.

In those pre-computer days, the staff relied on one man for its theoretical computations: Josef Mickl. Born in 1885, Mickl was the oldest member of the team apart from Ferdinand Porsche himself. He first worked for Porsche in 1917 and was at his desk in the Kronenstrasse office as soon as its doors opened in December 1930. When calculations of vibration frequencies, performance characteristics or structural stresses were needed, Mickl made them. With a background as an aircraft designer in Austria and Yugoslavia, he took a special interest in the aerodynamic problems of automobiles. Mickl was the key man behind the design of a Land Speed Record contender prepared by Porsche in 1937 and built by Daimler-Benz.

The successes of the rear-engined Auto Union (here in the 1935 Coppa Acerbo) brought worldwide fame to the still-new Porsche design organization.

Also concerned with body design, but in a quite different way, was Erwin Franz Komenda. He came to Porsche in November 1931 from Daimler-Benz, where he"d been deputy director of production-car body design at the respected Sindelfingen plant. Born in 1904, Komenda had learned his trade in Steyr and then in Vienna with a firm that made heavy coaches. He was drawn into the budding automobile business, where his capacity for infinite detail was appreciated. Intense and positive in all his views, even to the extent of defying his boss"s instructions (something few at Porsche dreamed of doing), Komenda was at heart a kind and deeply thoughtful man. He, Mickl, Reimspiess and Rabe remained stalwarts of the Porsche organization through the early 1960s.

Knit tightly into a team by their mutual respect, common nationality and veneration of Porsche, these were the men who, in the late 1930s, were eager to enrich the motoring world with variations on the basic Volkswagen theme. The factory then being built at Fallersleben was intended to produce 150,000 cars in its first year and to build up eventually to ten times that volume. Clearly more than a sedan and convertible would be needed to assure continuing demand sufficient to support that kind of volume.

Other VW versions were quickly planned. Type 66 was a right-hand-drive model, Type 67 was an invalid vehicle1, and Type 68 was a small panel van. The Type 62 was an open-sided cross-country variant with high ground clearance. Eventually it provided the foundation for the military Type 82 Kübelwagen that was to become justly famous during World War II. As wartime needs intensified, it was followed by the four-wheel-drive Type 87 and the famed and versatile Schwimmwagen, the amphibian Type 166.

Seeds of a Sports Car: Types 64 and 114
Thoughts of Wehrmacht-green Volkswagens going to war were still far away in 1937 when the Porsche designers sketched the specifications of another member of the VW family, the Type 64. This was to be a sports car, the kind of sporting variation that Ferdinand Porsche liked to engineer for each of his new car designs. This was partly to satisfy his own enthusiasm for fast cars and partly as a means of pushing each concept nearer its limits. Instead of the standard car"s 1.0-liter engine, for example, the paper study for the Type 64 proposed an enlargement to 1.5 liters. Other design changes made the Type 64 a distinctly different kind of VW, with an aluminum body and a top-speed potential of 90 to 95 mph.

Zuffenhausen became Porsche"s home in June 1938. The move to these new quarters also supported the planning effort for the.

"What are our prospects for building this car? May we have a budget to build some prototypes?" Porsche representatives posed such questions to Ley and Lafferentz during meetings in late 1937 and early 1938. The replies were not encouraging. Building and selling a production sports car did not suit the immediate plans of the German Labor Front, which wanted to project a responsible image. In 1938, after all, the German people had just begun paying their hard-won savings into a giant layaway plan to buy KdF-Wagens.

In spite of this rejection, Porsche"s people believed enough in the potential of a car like the Type 64 to try a new approach to getting it into production. They decided to explore the possibility of building it themselves. This would mark a full turn of the wheel for the Porsche family, from working for other car makers to becoming an auto producer in their own right. Looking beyond the design work Porsche was then doing on the VW project, which seemed certain to be one of the biggest the firm could ever hope to get, the idea of actually producing a car offered financial security for the future. Porsche could start out in a small way, in its own new works in Zuffenhausen, expanding later in response to demand.

The Type 82 Kübelwagen produced by Volkswagen during World War II.

It had occurred to Ferdinand Porsche as early as 1922 that he might go into the automobile business on his own. This was, said Ferry Porsche in an interview with Panorama, "an old idea of my father"s. When he left Austro-Daimler to go to Mercedes, he had the idea to do something a little like what Bugatti had done, and it was a question of having enough money to start a factory or to go to Mercedes as technical manager. At that time he didn"t have enough money, so he went to Mercedes." Now, when Professor Porsche was beginning to have money, he felt the urge again.

Because the Type 64 used many components from the Type 60, the Porsche company approached Labor Front officials to make arrangements for buying Type 60 parts in quantity for use in its sports car. This request was also turned down, but for a different reason. Probes of the relevant laws by both parties had concluded that there was no legal way a government-owned company, namely the VW factory, could sell goods to a private firm like Porsche. That decision ended for the time being any and all thoughts of a Porsche sports car based on VW parts.

On the eve of war in 1938, Porsche showed Hitler the VW.

But the Porsches father and son had given so much consideration to producing a sports car of their own that they could not shake off the idea. In 1938 they decided to pursue it further in spite of all the obstacles they had encountered. Since VW components weren"t to be made available, they put a small group of designers to work on a completely special sports car that was called the F-Wagen, for both Ferry and Ferdinand, carrying the designation of Type 114. The engineer most responsible for its creation was Karl Fröhlich. He kept design work moving ahead as quickly as he could, although as a nonpaying project the Type 114 drawings often had to be pushed aside to complete a job for a Porsche customer.

The Type 114 was never built; indeed, the detailed engineering drawings that would have been needed to build it were never completed. But by January 3, 1939, when Karl Fröhlich signed the drawing of its overall chassis layout, it was completely planned in every important detail: a magnificent Porsche sports car primed and ready to launch the family"s own automobile business.

The V-10 1.5-liter engine designed for the Porsche Type 114 had shaft drive to its four overhead camshafts, three downdraft carburetors and a water pump driven directly by the crankshaft nose.

The F-Wagen was an extraordinary conception. Not for another quarter-century would Porsche build a car of its own of comparable complexity. In its broadest outline, the layout of the F-Wagen showed a familial resemblance to the Porsche design that had been known at first as the P-Wagen, the famous Auto Union Grand Prix car. Its engine was located between the passengers and the rear axle, and its transmission was overhung to the rear of the axle. These elements alone made the Type 114 a radical automobile for its time. But its most surprising attribute was surely its ten-cylinder vee-type engine of 1.5 liters (1,493 cc, 58 x 56.5 mm).

The choice of ten cylinders was radical for the time, but not unique. In the late 1930s, engines of both five and ten cylinders were being advocated in technical circles and were being experimented with by Ford. Lancia even put a five-cylinder into production. Designers saw the V-10 as a useful and logical compromise, shorter than the V-12 yet offering more power, through higher speeds, than a V-8 of the same displacement. The Porsche team chose the V-10 configuration to power two vehicles it was working on in 1938: its Type 100 tank prototype2 for the German Army, which required two 15.0-liter air-cooled V-10s, and the Type 114 sports car.

With a 72-degree angle between its banks-the correct value to give evenly spaced firing impulses-the engine designed for the Type 114 would have been the most ambitious 1.5-liter engine of its time, as sublimely intricate as a Swiss watch. In both this angle and its use of ten cylinders, the Type 114 engine accurately foreshadowed the Formula 1 racing engines of the end of the twentieth century. Porsche"s ten were to have aluminum heads. Wet cylinder liners in an aluminum block were to extend down well past the crank centerline to a split line that sloped down toward the rear, between the block and sump, as had that of the Auto Union V-16.