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Conserving the Beetles! How British soldiers helped save iconic VW car by rescuing blueprints from bomb-hit German factory in 1945
By RAY MASSEY
PUBLISHED: 12:52 EST, 29 November 2012 | UPDATED: 02:44 EST, 30 November 2012
How British soldiers helped save VW car by rescuing blueprints from bomb-hit German factory in 1945 | Mail Online

The British officers and their team brought back to life what Hitler called his ‘Kraft durch Freude’ (KdF’) – or ‘Strength Through Joy’ – car in a town which carried the same name.
But they gave it back its original name – Volkswagen or ‘People’s Car ‘– and renamed the town Wolfsburg after the local castle.

After defusing an Allied bomb that had been dropped on the car plant in Wolfsburg, Colonel Charles Radclyffe and Major Ivan Hirst found the blueprints for Hitler's pre-war 'Peoples Car.'

From them, they restarted car production of the car designed for Hitler by Dr Ferdinand Porsche – who founded the Porsche car dynasty - with an order for 20,000 Type 1 Beetles for the British army and in doing so helped get Germany working again after the war.
Since then 21 million Volkswagen Beetles have produced and its success was one of the major building blocks of today’s mighty German motor industry.


Read more: How British soldiers helped save VW car by rescuing blueprints from bomb-hit German factory in 1945 | Mail Online
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