Volkswagen

Volkswagen is the brand name for a line of automobiles originally produced in Germany. Though the company is still headquartered in Germany, Volkswagens are now manufactured and assembled in many countries, including the United States. According to the Wall Street Journal, Volkswagen held a 2.3 percent share of the US motor vehicle market in 2010. The iconic Volkswagen Beetle, with its engine located in the rear of the car and trunk in the front, remains popular and widely available even though production ceased in 2003.

The company got in trouble in the 21st century when some of its diesel cars were discovered to have been designed to cheat on emissions tests.

• VW’s “defeat device” is not a physical device but a programme in the engine software that lets the car perceive if it is being driven under test conditions - and only then pull out all the anti-pollution stops. “Clean diesel” engines cut emissions through techniques such as adjusting air-fuel ratios and exhaust flows, and in some (though not most VWs) injecting a urea-based solution to render NOx harmless. When running normally, requiring greater performance, VW’s controls would not operate in the same way.

• Volkswagen admitted in 2015 that it rigged nearly 600,000 diesel-powered cars sold in the U.S. to cheat on emissions tests.

Brands

Brands which are manufacturerd by Volkswagen:

• Porsche (for 32.2% stake)
• Bentley
• Audi (also the holding Audi AG)
• Lamborghini
• Škoda
• SEAT
• Bentley

History

On May 26, 1938, Nazi dignitaries gathered near Fallersleben in northern Germany to lay the foundation stone for the Volkswagen Works. The Führer himself was present, predicting that this Volkswagen, initially known as the Kraft-durch-Freude-Wagen, or KdF-Wagen, would be “a symbol of the National Socialist people's community." In a country where car production still focused primarily on luxury models and where only one German in fifty owned an automobile, the car would cost just 999 German Reichsmark, while the program offered a savings plan to make such a vehicle affordable. The Volkswagen plant eventually became a massive complex known as the “City of the Kdf-Car” [“Stadt der Kdf-Wagen”] and was expected to produce at least 1.5 million cars annually. In reality, the plant had only just started small-scale production of what would become the Volkswagen Beetle when the company halted civilian production with the onset of World War II. The vast majority of Germans who completed their savings books never received their long-awaited People’s Cars, as Volkswagen went into military production.

Volkswagen and Forced Labor

The war posed a serious obstacle for Volkswagen, as the plant had been designed for the production of civilian vehicles. From its inception, it had never had a sufficient workforce. In search of labor, the massive complex at Fallersleben quickly began to deploy forced labor. Indeed, Volkswagen was among the first companies to take advantage of the forced labor of Soviet prisoners of war. The factory employed concentration camp inmates (including Jews), and in increasingly large numbers Soviet and Polish civilian foreign forced laborers known as “Ostarbeiter” [“Eastern workers”]. A first concentration camp on the site, Arbeitsdorf, was established on factory property in April 1942. Forced laborers eventually made up approximately 60% of the workforce.