On 10 September 2020, two days before the film evening at the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne, the Swiss news magazine 10vor10 on SRF presented Josef Ganz as the forgotten inventor of the VW Beetle. Watch the report on Play SRF.
“Erased from history”
In the accompanying article on srf.ch, „Wegbereiter des Kleinwagens – Der Jude hinter dem «Volkswagen» der Nationalsozialisten“, journalist Christian Schürer traces Ganz’s path: born in Budapest in 1898, the Maikäfer of 1931, which even made it into the German newsreel, and the Standard Superior of 1933, advertised as the “German Volkswagen” and inspected by Hitler at the Berlin motor show. After his arrest by the Gestapo, Ganz fled to Switzerland, where he developed a small car for Rapid in Dietikon.
Lorenz Schmid, whose grandmother was a cousin of Josef Ganz, told SRF that Ganz achieved an enormous amount in Germany in the 1930s: “But he was simply erased from history.” Many features of the VW Beetle, Schmid says, were already present in the small cars Ganz developed.
A historian’s view: “The idea of a small car has many fathers”
SRF also interviewed Wolfram Pyta, professor of modern history at the University of Stuttgart (interview on srf.ch). Pyta calls Ganz one of the pioneers and avant-gardists of the small car: an engineer and journalist who ran his own magazine, Motor-Kritik, developed his own patents and promoted his ideas “almost like a missionary”. “If one were to write a history of the idea of the small car, Josef Ganz would be right at the front,” Pyta says – but from the idea to a car ready for series production was still “a huge distance”.
According to Pyta, the sources show no intensive exchange between Ganz and Ferdinand Porsche, who had been working on small cars independently since 1931 and received the commission for the Volkswagen in 1934 – with the car industry’s association as financier and Hitler as political patron. Ganz, by contrast, was a lone fighter without an office or a team of experts behind him.
Earlier on SRF: “A deliberate act”
Back in December 2015, Radio SRF 2 Kultur spoke with biographer Paul Schilperoord („Wie Hitler den jüdischen Erfinder des VW Käfer bekämpfte“). “It is difficult to say there is a single inventor, because many people were involved in the Volkswagen project,” Schilperoord said. “But Josef Ganz laid the foundation for the VW Beetle by developing the design and concept of the prototype.” Why he was forgotten has a simple reason, according to Schilperoord: Hitler banned all of Ganz’s publications – “a deliberate act to get rid of any Jewish connection with the Volkswagen”.
The documents behind Ganz’s role are collected on credibility.josefganz.org. More about the evening in Lucerne: Movie event at the Swiss Museum of Transport and And it goes on and on!
