Yes and no. Hitler rather famously called for an affordable mass-produced automobile at the 1934 Berlin autoshow and was one of the foremost backers of what became known as the Kdf-Wagen. Nonetheless, Hitler conceptualization of a car for the masses was not new. German automobile manufacturers had envisioned such a mass market since the Kaiserreich and Henry Ford had articulated notions of mass automobility since the Model T. The genesis of the KdF-Wagen was rather complicated and involved the intersection of several actors, including Hitler.
The idea of the Volkswagen was one of several Nazi initiatives to provide German consumers luxury consumer goods and other signs of the good life. These Volkprodukte (people's products) were to thread the needle between affordability and high quality. Additionally, German industry was to contribute to the design of the Volkprodukte while the state subsidized the establishment of a manufacturing base and a distribution network. The Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF) would likewise promote state-subsidized living quarters and clean, modern factories for the German worker in the new era. Ideally, this would be an expression of the relationship between state, labor, and capital in the Third Reich where both worked to the common benefit of the Aryan German population.
In practice, things did not work out that way. Of all the Volkprodukte, only the Volksempfänger (people's radio) proved to be successful. A good part of the reason behind the success of this particular product was that there was a unique confluence of factors that allowed the Volksempfänger to gain traction in the German market. For one thing, the interests of business and the state clearly aligned. German radio manufacturing and broadcasting interests had been calling for some type of national set while Goebbels's propaganda ministry recognized the utility of radio. The technical hurdles in setting up a radio manufacturing base too were not very high either, allowing the Volksempfänger to quickly ubiquitous in German households. German household radio ownership went from 25% in 1933 to 75% in 1941. Although this rate was not spectacular compared to Germany's neighbors, it was one of the few successes of the Volksprodukte initiatives.
The travails of the KdF-Wagen were representative of all the reasons the Volkprodukte failed. For one thing, the German automobile industry was only lukewarm at best over the initiative. The Reichsverband der Automobilindustrie (German Automobile Manufacturers Association/RDA) did not relish facing a state-subsidized competitor. Internal correspondence by the RDA showed that they felt Hitler's proclamation in 1934 to be too optimistic. The state tendered plans to the RDA in 1934/35 calling for a car that could seat 4-5, easy to maintain, travel up to 50 mph, and cost around 1000 RM. In short, the state expected a car that was approximately half as expensive as the existing lower-end German car market but would be as luxurious as higher-end models.
Not surprisingly, the RDA felt that even if the Volkswagen's specs could be reached, the car would cut into their business. But the RDA as on the horns of a dilemma; while they did not want to see the car come to fruition, they did not want to alienate Hitler and his pro-automobile stance. While a number of prior German politicians championed mass automobility, Hitler took it to a new level. Even though he could not drive, he was a motoring fan and pushed for various policies to make mass car ownership a symbol of National Socialist strength. Many of these initiatives built on Weimar-era projects, such as the fabled autobahns, which Goebbels derided as a Jewish wasteful extravagance when the NSDAP was not in control of the government, but it was clear to the RDA that Hitler was a partisan of the car. Therefore, the RDA elected to try and control the process of the Volkswagen's design in the hopes of torpedoing it.
The RDA's selection of Ferdinand Porsche to head the Volkswagen initiative design team was part of this delaying stratagem. Porsche was relatively old, known to be quite temperamental, and had a real problem with staying on budget. The RDA likely hoped that Porsche might produce a design that was unworkable on a mass scale, thus keeping Hitler satisfied and in theory allow the mainstream manufacturers to take the place of the small car market the KdF-Wagen would fill. The DAF and Goebbels were pushing for a three-wheeeled bubblecar to take the place of Hitler's call for a cheap national automobile, something which the RDA felt little threat from. Yet Porsche's perfectionism and engineering skills meant that he could surmount some of the obstacles; his team was also not above stealing other designs such as Czechoslovakia's Tatra 97 which had a number of features of the emerging KdF-Wagen. The RDA also did not count on Porsche's ability to court Hitler's opinion and gain his support over the process.
This political support allowed Porsche's team to ignore one of the biggest failures of the KdF-Wagen design: price. His team, like the automobile manufacturers recognized almost immediately that 1000 RM was too small of a price to deliver the machine. This was the reason why none of the major German car manufacturers wanted to manufacture Porsche's design as they recognized Hitler's political promise of a 1000 RM sticker price was economic nonsense. BMW's general director Franz Popp in 1937 floated the idea of handing over responsibility for manufacturing the Volkswagen to the DAF. The DAF's head Robert Ley was anxious to strengthen his organization's political power within the state apparatus and he likely did not realize the impossibility of his task.
Like other Volksprodukte initiatives, the KdF-Wagen soon ran aground of the realities of modern manufacturing. Not only did Ley underestimate the complexities of setting up a modern manufacturing center, the program was on the verge of financial collapse. German consumers were to pay for their KdF-Wagens via a saver scheme from their monthly wages. Not only were these savers not enough to cover the expenses of producing a KdF-Wagen, subscriptions for the car ran far short of expectations. Internal reports on German public opinion showed that while there was intense public interest in the project, most Germans could neither afford to part with their wages or were skeptical of the regime's promise of a 1000 RM car. Moreover, most of the subscribers did not fit Hitler's image of a German working-class man buying his first car; many of the subscribers were middle-class and for some it would have been their second car. So while the initiative promised the automobile as a grand social leveler and state propaganda advertising the car emphasized this facet of the initiative, this hope was soon proving to be a mirage.
Fortunately for Ley the war prevented the collapse of the KdF-Wagen project as German automobile production became geared to military uses. Had the war not intervened, it would have been likely that the KdF-Wagen would have mirrored subsequent Eastern bloc experience with the car where politically-determined pricing and inexperience with mass marketing would have led to long queues, grey-market automobile sales, and overall public dissatisfaction with the distribution of these machines.
Hitler's responsibility for what would have been a public relations fiasco was quite large. He pushed for a low price and the manufacturers knew this was impossible. But rather than deal with this reality or walk away from these ambitious promises the state simply tried to ignore it. The ability to blame-shift or pass the buck for the problem was much easier in an entity like the Third Reich where there were large power blocs like the DAF or the Propaganda Ministry whose formal boundaries were ill-defined. Hitler's mercurial management style and susceptibility to flattery only heightened the centrifugal tendencies of the system. Thus while Hitler was not the only German to have pushed for a cheap automobile for the masses, he did preside over a system that was often dysfunctional and did much to prevent mass automobility from becoming a reality.
Sources
König, Wolfgang. "Adolf Hitler vs. Henry Ford: the Volkswagen, the role of America as a model, and the failure of a Nazi consumer society." German Studies Review (2004): 249-268.
Rieger, Bernhard. The People's Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle. Cambridge: Harvard University press, 2013.
Ross, Corey, Pamela E. Swett, and Fabrice d' Almeida. Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
