One of the more significant ‘jewish invention’ claims that I have come upon in recent months is the claim that a jew ‘invented the Volkswagen Beetle’. The Volkswagen Beetle has long been an iconic car long credited to its ostensible creator Ferdinand Porsche – as well as his design team Erwin Komenda, Josef Kales, Karl Rabe, Josef Mickl and Franz Xavier Reimspiess – was first debuted between 1936 and 1937 having been commissioned by Adolf Hitler in June 1934.
However, the claim that Porsche and his team ‘stole’ – or ‘took heavy inspiration’ from the work of others to create – the Volkswagen Beatle have long been circulating with the first ones kicking around in the 1950s.
It is from these assertions we get the claim that a ‘jew invented the Volkswagen Beetle’ as one jewish Reddit user summarised it in a thread listing so-called ‘jewish inventions’ – nearly all of which are in fact not ‘jewish inventions’ – writing:
‘Hitler stole the design of the VW Beetle (and also the name) from a Jewish auto engineer named Josef Ganz. He saw Ganz’s car at an auto show, scribbled a fascimile on a cocktail napkin and gave the idea to Ferdinand Porsche (a zealous SS officer) to manufacture.
Ganz was chased out of Europe by the Nazis & died a complete unknown somewhere in Australia. Much of his contribution to the modern auto industry has never been acknowledged, though he was arguably one of the great visionaries of his time.’ (1)
The claim that Josef Ganz – who was indeed jewish – was the ‘father of the Volkswagen Beetle’ is largely the work of one man: Paul Schilperoord. (2) The problem of course that Schilperoord’s book ‘Het Geheim van Hitlers Volkswagen’ is entirely speculative in nature and having read it – slowly as my Dutch simply isn’t that good – not particularly persuasive as it based on unevidenced assumptions about how Porsche (and others) were ‘influenced’ by Ganz’s designs and work but yet provide little actual evidence.
The argument is basically that Hitler allegedly saw Ganz’s designs at the Berlin Auto Show in 1933 and ‘ordered them copied’. The problem is that there is next to no evidence of this and what is usually left out of such claims is that the prototype that Ganz was exhibiting at the Berlin Auto Show had a completely different engine and axle layout than Porsche’s Beetle even if it superficially looked a bit similar. (3) It is also worth noting that Hitler had absolutely nothing to do with the design per se – the design actually comes from 1930/1931 where-as the design from 1934 to 1937 is simply Porsche’s refined version of his 1930/1931 design – as that was Porsche’s work who shared a common inspiration in the form of the motorcycle industry with Ganz but was not ‘inspired by Ganz’. (4)
The irony is that practically every country – from Britain to the United States to Belgium to France to the Soviet Union – tried to claim that they – and not Porsche and the Germans – had ‘in fact designed the Volkswagen Beetle’ and that their ideas ‘had been stolen’ by Porsche and the Germans as a form of mass intellectual/patent theft (a-la ‘Operation Paperclip’ etc). (5)
These claims were largely fanciful nonsense that have long been discarded by historians, but the Hungarian engineer Bela Barenyi has been widely credited with having inspired bits of Porsche’s design with his work in 1925/1926: (6)
Compared to Porsche’s July 1934 design: (7)
Now while Porsche’s 1934 design for the Volkswagen Beetle is distinctly different from Barenyi’s 1925/1926 design; you can see how Porsche’s 1934 design could be seen as having been inspired by Barenyi’s 1925/1926 design but that is as far as it goes and suggesting Barenyi was the ‘creator’ of the Volkswagen Beetle is simply wrong.
The other character whose role in the Volkswagen Beetle was an Austrian German engineer named Hans Ledwinka who was the chief design engineer for the Austrian-Czech car manufacturer Tatra between 1921 and 1937 as well as a friend of Porsche’s Ledwinka and that much of what Ledwinka had created throughout this period was pre-figured and complemented Porsche’s own designs and work.
Further it isn’t widely known that Ledwinka and Porsche’s design teams heavily collaborated in designing the Volkswagen Bettle between 1934 and 1937; (8) so Lewinka’s involvement – he’s primarily known for designing the trucks used by the Wehrmacht during the Second World War – is not only confirmed but accepted by historians.
The point here is that the case for Josef Ganz having something to do with the creation and the design of the Volkswagen Beetle is simply nonsense as there is no evidence that this is in fact true. While we have solid evidence that Hans Ledwinka was heavily involved in its creation as well as decent evidence that Bela Barenyi’s earlier work somewhat inspired the original Volkswagen design.
So no, the Volkswagen was not a ‘jewish invention’.
References
(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/Jewish/comments/18q24ls/what_are_some_things_that_were_invented_by_jews/
(2) Schilperoord’s case is summarised by a short video on his website: https://josefganz.org/; also see https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-unknown-jewish-engineer-behind-hitlers-vaunted-volkswagen-beetle/
(3) Karl Ludvigsen, 2012, ‘Battle for the Beetle’, 2nd Edition, Bentley: Cambridge, pp. 16-17
(4) Ibid., pp. 13-15
(5) Cf. Ibid.
(6) https://www.mercedes-benz.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2014/09/HISTORIE_Bela_Barenyi_der_Lebensretter_04-710×396.jpg
(7) Ludvigsen, Op. Cit., p. 17
(8) Ibid., pp. 224-227
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