BERLIN: At a typical archive of a car manufacturer, you'll find a mass of photos, sketches, memorabilia, film material and other documents that tell the story of the car brand.
The VW Corporate Archives were founded in 1997 and are responsible for documenting the history of the group as well as the brands VW and VW Commercial Vehicles. The oldest document dates from 1887 and is a photograph of the Porsche family. A particularly valuable archive item is the first drawing of the Porsche crest from 1952, which gets around 6,000 inquiries per year.At BMW, the first reference to a historical archive dates from the early 1940s. In the beginning it consisted of registries and an archive for technical documents.
Collecting and saving everything that's important for the documentation of the company and its products. This is what Gerhard Heidbrink from the Mercedes Archive sees as his task.As the oldest car maker in the world, Mercedes is of particular importance. In 2011, the documents of the patent granted to Carl Bent were included in the Unesco Memory of the World register. The patent from 1886 is considered the birth certificate of the automobile.