, German entrepreneur Adolf Rosenberger helped the famed car company get rolling in the early 1930s—until Hitler rose to power.n the day that Adolf Hitler seized the most powerful post in Germany, an entirely different Adolf quit his job. On January 30, 1933, the thirty-two-year old Adolf Rosenberger gathered the staff of nineteen at the office of the Porsche automobile design firm in central Stuttgart's Kronenstrasse and told them he was resigning as their commercial director.
In late June 1934, Ferdinand Porsche signed a contract with the skeptical, reluctant Reich Association of the German Automotive Industry to develop the Volkswagen, a “people’s car” that would cost only 1,000 reichsmarks [or about $8,200 in today’s dollars], in ten months. It was a herculean task. Ultimately, it would take Porsche 1.
An asset was considered Aryanized in the Third Reich when the Jewish “element” of ownership had been removed. Aryanizations could involve paying less than the actual value for firms, houses, land, jewelry, gold, art, or shares owned by Jews, as had been the case with Rosenberger; it could extend to the outright theft of possessions. Because of Nazi Germany’s penchant for formal legal procedure, Aryanizations often had the veneer of a normal business transaction.
In early June 1938, Rosenberger received a letter at his Paris apartment on Avenue Marceau, around the corner from the Arc de Triomphe. The message from Stuttgart contained bad news. Baron Hans von Vey-der-Malberg informed his predecessor that Porsche was no longer able to maintain its patent licensing contract with him “on higher authority.
As the case went to court in late September 1950, a lawyer for Porsche and Piëch proposed a settlement to Rosenberger's lawyer: 50,000 deutsch marks [or $144,000] plus a car. Rosenberger was offered a choice: a luxury version of the Volkswagen Beetle or a Porsche 356, the first sports car under the family name, designed by Porsche's son, Ferry. Rosenberger was still in Los Angeles, caring for his wife, who was ill so his lawyer accepted the settlement without consulting him.
In 1998, Ferry died in his sleep at eighty-eight years of age, in Austria’s Zell am See. The sports car icon of global renown had published his second autobiography a decade earlier. But in this version, Ferry had changed his tune. The anti-Semitic statements were gone, and he reduced the Adolf Rosenberger affair to just two paragraphs. He continued to deny the Aryanization of Rosenberger’s stake in Porsche undertaken by his father, Ferdinand, and his brother-in-law, Anton Piëch.
The reason why the Ferry Porsche Foundation endowed the professorship at the University of Stuttgart was because members of the university’s history department had published a firm-funded study in 2017 about the Porsche company’s origins in the Nazi era. However, the German public soon raised a question: was the study truly based on independent, objective analysis of the historical record?
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