WOLFSBURG (Germany): Europe’s number one carmaker Volkswagen is not keen on celebrating the 75th birthday of its German home town of Wolfsburg on Sunday because of the long shadow cast by Adolf Hitler there.

“It was all just a bit of Nazi propaganda,” a spokesman for the carmaker said, referring to the festivities 75 years ago when the Nazi leader laid the foundation stone for a factory that would build the “Kraft-durch-Freude” (KdF) (Strength through Joy) automobile that went on to conquer the world as “the People’s Car”.

By contrast, Wolfsburg’s municipal authorities see cause for celebration, even if they have earmarked July 1 as the big day because that was when, in 1938 the official decree was signed marking the foundation of the “Town of the KdF car.” Barely 900 people lived there then.

Now more than 120,000 “Wolfsburgers” — the new name dates from 1945 — are set to celebrate their town’s 75th anniversary. Both VW and Wolfsburg have had varied histories.

The factory mostly churned out vehicles for the Wehrmacht armed forces and other military equipment with thousands of slave labourers working in inhuman conditions for the arms industry.

At the laying of the factory’s foundation stone on May 26, 1938, 80,000 troops assembled there while Hitler and the Beetle’s designer Ferdinand Porsche drove past in an open-top car.

During the war, the factory was managed by Porsche’s son-in-law Anton Piech.

It was his son Ferdinand Piech, as chief executive of VW at the end of the 1990s, who finally cut through the tangled Gordian knot of talks regarding compensation for the slave labourers.

VW set up its own compensation fund and opened its archives to historians and scholars to explore its Nazi past. At this point, the Beetle was only being built in Mexico, long overtaken as the group’s flagship by mass market models such as the Golf and the Passat.

After taking over the reins of the supervisory board, patriarch Piech pressed ahead with the acquisition of truck makers MAN and Scania.

Even a scandal about “pleasure” trips for members of the works council could not prevent the group in its unstoppable rise to become Europe’s leading carmaker.

Nor was it hindered by a bitter power struggle between the group’s new majority shareholder Porsche and the regional state authorities of Lower Saxony with its so-called “golden share”, or blocking minority.—AFP