Word: nordhoff
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Died. Heinrich Nordhoff, 69, the man who sent Volkswagens around the world (see BUSINESS...
...poor in the fullest sense," Volkswagenwerk's Heinz Nordhoff once remarked, "has certain compensations. It strips the soul clean." When he reluctantly took charge of Volkswagen's Wolfsburg plant in North Germany in 1948, Nordhoff and his company both had more than enough of such spiritual compensation...
Built by Hitler to turn out "people's cars," the Volkswagen factory made only 210 cars before it went into war production, and after V-E day it was a shambles, 60% destroyed by Allied bombs. Nordhoff, too, was part of the postwar wreckage-a lifelong German automan who, because he had manufactured trucks for the Wehrmacht, was forbidden to work in the U.S. zone at anything except manual labor...
...urging of British occupiers, Nordhoff moved into their zone to try to restore auto production and employment in the depressed Wolfsburg area of Lower Saxony. Had the British foreseen how Nordhoff would drive their own cars off the export markets, they might never have given him the job. By last week, when Nordhoff died of a heart attack at 69, Wolfsburg had grown from a hamlet to a bustling city of 85,000 as home base for West Germany's largest industry. With assembly plants from Africa to Australia, the bug was the new Model T, a ubiquitous symbol...
Only Passion. Volkswagen's massive contribution to the postwar economic recovery that West Germans refer to as the Wirtschaftswunder was almost exclusively the work of Heinz Nordhoff, a courtly engineer whose only passion, he once said, was "to build cars, sell cars and build cars." The son of a Hildesheim banker, Nordhoff served long enough in World War I to be shot in both knees. In 1925, he took an engineering degree from the Polytechnic Academy in Berlin and began his career by designing aircraft engines in Munich. Joining Opel, General Motors' subsidiary, in 1929, Nordhoff worked...