Heinrich Nordhoff e 30.000 dipendenti alle sue spalle, stabilimento Volkswagen a Wolfsburg 1955

Pretty tall fella. I reckon his staff looked up to him, despite his reputation for looking down on people. He was a giant of industry and head and shoulders above the competition.

[Pyramid of Capitalist System – Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System)

The irony, given Volkswagens ascendancy over the British car market, is that the manufacturer wouldn’t have carried on post-war without intervention by the British, who basically felt that Germans needed some industry to keep themselves going.

‘British forces, led by Major Ivan Hirst, saved Volkswagen by taking control of the Wolfsburg plant in 1945, preventing its dismantling. Hirst persuaded the British military to order 20,000 cars to meet their own transport needs, which restarted production of the VW Beetle’

Look up [Major Ivan Hirst](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Hirst), he modernised the factory, improved the cars and basically ran operations for four years until it was formally handed over to Germany in 1949.

From Wikipedia:
“As head of the Opel plant in Brandenburg, he had been responsible for the production of armaments, in which thousands of forced laborers (Eastern workers and prisoners of war) had been employed and regularly died as a result of the working and living conditions.”

well, well, well…

Nordhoff was a Genius – he laid the foundation of what the Volkswagen corporation is today. At the beginning of 1965, Volkswagenwerk AG under Nordhoff took over Auto Union GmbH (one part of the AUDI we know today) in Ingolstadt from Daimler-Benz, ostensibly to produce the Beetle, which was still in high demand at the time, at the plant there. With the takeover, Volkswagen acquired promising technology that Nordhoff’s second successor, Rudolf Leiding, was later able to use to modernize the VW Group’s vehicle range.

He should have stood behind them imo.