Carl Hahn dies at 96; made Beetle ubiquitous
Carl H. Hahn, the German automobile executive who helped transform the humble Volkswagen Beetle into an American pop culture icon and one of the most widely produced cars in the world, died Jan 14 at his home in Wolfsburg, Germany. He was 96.
His death was confirmed by his son Christopher Hahn.
During Hahn’s chairmanship of Volkswagen AG from 1982 to 1993, the company graduated into a global brand and Europe’s leading automobile manufacturer.
He was still in his 20s in 1954 when he wrote an unsolicited letter to Heinrich Nordhoff, the German engineer who had rejuvenated Volkswagen after World War II, persuading Nordhoff to hire him. Hahn became Nordhoff’s assistant and was quickly promoted to chief of export promotion.
Hahn served as president of New York-headquartered Volkswagen of America from 1959 to 1964, and upon arriving in the United States he toured the country in a VW minibus.
“I learned, apparently very fast, to get to know and understand America,” he would later say. “And I loved it.”
Volkswagen avoided the fins and other frills with which US manufacturers larded their vehicles. Instead, the company and its advertising agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, promoted “our philosophy of a car that doesn’t change for the reason of change, only for the benefit of the consumer,” Hahn said at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011.
The ads urged buyers to “Think Small,” embrace their cars’ distinctive rounded back and bug-eye headlights, and value efficiency and quality control.
Coupled with marketable if less visible engineering advances, the campaign transmogrified the cookie-cutter low-cost automobile that Adolf Hitler commissioned as “the people’s car” in the 1930s into the American counterculture’s adorable “Love Bug.”
“Without him, there would likely not have been the ads, which did indeed change the whole story for VW outside of Germany and result in a lot of needed healing, as well as revenue,” Andrea Hiott, the author of “Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle” (2012), said in an email.
While Detroit was wooing car buyers with luxurious behemoths, the blackand-white Volkswagen ads featured a photograph of the diminutive Beetle surrounded by an expanse of white space that spoke simplicity.
The campaign, which Advertising Age ranked as one of the best of the 20th century, featured another ad with the headline “Lemon.” It touted the car’s reliability and resale value and boasted that Volkswagen had more quality-control inspectors in its factory than cars.
In 1964, at the age of 38, Hahn was named the parent company’s head of sales and left the States, moving to Wolfsburg, the city in the Lower Saxony region of northern Germany where Volkswagen AG is headquartered.
Carl Horst Hahn Jr. was born July 1, 1926, in Chemnitz, in eastern Germany, to Carl Hahn Sr. and Marie (Kusel) Hahn.
His father, Carl Sr, was a director of DKW, which became the world’s biggest motorcycle maker in the 1920s, and a founder in 1932 of Auto Union, a forerunner to what became Audi AG. He was a practising Catholic who joined the Nazi Party in 1933 after Hitler signed a treaty with the Vatican in which he guaranteed the church’s rights in Germany, Carl Jr wrote in a memoir.
Carl Jr was drafted by the German military as a teenager and served in the tank corps. He was captured near the end of the war and freed from a US-run prisoner-of-war camp in July 1945.
After the war, he left communist East Germany. He studied business administration at the University of Cologne and the University of Zurich and received his doctorate in economics from the University of Bern in Switzerland in 1952.
He worked as an economist for the European Productivity Agency (EPA) in Paris before he was hired by Volkswagen.