ROBERT PHILPOT
ON FEBRUARY 11, 1933, Adolf Hitler strode into the Kaiserdamm’s Hall of Honour to open the Berlin Motor Show. That he had chosen the event to deliver one of his first major speeches since becoming chancellor just ten days previously symbolised the already close relationship between the fledgling Nazi regime and the German automobile industry.
Buffeted by the economic gales of the Great Depression, manufacturers like Daimler-Benz desperately needed an infusion of government cash. The company had even been forced to abandon the costly world of motor racing in 1930, and now wanted to get back on the Grand Prix circuit to showcase its cars internationally and boost exports.
Hitler, in turn, was not only grateful for the support Daimler-Benz had lavished on the Nazis. He recognised too that reviving the automobile industry was vital to Germany’s economic recovery and his plans for rearmament, and that success in motorsports offered a veritable propaganda bonanza.
Thus, thanks to the Nazis’ financial largesse, by the time Hitler returned to the Berlin Motor Show five years later, his self-proclaimed “beloved child” was flourishing. Manufacturing production, exports and profits were surging. Germany’s “Silver Arrows” — Daimler’s Mercedes motor racing team, and that of its great rival, Auto Union — dominated the Grand Prix.
But, as the 1938 season commenced, an unlikely team of outsiders — an American heiress, a Jewish driver, and a staid and ailing French automobile manufacturer — were plotting to throw a spanner in the Third Reich’s motor racing works.
The story of how Lucy Schell, René Dreyfus and Delahaye took on the Silver Arrows is the subject of US author Neal Bascomb’s brilliantly told new book Faster. Explaining what drew him to the story, Bascomb says: “I tend to write David and Goliath stories and there was definitely that sense [to] it.”
A motor enthusiast since his youth, Dreyfus had raced for a string of top European teams — including Maserati, Bugatti and Ferrari — after he notched up his first major triumph by winning the 1930 Monaco Grand Prix. But, by 1936, the Frenchman had become, in Bascomb’s words, a “jockey without a horse”. Mussolini had demanded an all-Italian team, hastening Dreyfus’s departure from Ferrari, while there was clearly no place, even had he wanted it, for a Jew with the Silver Arrows.
Schell, however, very much wanted Dreyfus. Having made France her home, she had been one of Europe’s top female drivers in the early 1930s. In 1936, she decided to avenge her adopted nation’s multiple Grand Prix defeats and set about establishing her own team, Écurie Bleue. Single-minded and straight-talking, she persuaded Delahaye — a company that had begun to dabble in the world of racing to shake off its stolid, if reliable, image — to build her a car that would allow the team to compete on the Grand Prix circuit. Only Schell’s large cheque-book overcame Delahaye’s wariness at undertaking such a costly and risky project. She then talked Dreyfus into joining the team and driving the new Delahaye 145. Schell’s motivations are clear, believes Bascomb. “She unambiguously wanted to beat the Germans,” he argues. She had been horrified by her experience of working as a nurse in France during the First World War and, fearing the consequences of Hitler’s increasingly aggressive plays on the European stage, wanted to “strike a symbolic blow” against the Nazis. Although initially less politically minded than Schell, Dreyfus, says Bascomb, also despised the Nazis and how they had turned his sport into “a battleground between nations rather than individual drivers”.
It’s not hard to see why the Silver Arrows made such a tempting target. The Nazis positively revelled in their success: “Racing is and always will be the highest embodiment of motorsport,” proclaimed Joseph Goebbels, “and thus the highest achievement of the nation in any international competition.”
The price of Nazi support — one that Mercedes and Auto Union were happy to pay — was a high one and, as Bascomb suggests, meant that “politics was inseparable from racing”. Leading drivers such as AU’s Bernd Rosemeyer and Mercedes’ Rudi Caracciola were regularly wheeled out as propaganda props and their victories on the track claimed for the regime. While Rosemeyer, who joined the SS and died in a racing accident in 1938, happily accepted the role, Caracciola was more ambivalent about the regime. Nonetheless, says Bascomb, he accepted the “Faustian bargain” presented to him. “All these drivers, particularly on the Mercedes team, knew exactly what was happening. It was impossible not to know,” he argues.
That was never more apparent as the 1938 Grand Prix season opened against the backdrop of the Anschluss and Hitler’s sabre-rattling over the Sudetenland. As Jews were pictured scrubbing the streets of
Rene Dreyfus and Lucy Schell with the Delahaye 145 (left); Bernd Rosemeyer (top) starting the race that would cost his life; (above)the 1938 Pau Grand Prix a; (below) Dreyfus and wife Chou-Chou after he won the 1937 French “Million Franc” race
Vienna and Hitler called Reichstag elections and a plebiscite to endorse the new “Greater Reich”, Caracciola put his name to a newspaper article which urged a Yes vote and suggested that Germany’s “unique successes over the past four years” in motor racing represented “a glorious symbol of the efforts of our leader”. His bosses offered similar paeans of praise for Hitler’s rescue of the automobile industry and its subsequent victories on the Grand Prix circuit.
Schell, though, had decided that Écurie Bleue would make its stand at the first race of the season in the mediaeval French city of Pau on April 10. Despite Dreyfus driving the Delahaye 145 to victory in France’s speed-chasing “Million Franc” prize the previous summer, Caracciola and the Silver Arrows were so heavily favoured that bookmakers had stopped taking bets on a German victory. Indeed, no French driver or car had beaten the Germans in any Grand Prix since Hitler had begun funding their racing teams. Nor had Dreyfus ever beaten Caracciola in a Grand Prix race. Moreover, Mercedes’ W154 was faster and technologically more advanced than the Delahaye 145.
For the Germans, there was an added incentive: Hitler had timed his phony poll for the day of the season’s opening race. “Defeat at Pau,” Bascomb writes, “would be a humiliation”. In front of 50,000 spectators, Dreyfus and Caracciola fought a heart-stopping duel, in which, over the first 50 laps, each took, then surrendered, the lead. On the 52nd lap, Caracciola was forced into a pit stop to refuel. Recognising that this offered Dreyfus a potentially critical advantage — and perhaps knowing too how poorly the Nazis would view defeat at the hands of a Jewish driver — the German champion passed the wheel to a teammate. But Dreyfus, who had already been driving for one and a half hours on the exhausting course, was determined not to cede the lead he had built. To jubilation in the crowd and throughout France, Dreyfus emerged triumphant at the end of the 100 laps.
Reconstructing this largely forgotten story was, Bascomb acknowledges, no easy task. Coming as Europe hurtled towards war, Dreyfus’s victory has been “largely obscured by much, much larger events”. “Although it was,” he notes, “a symbolic victory it was by no means a definitive one.” Nonetheless, it is not one without contemporary resonance, the author believes. Individuals, he suggests, can make a difference, however small, even in the face of huge, seemingly insurmountable, forces and challenges. “Lucy, in particular, took a stand and tried to take on the Germans, in the world that she lived in,” Bascomb argues. “She tried to do something … and that’s what she convinced René to do too.”
Faster is published by Houghton Mifflin