While former Chancellor Ludwig Erhard is known as the architect of the postwar economic recovery that West Germans refer to as the Wirtschaftswunder, a slight, self-assured man named Heinz Nordhoff is certainly one of the nation's master builders. Because he had run wartime Germany's biggest military truck plant, U.S. occupation authorities restricted him to manual labor. The more pragmatic British tapped him to revive a Wolfsburg auto factory which had been so badly bombed that, Nordhoff was later to recall, it "didn't even smell good enough for the Russians." That plant had...
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