The Volkswagen Beetle started out as the car that nobody wanted to build. Ferdinand Porsche, who designed it, dreamed from the early 1920s of a "people's car" that would provide the kind of cheap transportation that Henry Ford's flivvers gave the U.S. Even after Adolf Hitler came to power and ordered automakers to produce a small car, Porsche's plans for his slope-nosed oddity got nowhere. Not until 1938, when Hitler made tt a state project did the Volkswagen become a realityjust in time to be modified into a Jeep-like military vehicle. At a meeting in Cologne in 1948, the VW plant,...
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