Josef Ganz
Josef Ganz · Technology & Engineering
Car designer and Motor-Kritik editor whose small-car prototypes prefigured the Volkswagen Beetle; erased and exiled by the Nazis.
1 July 1898, Budapest, Austria-Hungary — 26 July 1967, St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia
Frankfurt, Germany & Australia
Josef Ganz is recognized among Jewish contributors to Technology & Engineering — Car designer and Motor-Kritik editor whose small-car prototypes prefigured the Volkswagen Beetle; erased and exiled by the Nazis.
Born into a Jewish family in Budapest, raised in Vienna and Frankfurt, Josef Ganz used his magazine Motor-Kritik to wage war on the heavy, expensive cars of the establishment and to preach a light, affordable 'car for the masses'. He built it too: the Ardie-Ganz prototype in 1930, the 'Maikäfer' (May Beetle) at Adler in 1931, the Standard Superior in 1933. Then Hitler commissioned Ferdinand Porsche to build a people's car, and the Jewish journalist-engineer who had preached it was arrested by the Gestapo, driven out in 1934, and written out of Volkswagen's story.
He died in obscurity in Australia; postwar VW director Heinrich Nordhoff himself credited Motor-Kritik's battles. Historians have since put his name back where it belongs — among the fathers of the Beetle.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Ganz
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Car designer and Motor-Kritik editor whose small-car prototypes prefigured the Volkswagen Beetle; erased and exiled by the Nazis.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Ganz
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