30 Vintage Photographs Capture Daily Life at the Volkswagen Factory in Wolfsburg in 1972

Volkswagen is one of the world’s biggest car manufacturers in the world but it’s worldwide headquarters are still based in the small city of Wolfsburg, where the company was founded in 1938.

The VW factory complex in Wolfsburg is apparently the largest factory in the world and covers an area of over 1,000 acres, which is 3 times the size of Boeing’s factory in Everett, Washington, USA. Over 70,000 people work for VW in Wolfsburg, so not only is it the world’s biggest factory in terms of size, it is also one of the world’s biggest factories as regards numbers employed.

Only 210 cars were built before World War II, before the factory was converted to manufacture arms for the German Army. The Volkswagen factory was heavily bombed during World War II and only re-opened in May 1945 as the British Army needed 20,000 vehicles in order to patrol occupied Germany. Incredibly, despite the shortage of supplies in post-war Germany, almost 2,000 Beetles had been built by the end of 1945 and just 3 months later, over a thousand cars a month were being built in Wolfsburg.

By 1955, over 1 million VW Beetles had been built and by 1972, over 15 million were produced surpassing the previous record holder, the Ford Model T. Production of the original VW Beetle ended in Wolfsburg in 1974 but it continued in VW’s factory in Pueblo in Mexico until 2003.

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Inside the Volkswagen Factory in Wolfsburg in 1970 Through Amazing Color Photos

The Volkswagen factory in the company town of Wolfsburg had a state of the art production line churning out thousands of Beetles and other VW models.

These photographs were taken by Bruce Thomas that show inside the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg in 1970.

The modern version of the war time Kubelwagen was then in production

The upper body shell is mated with the floor pan

The less than successful VW 411 model was also in production

Beetle mudguards in all colors

Beetle tail lights

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23 Amazing Black and White Photographs Captured Volkswagen's Main Plant in Wolfsburg, Germany in 1951

Most people who have ever owned a Volkswagen Beetle or, say, an early, split-windshield VW bus or even a Karmann Ghia will swear that those uncomfortable, relatively bare-bones vehicles were among the favorite cars they’ve ever driven. They’re not for everyone, of course — but for a certain breed of driver, the old-school VWs offered a rare combination of reliability, ease of maintenance and, most importantly, personality that so many other mass-produced automobiles lacked.

The story of Volkswagen, meanwhile, is among the most fascinating and, in some regards, most troubling of any car manufacturer in existence. One well-documented example of VW’s paradoxical lore: in its early days, during World War II, Volkswagen used slave labor (the company has admitted as much) to build vehicles for the Nazi war effort; decades later, the archetypal Volkswagens, the Beetle and the T1 bus, would become the four-wheeled symbols of the “peace and love” movement of the 1960s. From Hitler to hippies: not many other companies, automobile or otherwise, can lay claim to that sort of bizarre corporate narrative.

Here, a series of photos made by LIFE photographer Walter Sanders at the company’s famous Wolfsburg plant in 1951. A refugee from Hitler’s Germany himself, who fled his native country the same year VW began making cars, Sanders captures in these pictures of the factory and the factory workers a nation in the process of recreating itself. Here, in black and white, is a portrait of the labor and mechanization that would again make Germany  one of the world’s most powerful economies before the end of the century.

Scene at Volkswagen's main plant, Wolfsburg, Germany, July 1951.

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A Look Inside a Volkswagen Factory in 1953

In 1953, photographer Peter Keetman spent a week at a Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, emerging with a collection of remarkable images that, although rejected by the Volkswagen publicists, transform the parts of the popular car into works of abstract art gleaming stacks of hoods and fenders trace sinuous lines reminiscent of Edward Weston's seashells; bolts of cable look like exotic plants; sheet metal takes on a life of its own.

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