AUDI AG can look back on a very eventful and varied history; its tradition of carand motorcycle manufacturing goes right back to the 19th century. The Audi andHorch brands in the town of Zwickau in Saxony, Wanderer in Chemnitz and DKWin Zschopau all enriched Germany’s automobile industry and contributed to thedevelopment of the motor vehicle. These four brands came together in 1932 toform Auto Union AG, the second largest motor-vehicle manufacturer in Germanyin terms of total production volume. The new company chose as its emblem fourinterlinked rings, which even today remind us of the four founder companies.After the Second World War the Soviet occupying power requisitioned anddismantled Auto Union AG’s production facilities in Saxony.
Auto Union began cooperation in the mid-1930s with Dynamit AG in Troisdorf, the aim being to develop a plastic body for DKW. One reason for this was that increasing demands by the military authorities were causing shortages of steel and rubber; another was that DKWs were still using wooden bodies built by hand and covered with imitation leather, a costly and time-consuming procedure. An empirical crash-test programme was drawn up in order to establish the relative strengths of wood, sheet metal and plastic. These were the first-ever crash tests in the history of the Germany automobile industry; special fixtures were designed, for instance a catapult for impact testing and a track with a downhill gradient for
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In the late 1930s, the company planned to erect a factory in Chemnitz to utilise the very latest continuous assembly-line production methods. It was intended to build DKW and Wanderer cars there in high volume, but the outbreak of war put paid to these plans and the factory was never built.
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Commercial development Between 1933 and 1939 the Auto Union expanded to an enormous extent. The Group's consolidated sales rose from 65 to 276 million Reichsmarks (RM) and the workforce increased from 8,000 to more than 23,000. Annual output of motorcycles rose from just under 12,000 to 59,000, and of cars from rather more than 17,000 to over 67,000. Compared with the figures for the year in which the Auto Union had been formed, output of Horch cars had doubled by 1938. In the same period production of Wanderer cars increased fivefold and of DKW cars more than tenfold. One in four passenger cars registered for the first time in Germany in 1938 came from the Auto Union, and more than one motorcycle in three was a DKW.
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War and liquidation When the Second World War broke out, this expansion came to an abrupt end. Auto Union AG built its last vehicles for civilian use in 1940/41, and was then obliged to manufacture products for the war effort. Due to mass conscription to the army the shortage of workers intensified. In order to satisfy the increased demand for German war machinery the Nazi regime started to use foreign workers in 1941/42. Today it is estimated that between 11 and 12 million men and women were part of the foreign workforce in the German Reich during the Second World War. The use of labour in Germany increasingly developed into forced labour. As the German war industry reached the limits of its working resources in 1943/44, the Nazi regime allowed access to hundreds of thousands of SS concentration camp prisoners. For them, employment in the war industry under unspeakable working and living conditions usually meant death through work.
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