A biography of the late Major Ivan Hirst, the English army officer credited with reviving the Volkswagen factory after the Second World War, is to be launched on Friday (26 March) at a ceremony to be held at the Imperial War Museum in London.

Ivan Hirst

Englishman who made Volkswagen part of the German economic miracle

Saturday March 18, 2000
The Guardian

It is ironic that the death of Ivan Hirst, at the age of 84, should coincide with another episode in the BMW-Rover crisis. For it was the Yorkshire-born Hirst who, between 1945-49, saved the Volkswagen car business and, as much as anybody else, laid the foundations for the successful postwar German motor industry.
Hirst arrived in Germany when the British army took over control of the Volkswagen factory at Wolfsburg from the Americans in the summer of 1945. As a major in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (Reme), his brief was to run a workshop for British army vehicles in the partly-ruined plant. The original intention was to dismantle the entire production line and ship out the machinery and tooling as reparations. Hirst's superior, Colonel Charles Radclyffe, who was in charge of car manufacture in the British zone, was responsible for carrying out this plan.

However, when the Volkswagen equipment was offered to Britain's motor manufacturers, including Rootes and Morris, they turned it down. An official British report famously found that "the vehicle does not meet the fundamental technical requirement of a motor-car ... it is quite unattractive to the average buyer ... To build the car commercially would be a completely uneconomic enterprise."

The British army thought differently and, after one of the few surviving wartime Volkswagen cars had been demonstrated to the British Rhine army group headquarters, the military ordered a batch of 20,000 similar vehicles. By the end of 1945, the factory had somehow managed to put together 2,490 cars. Many of them were then bartered for materials to make further cars, or for provisions to feed the 6,000 workers and other citizens of Wolfsburg, the company town built before the war as Volkswagen's headquarters.

Ivan Hirst was the man who got production going. He organised the clearance of bomb damage and had the buildings repaired; he re-commissioned machine tools, body presses and assembly jigs; he concerned himself with improving the quality of the car, with setting up a sales and service network and with starting exports - the first went to Holland in 1947.

He became a great enthusiast for the Volkswagen, which he was always ready to defend, even against the interference of the British authorities. His view was that the factory belonged to the German people, and it was his task to see that they got it.

In 1947, Colonel Radclyffe decided that a suitable German must be found to take over the company. Following a tip-off from an army colleague, Hirst found the former Opel production manager, Heinrich Nordhoff, running a small workshop in Hamburg, and was instrumental in getting him appointed as managing director in January 1949. Nordfhoff served with Volkswagen for 20 years until his death in 1968, building up the plant into one of the world's leading car manufacturers.

Hirst finally left Wolfsburg in August 1949 and, the following month, Radclyffe, on behalf of the Allied Control Commission for Germany, handed over the Volkswagen company to a trust run by the new West German federal government and the state of Lower Saxony. Hirst had carried out his task.

Born in Saddleworth, on the eastern side of the Pennines, he came from a manufacturing background - his family owned a clock factory. He was educated at the local grammar school and the faculty of technology at Manchester university. He was a keen member of the Territorial Army, training at the drill hall in Huddersfield, and by 1939 had reached the rank of captain.

Hirst was promoted to major while serving with the British Expeditionary Force in 1940, was evacuated at the fall of France and, in 1942, transferred to the Reme. After D-Day, he managed a tank repair workshop in Brussels, and was then sent to the control commission to take charge of the Volkswagen project.

After it was over, Hirst worked for the Allied Military Security Board in Germany and became a regional industry director. He later joined the industry staff of the German section of the foreign office, where he stayed until 1955 before joining the international secretariat of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris. On retirement in 1975, he returned to England and settled in Marsden, in the Colne valley. There, he became a well-known local figure, stopping to inspect vehicles carrying the VW logo and frequently welcoming historians, writers and television documentary-makers to his home.

When Hirst left Wolfsburg, his friends at Volkswagen wanted to present him with one of their cars as a token of their friendship and respect. He refused to accept this. Instead, he was given an 18in scale model, which might have cost more than the real thing. The Volkswagen company and the people of Wolfsburg remembered him with fondness and gratitude. Yet he himself always disclaimed any special role in the salvation of the motor business, ascribing it instead to successful teamwork between the Germans and the British.

Only two years ago, Hirst drove through Marsden in the first of the new VW "Bugs", whose right-hand drive version was finally - and much to his approval - launched in Britain last year.

His wife predeceased him.

Anders Ditlev Clausager

Ivan Hirst, engineer, born March 1 1916; died March 10 2000