by Karl Ludvigsen
Images from Ludvigsen Library and Daimler Archives

Sensational racing successes in the mid-1950s advertised the robust  revival of Daimler-Benz to a world recovering from a ruinous war in which the Allies had nearly obliterated the company altogether.
 
By the end of World War II, the Allies had done their best to reduce the production facilities of Daimler-Benz AG (DBAG) to rubble. Completely converted to production of war materiel, Daimler and Benz plants earned pride of place on the targeting maps of the RAF and America’s Eighth Air Force, which began concentrated raids on the German heartlands early in 1943.
 
Under the direction of management board chairman Wilhelm Haspel, who assumed command after the death of Wilhelm Kissel in 1942, precautions were taken to ward off the bombers. At Untertürkheim, several points of identification, including a gravel pit and stadium, were camouflaged. A smoke generator to shroud the plant was installed, using a sulphurous-acid gas that reacted with moisture in the air. As luck would have it, the day of a major raid was so dry that little smoke obscured the factory. Concealment worked better at Sindelfingen, the first plant to be so disguised. Clouds of smoke hid the huge plant during three raids, but when the B-17s visited again on September 10 and 13, 1944, the gas supply had run out. Sindelfingen was a sitting duck.

By the end of World War II, 70 percent of the Untürterkheim plant had been destroyed. Above; The same plant 10 years later, much bigger than it had ever been before the war. Funds for reconstruction initially came from Marshall Plan loans, but then from cash flow from new product sales.

At war’s end, Untertürkheim was 70 percent destroyed, Sindelfingen 85 percent. Gaggenau, where heavy trucks were made, was hit on September 10 and October 3, suffering 80 percent obliteration. Mannheim, making Opel trucks under license, survived best, with only 20 percent wrecked. The occupying Russians stripped all machinery and equipment from Berlin-Marienfelde’s huge aero-engine plant and shipped it back to the mother country. Before July 1945, when the Americans assumed control of the occupation zone in which Stuttgart lay, the nearby French heavily plundered DBAG’s facilities. Gaggenau remained in the French zone. Total machine-tool losses owed to the war equaled 6,397, with many more being seized by the Allies as war reparations.
 
A Field of Rubble
 
“I found a field of rubble there,” said star driver Rudolf Caracciola of a 1945 visit to Stuttgart. “They were clearing the rubble away. Everybody was shoveling and carrying off debris.” Skilled workers began filtering back to the various DBAG factories, feeling that as their fathers and grandfathers had worked at the “Daimler” or the “Benz,” they would continue in their footsteps. Given one meal daily for themselves and their families, plus a small fee, these craftsmen – 12,849 by the end of the year – set about the rugged task of rebuilding their place of employment.

Conditions were dire. Only 71 overcoats and 60,000 pairs of shoes were listed as available for Stuttgart’s 333,000 inhabitants. The daily ration was 1,500 calories, of which 1,200 came from potatoes and bread. Dread of a deadly 1945 winter in unheated homes and flats was unrealized, as the weather turned unseasonably warm. An illuminated Christmas tree, the first seen since 1938, glowed atop a Stuttgart newspaper building. But a year later, fears of a long, harsh winter would be fulfilled.

DBAG’s first postwar annual report rendered a bleak verdict: The company “had practically ceased to exist.” Although well aware that the real cost was far greater, it wrote off 141 million marks of the company’s value. Later, DBAG’s managers reflected that it should have taken that opportunity to rebuild and redesign the factory from scratch, but Germany’s enfeebled economy couldn’t support such a major project. None could have imagined that from 1948, funds for reconstruction would start to flow from former enemy America’s Marshall Plan for the revival of a ruined Europe; $3.5 billion would come to Germany.

Important income for 1945’s fresh start came from repairs to the vehicles of the occupying armies, carried out at main dealers and special facilities. After making bicycle trailers, vegetable carts, and bed frames to survive, Sindelfingen was available for body construction and car assembly while Untertürkheim housed the main offices and facilities for production of passenger-car engines, axles, suspension parts, and other forged and machined components.

The popular prewar 170V was revived, the first produced in 1946 with general-purpose delivery bodies. After filling an order for 25,000 gasoline-fueled stoves, Mannheim produced its first trucks, license-built Opels for the American occupiers. Heavy trucks and the versatile Unimog would come from Gaggenau. Berlin-Marienfelde revived to produce spare parts for the Russians at first, later naval and stationary engines.

The company’s management was decimated by the Allies’ denazification procedures, which required suspect officials to step down while their links with the Nazi Party were assessed. Some 1,000 managers fell afoul of the process. Gradually many were able to return after they were judged sufficiently disinfected. “In general the ‘Old Guard’ is substantially active with us again,” Haspel said at the end of 1950. This included race-engineering chief Rudolf Uhlenhaut, who spent more than a year with a British engineering unit in the Ruhr. He rejected an offer to lead Volkswagen’s engineering, saying, “I’m a Mercedes man, and the company will come back.”

In July 1947, the first passenger versions of the 170V were assembled; by the end of that year, total postwar 170V production was 1,259 units. Car output rose to 5,120, and truck and bus production to 4,770 in 1948, the year in which the reform of Germany’s currency gave a lift to all enterprises. In its 1948–1949 business year, DBAG made a profit for the first time since the war, employing 22,600. Astonishingly soon it suffered a severe shortage of qualified workers, especially skilled craftsmen, exacerbated by war-torn Stuttgart’s lack of housing and unreliable transport network.

New Designs and the Economic Miracle

West Germany was now on the brink of its Wirtschaftswunder (“Economic Miracle”). Working under the most demanding conditions, Daimler-Benz presented two completely new auto ranges at the 1951 motor show in Frankfurt, in the west of a divided Germany. Both powered by overhead-cam sixes, they were the 2.2-liter 220 and 3.0-liter 300. At the next round of the biennial show in 1953, they were joined by the smaller 180, ponton-bodied like the redesigned 220.

Crucial in putting in place the main building blocks that would support the Mercedes brand for decades, these cars were shaped by stylist Walter Häcker with richly rounded forms, implying robustness, and meticulous detailing. Bravely they spurned the general trend to horizontal grilles. Instead, they unashamedly flaunted the classic vertical Mercedes-Benz radiator-look grille in a style that originated in the 1920s. Although seemingly conservative, in fact this bold strategy preserved for the Stuttgart cars a proud, noble look that set them apart from all rivals.

Just what Germany was looking for, the 180 accounted for 65 percent of the 55,067 autos DBAG produced in 1954. And fully 43 percent of these 180s were diesels, for the company’s prewar initiative had borne rich fruit at a time when fuel economy was of vital concern, especially for Germany’s large class of small independent businessmen. In 1958, the building of the 100,000th 180D would be suitably celebrated. By 1960, DBAG would be making more than 120,000 cars annually and employing nearly 93,000 worldwide.
 
An Inevitable Return to Motorsports
 
For a reviving Mercedes-Benz marque, a return to motorsports was inevitable. Despite depressions, strikes, mergers, and wars, the company’s commitment to racing that began as an obligation mellowed into a tradition. Even when circumstances forced a slowdown in participation, there was usually a new racing car on the drawing board. This was an expression of an attitude that was less “Shall we return?” than “When shall we return?”

Racing played a major part in both development and publicity efforts in the early 1950s. Above: At the Italian Grand Prix at Monza in 1954, chief development engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut chatting with board member for technical affairs Prof. Dr. Fritz Nallinger, drawing office chief Prof. Dr. Hans Scherenberg, and senior engineer Ludwig Kraus.

Hopes were high for a postwar career for the 1.5-liter V-8 W165 that had won so sensationally at Tripoli in 1939. Stored near Dresden during the war, the cars were smuggled to Switzerland early in 1945. Because no documents accompanied them, they were ultimately delivered to the Swiss-owned Mercedes-Benz import company, where they were seized by authorities and sequestered as German property. Efforts to clear one for Caracciola to race at Indianapolis in 1946 were blocked.

Later in the 1940s, Swiss resident Caracciola fought for possession of the cars in the Zürich courts and lost. In 1950, Swiss authorities solicited bids for the W165s. Many of those interested in buying the cars wrote to the factory to ask whether they would offer any help in restoring them to full vigor. Daimler-Benz, predictably enough, replied that they were relics of little value and of no interest to the parent firm. When bids submitted on December 15, 1950, were opened, the highest offer was from the Swiss Mercedes-Benz importer.

The availability of these 1.5-liter racers caused new ideas to flourish in the fertile mind of the most avid motor-racing enthusiast at Daimler-Benz, Alfred Neubauer. From 1947, Grand Prix races would be contested by 4.5-liter unsupercharged cars competing against 1.5-liter blown models – just what DBAG had in its W165. In 1948, the occupiers permitted the auto clubs and the motor-sporting authority to come to life again in Germany.

Neubauer’s ideas were expressed in a proposal that went before the firm’s management board at its meeting on June 15, 1951, introduced by Chairman Haspel. Engineer Fritz Nallinger, a member of the board, spoke on the subject. The board also invited Uhlenhaut and Neubauer to speak. After the board announced its decision, Neubauer made a joyful note of it in the margin of his meeting agenda: “Racing cars and sports cars are to be built!”

The decision launched a project to build more W165s, but sober reflection after witnessing a titanic battle between Ferrari and Alfa Romeo in the German Grand Prix led to a rethink. Instead, work began on design of the W195, a supercharged 1.5-liter V-12 racing car. They envisioned a front-engined car with provisions for 4-wheel drive. This, too, had to be abandoned when races for the existing formula were drastically curtailed from 1952. Design began instead on the W196 for the new 2.5-liter formula of 1954.

To stretch its legs in the meantime, the Rennabteilung built a sports-racing car on the basis of the 3.0-liter 300 sedan. “We could not build a proper racing car since we did not have the money,” Uhlenhaut recalled. Haspel, he said, “left it to the technicians to do something with no help from general management.” Using the 300’s components, Uhlenhaut created the 300SL sports-racer for the 1952 racing season. Its wind-cheating lines demanded a low, wide grille, modeled on the 1939 Grand Prix W125 car, with the addition of a huge three-pointed star.

The 300SLs, built in a short time essentially out of the 300 sedan’s parts bin, were inspirational when they appeared at the Mille Miglia in 1952

After achieving historic victories at Le Mans and in the Mexican Road Race, with encouragement from Max Hoffman, the U.S. importer, the 300SL evolved into a production sports car launched in 1954. Introducing direct fuel injection on a four-stroke road car for the first time, distinguished by its tubular space frame and gullwing doors, the 300SL was and remains one of the most sensational sports cars of all time. At the end of the 20th century, a panel of experts picked the 300SL as the quintessential example of the Mercedes-Benz marque.

Road, race, and rallying successes of the 300SL were mirrored on the Grand Prix tracks of 1954 and ’55 by the reborn Silver Arrow, the W196. It probed technology limits with its direct fuel injection and mechanically closed valves in a straight-eight engine of 2.5 liters. It was created under the able leadership of Nallinger, technical board member throughout these years. Head of development Uhlenhaut and drawing office chief Hans Scherenberg led the engineering and testing, while Hans Gassmann oversaw engine design and Ludwig Kraus the chassis.

Juan Manuel Fangio called the W196 “the perfect racing car,” as well he might, for the machine – with choice of aerodynamic or open-wheeled bodies – took him to his second and third Formula 1 world championships. Its 3.0-liter sports-car sister, the 300SLR, won the world championship for makes with successes in the Mille Miglia, the Tourist Trophy, and the Targa Florio that featured the virtuosity of Stirling Moss. To its debit, on the other hand, was the fiery crash at Le Mans in 1955 that killed more than 80 and provoked huge ructions in the world of motorsports.

From SL to SLR, these great cars confirmed the unchallenged supremacy of Daimler-Benz as a maker of quality luxury cars at the end of its first decade of postwar rebuilding. With Germany’s “Economic Miracle” bringing welcome prosperity, the Mercedes-Benz stylists dared a touch of fantasy. The rear fenders of the 1959 220b and the 1961 300SE showed unmistakable signs of fins. New vertical headlamps added front-end style to the “Finback” range, which as the W111 series sought economies by sharing the same basic body between both large and small models – not always to the benefit of the latter.
 
Building on Exports
 
Both home and export markets took the postwar Mercedes-Benz offerings to their hearts. The motor-sports successes, shrewdly calibrated to resonate outside Germany and indeed outside Europe, were the best possible advertising for the rebirth of traditional Mercedes-Benz superiority. The export share of DBAG’s turnover rose from 1948’s 1.8 percent to 35.5 percent in 1955 and the decade’s record figure of 44.9 percent in 1958. One reason for this was the reluctance of the company’s management to place too much reliance on domestic growth. Only volume-bolstering export sales afforded the production rates that allowed costs to be kept under control by installation of improved manufacturing methods.

Haspel, whose career had been closely linked to that of Kissel’s, didn’t live to see the magnificent revival he had done so much to launch. At the age of only 53, he died of a stroke in January 1952. Nor was his successor, Heinrich Wagner, a production expert, any more fortunate, dying a year into his term at 54. His deputy, Fritz Könecke, assumed command of DBAG. Before the war a veteran of tire-maker Continental, rising to its board chairmanship, Könecke was a sales-savvy executive ideally placed to lead Daimler-Benz’s international growth.

Though Könecke was doubtful about an expansion foisted on him from on high, he did his best to support it once enacted. In 1957, Friedrich Flick, who owned 25 percent of Daimler-Benz and 41 percent of Auto Union, maker of DKW cars, urged that the larger company buy the smaller. Argued in the deal’s favor was its ability to give entries to DBAG in smaller and cheaper product ranges. By April 1959, the Stuttgart company had acquired all the shares of Ingolstadt-based Auto Union. Könecke summed up the merger of Germany’s second-largest and fifth-largest car manufacturers: “We have married a nice girl from a good, old-established family!”

In 1959, Mercedes-Benz began systematic crash tests to improve vehicle safety, propelling the test cars with hot water rockets.

In November 1960, Könecke stepped away from DBAG and its Auto Union decision, taking early retirement after the tragic accidental death of his only son. Since 1956, the Daimler-Benz supervisory board – responsible for financial oversight and blessing of major decisions – was guided by the major shareholdings of Flick, the Quandt family, and the Deutsche Bank, represented by chairman Hermann Josef Abs. Their choice to head DBAG’s management board was Austrian-born engineer Walter Hitzinger. The future of Daimler-Benz – in terms of turnover now Europe’s largest automaker and the world’s fifth biggest – would be up to Hitzinger.