by dxdm | 2025-12-19 22:46:12+00:00
(Edit to add TLDR: I'm going to put some context around "Hitlers good move" of "founding Volkswagen". But first I am going to explain my original comment and apologize for scrooge-ifying you.)

I made that quip because you reacted to a satirical, presumably generated headline by questioning the honesty of the satire and by ascribing a political motive to it.

That's okay to do, of course, but reacting to this particular one among all the other unfairly and satirically reduced headlines, and immediately smelling political motive maybe says more about where you're coming from than it does about the particular circumstances how this headline came to be. Maybe you want to see it as political for some reason, or are at least primed to read it that way, when everything around it suggests it's just indiscriminate satire?

So the fact that this is what popped into your head maybe wants to tell you something, like the visiting ghost. It's probably related to current politics. And then I think your comment in the face of this fun little website felt a bit scrooge-y to me, and so this admittedly silly comeback popped into my head.

It wasn't very nice or productive of me, so please accept my apologies for hanging this old bore's name on you.

Now that we got that out of the way, I'm going to skip past how I think you're misreading what was meant by "honest" and "accidental" in their respective places, and quickly jump into the other can of worms you opened, and wield my worm-relativizer.

I agree that good deeds can be done by bad people, and vice versa. But I would like the record here to show that the Volkswagen was not simply "a good move by Hitler", because people might take that literally and come away thinking Hitler was the single driving force here, or that it was unrestrictedly good.

Hitler played an important role bringing the Volkswagen about, that is correct. He did that by putting the power of the state behind efforts that had been ongoing for a while to develop a cheap, mass-produced car in Germany, and enabled engineers like Ferdinand Porsche to get it done by cajoling the car industry to put resources behind it. (More or less; the point is Hitler and nazi government were not responsible for idea nor execution, but they did push it forward because it aligned really well with their ideology, and would of course be happy to claim credit for the whole thing.)

Now, how about "good"? Before the Volkswagen became the affordable car for the masses after the war, it did a lot of work in a modified form as part of the German war machine. Before the civilian car came to market, the nazis started the European part of world war 2, and the engineering and tooling and factory put in place for the car, it started turning out what was essentially the German version of the army Jeep, if you will pardon that comparison, supporting the German war effort and all the atrocities it enabled and tragedies it brought about.

As a little cherry on top, I think the many folks who paid non-trivial sums to essentially pre-order the car before the war never got that car, nor did they get their money back.

So, I don't like seeing the Volkswagen poke it's head out as "Hitler's good deed". I don't think you wanted to mislead anyone, and your point about good deeds stands regardless.

But history is messy, and to learn from it it helps to see it in proper context, especially around this fella and his pugnacious posse.