When the Whole Town Is Out of Office
What happens when Volkswagen shuts down its massive German factory town for three weeks every summer.
The Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg, Germany.
Photographer: Maximilian Mann for Bloomberg Businessweek
This story is part of Businessweek’s Out of Office Special. Read more from the package here.
In 1938 a town sprung up from the rich farmland 150 miles west of Berlin to serve a giant factory complex built to churn out an affordable “people’s car.” Only a few of what the plant’s Nazi overlords called the Strength-Through-Joy Car were made before the operation shifted to producing military vehicles. In 1945 the victorious Allies renamed the town Wolfsburg, after a nearby castle. And in the ensuing decades, it grew into one of the biggest manufacturing hubs on the planet—covering an area as large as Monaco—making millions of Volkswagen Beetles and dozens of other models.