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Friday, October 31, 2014

Collecting Cars once owned by the Nazis


Hitler Riding in his mercedes car Past Nazi Followers
 Adolf Hitler in his Mercedes surrounded by Sieg Heiling crowds in 1937. Photograph: © Bettmann/CORBIS
Showing off his stunning collection of classic automobiles, Dmitry Lomakov explains why Russians love Nazi cars. "They are symbols of Russia's victory,'' he says. "For Russians the second world war isn't a historical event. For us it happened yesterday.''
Lomakov is the director of Moscow's museum of retro-automobiles whose collection in a freezing cold hanger includes three rare Nazi-owned vehicles. "Buying a Nazi car is like sticking one finger up to Hitler,'' he explains.
On the left of the entrance is Joseph Goebbels' Mercedes Benz 540K, bought by Lomakov's father in 1972 after he spotted it rusting in a garden in communist Latvia. Then there is Hermann Goering's jaw-droppingly sleek Horch-853 limousine. Next to that is Martin Boorman's comparatively modest Mercedes-Benz 320, used by his cook to transport sacks of potatoes. Earlier this week an anonymous Russian collector snapped up the ultimate trophy: a midnight blue Mercedes Benz 770K belonging to Hitler.
The five-ton armour-plated vehicle – licence plate number 1A 148461 – was part of Hitler's official fleet, and used by the Führer to criss-cross Europe during the second world war. (Hitler was photographed standing in it surrounded by adoring Sieg Heiling crowds.)
Michael Fröhlich, a Düsseldorf car dealer, brokered the deal. The mystery Russian purchased five other similar class vehicles, four of which once belonged to third reich leaders including the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.
Fröhlich, who refused to reveal the price tag, said he had had made sure to "double-check" with the courts before going ahead, realising how sensitive and often illegal the buying and selling of Nazi memorabilia is. "They assured me I could not be prosecuted as long as there are no Nazi symbols in the car – but the swastikas were removed long ago,'' he said.
Lomakov says: ''He said he knew the identity of the mystery Russian but wasn't telling: 'He may have bought Hitler's car out of patriotism. Or as an investment. "We don't have hang ups about swastikas. For us the war is close. We grew up with it. Everyone has relatives who fought the Germans."According to Lomakov, Germans are still squeamishly embarrassed by their country's dark past. But Russians ,happily mug up for photos next to Hitler-era relics, posing with them like Roman victors.
The red army returned home from the second world war with an extraordinary amount of booty — paintings, tapestries, furniture, dinner plates, and other looted souvenirs. In the summer and autumn of 1945 thousands of German cars and motorbikes were shipped back to a war-shattered Soviet Union.
Soldiers also brought back Hitler's jaw. Much of this third reich memorabilia is on display in Moscow's armed forces museum, where you can peek at Hitler's jacket and swastika armband. Russia's FSB spy agency recently exhibited Hitler's hat, dusted down from its secret archives.
Russian soldiers stumbled on Goebbels's motor at his estate near Berlin. It ended up in the Soviet Union in 1947. Lomakov's father, Sasha, bought it from the widow of the first secretary of Soviet Latvia's communist party. "The car was in a dreadful state," Lomakov recalls.
Foreign cars were a rarity in the Soviet Union. It was only after the collapse of communism that Boris Yeltsin allowed in foreign marques. In recent years the number of classic car collectors has grown in Russia — swelled by wealthy new Russians willing to splash out millions on classic German engineering.
The Lomakov family have been collecting classic cars for more than 40 years, and has amassed over 120 cars and motorcycles. Their vehicles have appeared in numerous films.
The museum also boasts classic Soviet Gaz limousines and US motorbikes. "Hitler had several 700 series Mercedes cars. It would be an honour to have one as a trophy. I might even put it in a separate garage,'' Lomakov mused.
Frohlich, who has sold cars belonging to other prominent figures such as Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo, traced the provenance of Hitler's car back to Austria where it was sold after the Second World War for 2000 Reichsmarks. Later it ended up in the cellar of the Imperial Palace in Las Vegas and then in the collection of a Munich brewery billionaire. His widow sold it with several other Nazi cars to a collector in Bielefeld, who kept them in his garage.
Frohlich said it should not be assumed that his buyer for Hitler's car was a Nazi. "Everyone knows that these cars are not going to get any cheaper. They are the best investment that you could make right now." But he warned of a possible curse. "Almost everyone who had bought the Mercedes has died not long afterwards, including Hitler."

Daimler-Benz in the Nazi Era (1933-1945)


From 1937, Daimler-Benz AG increasingly produced armament items such as the LG 3000 truck and aircraft engines such as the DB 600 and DB 601. To create additional capacity for aircraft engine production in addition to the Marienfelde plant the Genshagen plant was built in a well-concealed forest location south of Berlin in 1936.
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Plant of Berlin-Marienfelde, production of aircraft engines, 1939.

 
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Wilhelm Kissel, since 1937 chief of the board of management of Daimler-Benz
Armament production accounted for an ever-growing proportion of the company’s revenues up to the start of the war. In the summer of 1941, the Daimler-Benz AG Board of Management, chaired by Wilhelm Kissel, no longer envisaged a swift end to the war or an imminent return to producing civilian vehicles.

 
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Mercedes-Benz L 4500 4.5-tonne truck, 1945
The most important line of business was truck production, whilst passenger-car manufacture – already limited to military requirements since the beginning of the war – was in decline and virtually came to a standstill by the end of 1942. The company was now focusing on the manufacture and assembly of military components for the army, navy and air force.

 
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Daimler-Benz DB 601 A aeroengine, 12-cylinder V-engine with gasoline injection, 1937
Spare parts production and the repair of military vehicles and engines were also growing in importance. New staff were needed to handle the increased armament production because many workers were fighting on the front line.

 
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Plant of Sindelfingen: Forced labourers' camp "Riedmühle", around 1944.
Initially, the company recruited women in order to cope with the required unit volumes. However, as staff numbers were still too low, Daimler-Benz also used forced labourers. These prisoners of war, abducted civilians and detainees from concentration camps were housed close to the plants. Forced labourers from western Europe lived in guest houses, private accommodation or schools.

Workers from eastern Europe and prisoners of war were interned in barrack camps with poor, prison-like conditions. Concentration camp detainees were monitored by the SS under inhumane conditions. They were “loaned out” to companies in exchange for money. In 1944, almost half of Daimler Benz’s 63,610 Daimler Benz employees were civilian forced labourers, prisoners of war or concentration camp detainees.
After the war, Daimler-Benz admitted its links with the Nazi regime, and also became involved in the German Industry Foundation’s initiative “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”, whose work included the provision of humanitarian aid for former forced labourers.

The Nazis and the German Auto Industry

The colossal extent of slave labour used by modern-day German blue-chip companies to get rich during the Third Reich has been laid bare by the nation's top business magazine.
WirtschaftsWoche has published a league table illustrating the Nazi past of top German firms like Bosch, Mercedes, Deutsche Bank, VW and many others, which involved the use of almost 300,000 slaves. 
The league table follows revelations earlier that Audi, which was known as Auto Union during the Nazi period, was a big exploiter of concentration camp supplied slave labor, using 20,000 concentration camp inmates in its factories.
Slave labour: Jewish slave workers in striped uniforms work in a Nazi ammunition factory near Dachau concentration camp during World War II. WirtschaftsWoche has published a league table illustrating the Nazi past of top German firms like Bosch, Mercedes, Deutsche Bank, VW and many others, which involved the use of almost 300,000 slaves
Slave labour: Jewish slave workers in striped uniforms work in a Nazi ammunition factory near Dachau concentration camp during World War II. WirtschaftsWoche has published a league table illustrating the Nazi past of top German firms like Bosch, Mercedes, Deutsche Bank, VW and many others, which involved the use of almost 300,000 slaves
Old and young: The league table follows revelations earlier that Audi, which was known as Auto Union during the Nazi period, was a big exploiter of concentration camp supplied slave labor, using 20,000 concentration camp inmates, such as this young boy, in its factories
Old and young: The league table follows revelations earlier that Audi, which was known as Auto Union during the Nazi period, was a big exploiter of concentration camp supplied slave labor, using 20,000 concentration camp inmates, such as this young boy, in its factories
Many of the companies listed by WirtschaftsWoche have already had internal reckonings with their Nazi past.
In 2011, the dynasty behind the BMW luxury car marker admitted, after decades of silence, to using slave labour, taking over Jewish firms and doing business with the highest echelons of the Nazi party during World War Two.
Nazi favourite: Hitler speaks at the opening ceremony of the Volkswagen car factory in Fallersleben, Germany, in 1938. Volkwagen used 12,000 slave labourers under the Nazis
Nazi favourite: Hitler speaks at the opening ceremony of the Volkswagen car factory in Fallersleben, Germany, in 1938. Volkwagen used 12,000 slave labourers under the Nazis
Gabriele Quandt, whose grandfather Guenther employed an estimated 50,000 forced labourers in his arms factories, producing ammunition, rifles, artillery and U-boat batteries, said it was 'wrong' for the family to ignore this chapter of its history.
But BMW were not the only German firm to profit from the sudden influx of slave labour.
Daimler, which owns Mercedes, admitted as far back as 1986 that it had employed 40,000 forced labourers under appalling conditions during the war enabling it to reap massive profits.
Electrical giant Bosch used 20,000 slaves while steelmaker ThyssenKrupp used a staggering 75,000. 
VW, builder of the 'People's Car' that morphed postwar in the VW Beetle, e mployed 12,000 slaves in the most terrible of conditions at its plant in Wolfsburg. The chemical and pharmaceutical behemoths BASF, Bayer and Hoechst employed 80,000 slaves.
Bayer celebrated its 150th anniversary last year with no mention in the official blurb about the Nazi years from 1933 to 1945.
And chemical manufacturer IG Farben even had a factory inside Auschwitz death camp that used prison labour in the production of synthetic rubber and oil. 
However, their most ghastly act was in the sale of Zyklon B - the poison used in the Nazi gas chambers. At its peak in 1944, this factory made use of 83,000 slave laborers.
There were also companies which enriched themselves through Nazi rule with Publishing giant Bertelsmann grew rich publishing gung-ho pro war books for Hitler Youth members and, according to Handelsblatt, 'profited massively' from contracts with the German armed forced at the Nazi Party central headquarters in Munich.
A car for a fuhrer: Adolf Hitler waves to crowds in his six-seater Mercedes car in this undated World War II photograph. Mercedes are one of a host of German companies that helped the Nazis
A car for a fuhrer: Adolf Hitler waves to crowds in his six-seater Mercedes car in this undated World War II photograph. Mercedes are one of a host of German companies that helped the Nazis
Germany's largest bank, Deutsche, did not employ slaves but became hugely wealthy under Nazism. The bank sacked all Jewish directors when the Nazis came to power and from 1938 onwards became the richest in Germany by taking part in the 'Aryanising' - or taking over - of Jewish-owned businesses.
Train builder and electrical engineering giant Siemens still plays its cards close to its chest about wartime activities. 
The research director of the German Museum in Berlin said that what it has admitted so far about its past is merely a 'house history'. Companies such as the sporting goods supplier Adidas and the high street retailer C&A are still working on company histories about their time under Nazism.

HOW MANY SLAVES DID GERMAN FIRMS TAKE FROM THE NAZIS?

1IG Farben - 83,000
2. BASF, Bayer and Hoechst - 80,000
3. ThyssenKrupp - 75,000
4. BMW - 50,000
5. Daimler (Mercedes) - 40,000
6. Bosch - 20,000
7. Audi - 20,000
8. VW - 12,000
Top German companies a decade ago contributed £3billion into a fund to compensate forced labourers enslaved in Third Reich factories.
Under a programme organised by Fritz Sauckel - who was hanged at Nuremberg for war crimes - over two million people were brought to Germany from conquered lands to work for the new master race.
Many of these went to private companies, like VW and BASF, while tens of thousands more were conscripted to work under the most appalling conditions producing weaponry.
These included the slaves who built the V1 and V2 Rockets and other massive construction projects, such as the Valentin submarine base in Bremen.
The Nazis differed from other regimes throughout histroy which used slave labour. Romans and Greeks, for example, valued and revered their forced labourers wile the Nazis treated them with immense crulety.
VW, for example, had something called the ‘dying room’  where female forced labourers who gave birth had to leave their newborns to die.
Most of the agricultural slaves came from the occupied eastern territories of Poland, the Baltic states and Russia. Because the Slavik people were regarded as subhuman in the Nazi racial lexicon, casualty rates among them were the highest of all.
Dark past: Chemical manufacturer IG Farben even had a factory inside Auschwitz (pictured) that used prison labour in the production of synthetic rubber and oil. However, their most ghastly act was in the sale of Zyklon B - the poison used in the Nazi gas chambers. At its peak in 1944, this factory made use of 83,000 slave laborers
Dark past: Chemical manufacturer IG Farben even had a factory inside Auschwitz (pictured) that used prison labour in the production of synthetic rubber and oil. However, their most ghastly act was in the sale of Zyklon B - the poison used in the Nazi gas chambers. At its peak in 1944, this factory made use of 83,000 slave laborers
Mercedes used slave labour during Nazi rule of Germany
Mercedes used slave labour during Nazi rule of Germany
Slave labourers were used after the 1943 Dambuster raid to repair the breached dams in the Ruhr Valley and many French workers were press-ganged into backbreaking work building Hitler’s Atlantic wall meant to stave off a seaborne invasion launched from England.
BASF built a plant at Auschwitz to produce synthetic rubber and inmates there had a life expectancy measured in weeks. Soviet PoWs concripted to work in Nazi industrial plants suffered death rates of between 90 and 97 per cent.
BMW: Dynasty used 50,000 slave labourers under Nazis
Family secret: Guenther Quandt, whose family now owns BMW, used slave labourers during World War Two in his weapons factories in Germany
Family secret: Guenther Quandt, whose family now owns BMW, used slave labourers during World War Two in his weapons factories in Germany
In 2011, after decades of silence, the dynasty behind the BMW luxury car marker admitted using slave labour, taking over Jewish firms and doing business with the highest echelons of the Nazi party during World War Two.
Gabriele Quandt, whose grandfather Guenther employed an estimated 50,000 forced labourers in his arms factories, producing ammunition, rifles, artillery and U-boat batteries, said it was 'wrong' for the family to ignore this chapter of its history.
He spoke out after an in-depth study by Bonn-based historian Joachim Scholtyseck, commissioned by the family, that concluded Guenther Quandt and his son Herbert were responsible for numerous Nazi injustices.
It found Guenther acquired companies through the Nazi programme of 'Aryanisation' of Jewish-owned firms.
Herbert Quandt was 'part of the system', son Stefan Quandt said after the conclusion of the three-year study - forced on the family by public outrage over a German TV documentary - compiled using company files from the 12-year period of the Third Reich.
The Quandt family bought into BMW 15 years after the War.
Guenther became a Nazi Party member on May 1, 1933, a month after Adolf Hitler achieved supreme power in Germany.
But he had long used a network of party officials and Wehrmacht officers to build up contacts for lucrative state contracts.
Married to Magda Behrend Rietschel, Guenther was divorced by her in 1929 although they remained on friendly terms.
She went on to marry the 'poison dwarf' of the Nazi party, the propaganda maestro Joseph Goebbels, and would die with him - after murdering their six children - in Hitler's bunker in 1945.
The company grew rich in the Nazi era. In 1937, Hitler bestowed on Guenther the title Wehrwirtschaftsführer - leader of the armament economy - and his business supplied weapons using slave labourers from concentration camps in at least three factories.
Hundreds of these labourers died.
An execution area to murder those who displeased their masters was found in one of his plants in Hannover and the study mentions the fate of a Polish man who was hanged at another plant in front of 50 other inmates.
An AFA technician repairing a battery cell in a German type IX boat in 1942. AFA was owned by Gunther Quandt and manufactured batteries and accumulators for the German military
An AFA technician repairing a battery cell in a German type IX boat in 1942. AFA was owned by Gunther Quandt and manufactured batteries and accumulators for the German military
The study showed that the Quandt firms also used Russian POWs as slave labourers and that Guenther and Herbert knew about them, detailing their dispersion among their empire from the company HQ in Berlin.
Herbert even employed Ukrainian slaves on his weekend retreat outside the Reich capital.
Guenther was described as an 'opportunist' who enthusiastically helped the regime to rid Berlin industries of Jewish workers before the start of the war.
This was despite his numerous contacts with Jewish bankers in the years before the Nazis began their climb to power.
He was also 'unscrupulous' in his take-overs of Jewish firms which were forcibly sold for a pittance to loyal German industrialists such as himself.
'The family patriarch was part of the Nazi regime', judged the historian in the 1,200 page study.  
'The Quandts connected themselves inseparably with the crimes of the National Socialists.'
BMW, of which the Quandts became major shareholders 15 years after the war, was not implicated in the documentary.
'We were treated terribly and had to drink water from the toilets. We were also whipped,' said Takis Mylopoulos, a forced labourer who worked in Quandt's Hannover plant.
In 1946 Guenther Quandt was arrested and interned. To the surprise of many, he was judged to be a 'Mitlaufer', or fellow traveller -  namely someone who accepted the Nazi ideology but did not take an active part in crimes.
He was released in January 1948.
One of the prosecutors in the Nuremberg trials, Benjamin Ferencz, now says that if today's evidence against him had been presented to the court at the time,'Quandt would have been charged with the same offences as the directors of IG Farben' - the makers of the gas used to murder the Jews at Auschwitz.
Quandt was able to re-install himself in the supervisory boards of various German firms such as Deutsche Bank. He also became an honorary citizen of the University in Frankfurt in 1951.
He died on holiday in Cairo on December 30, 1954.

The two most powerful Nazi industrialists, Alfried Krupp of Krupp Industries and Friedrich Flick, whose Flick Group eventually owned a 40 per cent stake in Daimler-Benz, had been central figures in the Nazi economy. 
Their companies used slave labourers like cattle, to be worked to death.
The Krupp company soon became one of Europe's leading industrial combines.
The Flick Group also quickly built up a new pan-European business empire. Friedrich Flick remained unrepentant about his wartime record and refused to pay a single Deutschmark in compensation until his death in July 1972 at the age of 90, when he left a fortune of more than $1billion, the equivalent of £400million at the time.
Dark history: Car giant Audi, then called Auto Union, employed thousands of concentration camp inmates during the Second World War, an investigation has found'For many leading industrial figures close to the Nazi regime, Europe became a cover for pursuing German national interests after the defeat of Hitler,' says historian Dr Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, an adviser to Jewish former slave labourers.
'The continuity of the economy of Germany and the economies of post-war Europe is striking. Some of the leading figures in the Nazi economy became leading builders of the European Union.'
Numerous household names had exploited slave and forced labourers including BMW, Siemens and Volkswagen, which produced munitions and the V1 rocket.
Slave labour was an integral part of the Nazi war machine. Many concentration camps were attached to dedicated factories where company officials worked hand-in-hand with the SS officers overseeing the camps.
Hermann Abs, post-war Germany's most powerful banker, had prospered in the Third Reich.
Dapper, elegant and diplomatic, Abs joined the board of Deutsche Bank, Germany's biggest bank, in 1937. As the Nazi empire expanded, Deutsche Bank enthusiastically 'Aryanised' Austrian and Czechoslovak banks that were owned by Jews.
By 1942, Abs held 40 directorships, a quarter of which were in countries occupied by the Nazis. Many of these Aryanised companies used slave labour and by 1943 Deutsche Bank's wealth had quadrupled.
Abs also sat on the supervisory board of I.G. Farben, as Deutsche Bank's representative. I.G. Farben was one of Nazi Germany's most powerful companies, formed out of a union of BASF, Bayer, Hoechst and subsidiaries in the Twenties.
It was so deeply entwined with the SS and the Nazis that it ran its own slave labour camp at Auschwitz, known as Auschwitz III, where tens of thousands of Jews and other prisoners died producing artificial rubber.
When they could work no longer, or were verbraucht (used up) in the Nazis' chilling term, they were moved to Birkenau. There they were gassed using Zyklon B, the patent for which was owned by I.G. Farben.
But like all good businessmen, I.G. Farben's bosses hedged their bets.
During the war the company had financed Ludwig Erhard's research. After the war, 24 I.G. Farben executives were indicted for war crimes over Auschwitz III - but only 12 of the 24 were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms ranging from one-and-a-half to eight years.
I.G. Farben got away with mass murder.
Extract from a 2009 Mail Online article by Adam Lebor.

AUDI: 'Firmly ensnared' in Nazi regime
Car giant Audi employed thousands of concentration camp inmates during the Second World War and was 'firmly ensnared' in the Nazi regime, an investigation found last month.
During the war years, Audi was known as Group Auto Union and, in a deal brokered by the SS, hired 3,700 concentration camp inmates to work in what was then Germany’s second biggest car firm.
The academic study also revealed another 16,500 forced laborers, who were not imprisoned in concentration camps, were working in Auto Union plants.

Dark history: Car giant Audi, then called Auto Union, employed thousands of concentration camp inmates during the Second World War, an investigation has found
Authors of the study, economic historian Rudolf Boch of the University of Chemnitz, and Martin Kukowski, head of the Department of history at Audi, were granted access to the Audi archives for the first time for their 'house cleaning' history of the firm.
Their book, Wartime Economy And Labour Usage Of Auto Union Chemnitz AG During The Second World War, centres on the firm, which was the only serious competitor to Mercedes during the 12 year lifespan of the Third Reich, with a 20 percent market share for luxury cars.
During the war some of the plants were turned over to military production, churning out tanks and air-craft engines.
The 500 page report claims that Auto Union - now Volkswagen’s luxury marque Audi - built its success on the back of human misery and suffering, and that founder Dr Richard Bruhn was largely  responsible for the firm's large-scale exploitation of forced labour.
'More than 20,000 forced laborers were used in the production of Auto Union in their Saxon works, including almost one-fifth from concentration camps,' said the study authors.
Conditions in the concentration camp in the city of Zwickau, where many workers were held, were particularly appalling with 1,000 prisoners - many of them forced labourers from France - living in unheated barracks.  
'The conditions were devastating,' said the historians.
The researchers also discovered that disabled workers were shipped north to the Flossenburg concentration camp to be executed, and their numbers replaced with prisoners from that camp.
Towards the end of the war, 688 Zwickau inmates were sent on a death march to Karlovy Vary, now in the Czech Republic, with almost half of them dying on the way.
Audi recognised its wartime guilt in using forced labour more a decade ago, paying massive amounts into the £3billion fund which German industry set up to compensate Nazi slave workers and their descendants.
The company was founded in 1932 following a merger of four car makers, and dropped the Auto Union name after a further merger in 1985.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2663635/Revealed-How-Nazis-helped-German-companies-Bosch-Mercedes-Deutsche-Bank-VW-VERY-rich-using-slave-labor.html#ixzz3Hl0bucKn
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Sex in the Back Seat





Sex in the Back Seat
            Although no other twentieth century innovation has so intensely influenced manners, customs, and living habits, the nature and scope of the automobile’s influences are far from being fully understood. As early as the first decade of the twentieth century, the automobile was equated with adventure, including and perhaps especially sexual adventure. It liberated riders from social control and allowed men to pursue women (and women to pursue men!) in a manner that was to change patterns of courtship and sexual behaviors.
            Music of the day reflected the romantic possibilities and opportunities now afforded by the coming of the automobile. In 1899, Alfred Dixon published “Love in an Automobile,” and a year later at least six song titles featured the theme of a charming young woman riding in a car. That same year, Rudolph Anderson wrote the following song about a male persuading a female to take a romantic drive:
“When first I propose to Daisy on a sunny summer’s morn,
She replied, ‘you must be crazy’ and laughed my love to scorn.
Said I, ‘Now I’ve hit on a novel scheme, which surely to you may appeal.
Say wouldn’t you go for a honeymoon in a cozy automobile?’
When she heard my bright suggestion, why, she fairly jumped for joy.
Her reply was just a question, ‘Oh joy, when do we start dear boy?’
Said I, ‘You will take ‘about half an hour to pack up your things and grip.
And the ‘round the corner we’ll married be, and start away on our trip.
We’ll fulfill your dreams, marring mishap of course.”25
The famous song of this era, “In My Merry Oldsmobile” sold between 600,000 and 1 million copies of sheet music. It ran:
Come away with me Lucille
In my merry Oldsmobile.
Over the road of life we’ll fly,
Autobubbling you and I.
To the church we’ll swiftly steal,
And out wedding bells will peal,
You can go as far as you like with me,
In our merry Oldsmobile.26
Other early titles included:
“The Automobile Girl”
“My Automobile Girl”
“My Auto Lady”
“The Motor Girl”
“The Auto Show Girl”
“Motor Maid”
“Let’s Have a Motor Car Marriage”
“Automobiling with Mollie”
“In Our Little Lovemobile”
“An Auto Built for Two”
“Riding in Love’s Limosine [sic]”
“On an Automobile with a Girl You Love”
“The Auto Kiss”
“The Automobile Honeymoon”27
            Previously, “calling” was the traditional means by which couples were brought together. “Calling” was a courtship custom, and it involved three central tenets of middle class American life:  the family, respectability, and privacy. Calling admitted the male into the young woman’s private home, where boys engage in conversation with the girl under the watchful eyes of her mother. Tea was often served, and perhaps the girl would display her musical talents and play the piano as light entertainment. All of this took place in the parlor. Mothers, the guardians of respectability and morals, decided who could call on their daughters and who could not. Daughters could request a certain male visitor, but the mothers made the final decision as to his acceptability. Family honor and name, along with class boundaries, were to be respected.
            The calling ritual as practiced resulted in giving middle class mothers and daughters a measure of control. How much of this was real and actually practiced is certainly open to question, particularly since horse-drawn carriages, the woods, and the haystack were also options for young couples. But community controls and prevailing rituals and beliefs certainly have power. Yet it is undeniable that the emergence of the automobile and dating caused the loss of some of that control as power shifted from women to men. Under the calling system the woman asked the man; but in dating, the male had the car and invited the female out beyond the sphere of the parental domain. Cars took young couples off porch swings, outside of home parlors, and far away from concerned mothers and irritating brothers and sisters.
            This transition in coupling habits was well described in a racy and imaginative 1927 song entitled “Get Em in a Rumble Seat.” The so-called rumble seat, was an extension of the trunk, open and separate from the automobile interior.
            It certainly was a little tight in a rumble seat. Despite the space constraints, social commentators feared the thought of young people getting together unsupervised. There were also concerns over promiscuity and premarital sex. Initially, cars were open and seats were uncomfortable. But by the mid-1920s, most vehicles were closed, and heaters were soon available. Seats became wider and more luxuriously appointed. And as historian David Lewis has remarked, “Many cars were also equipped with long, wide running boards, and starting in the mid-1920’s increasingly long, sloping fenders,” which when covered with pillows and blankets provided impromptu settings for romance.28 By the 1920s, manufacturers designed beds into the front seat that folded into the rear seat cushions to assist in romance. The 1925 Jewett slept two people in comfort, as long as the couple did not stretch out more than 6 feet. Other car companies followed with “sleeper” cars, convenient for both auto-campers and illicit lovers.
            As Frederick Lewis Allen recounted in his Only Yesterday, the 1920s brought with it a revolution in terms of sexuality among young people. While the automobile was one venue for sexual activity, it was far from the cause of this shift in moral values that was perhaps brought on by World War I and the disillusionment and modernist thought that followed.29
            Every community had its lovers’ lane and makeout point. After World War II, and despite the intention of drive-in owners to make their businesses attractive to families, drive-ins were often seen as “passion pits.” In-car shows were often better than what was transpiring on the screen. If a speaker was not in the car window, there were credible suspicions that something had to be happening inside.

            In an interesting study published in 1953 by Alfred Kinsey and the staff of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, 983 women were surveyed concerning the places where they had premarital coitus. While a marginally greater proportion of liaisons took place in the homes of the male or female than in automobiles, the data suggested that sex in automobiles, outdoors, or in hotels and rented rooms occurred in nearly equal numbers, and only slightly less than in a home.30 Kinsey concluded that “the importance of the car has more than doubled in the thirty years covered by the sample. In earlier generations in both European and American history, the buggy or other horse-drawn conveyance appear to have served the function which the automobile now serves.”31