Editing Volkswagen Group (section)

===1945 to 1970===
[[File:VW Export, Bj. 1951.jpg|thumb|right|A 1951 [[Volkswagen Beetle]]]]
After the war in Europe, in June 1945, [[Ivan Hirst|Major Ivan Hirst]]<ref name=VW-intl-hist/> of the British Army [[Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers]] (REME) took control of the bomb-shattered factory for use in repairing British Army vehicles, pending the expected disposal of the plant tooling and equipment as [[war reparations]]. However, no British car manufacturer was interested. A British report on the car said 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."<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/mar/18/guardianobituaries |title=Obituaries&nbsp;– Ivan Hirst |work=The Guardian |date=18 March 2000 |access-date=3 February 2012 |location=London |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131204072755/http://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/mar/18/guardianobituaries |archive-date=4 December 2013 |url-status=live }}</ref> In 1948, the [[Ford Motor Company]] of USA was offered Volkswagen, but [[Ernest Breech]], a Ford executive vice president, said he did not think either the plant or the car was "worth a damn."<ref>Ford: The Times, the Man, the Company by Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Nevins 1954</ref> Breech later said that he would have considered merging [[Ford of Germany]] and Volkswagen, but after the war, ownership of the company was in such dispute that nobody could possibly hope to be able to take it over. As part of the [[Industrial plans for Germany]], large parts of German industry, including Volkswagen, were to be dismantled. Total German car production was set at a maximum of 10% of the 1936 car production numbers.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/marshall/large/documents/index.php?pagenumber=10&documentid=22&documentdate=1947-03-24&studycollectionid=mp&nav=OK |title=Harry S. Truman&nbsp;– Library & Museum&nbsp;– Draft, The President's Economic Mission to Germany and Austria, Report 3, March, 1947; OF 950B: Economic Mission as to Food...; Truman Papers |work=Trumanlibrary.org |access-date=3 February 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110211032355/http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/marshall/large/documents/index.php?pagenumber=10&documentid=22&documentdate=1947-03-24&studycollectionid=mp&nav=OK |archive-date=11 February 2011 |url-status=live }}</ref> The company survived by producing cars for the British Army, and in 1948 the British Government handed the company back over to the German state, and it was managed by former [[Opel]] chief [[Heinrich Nordhoff]].
[[File:Audi 75 in Rothenburg.jpg|thumb|right|The [[Audi F103]], in production from 1965 to 1972]]
Production of the Type 60 Volkswagen (re-designated [[Volkswagen Type 1|Type 1]]) started slowly after the war due to the need to rebuild the plant and because of the lack of raw materials, but production grew rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s. The company began introducing new models based on the Type 1, all with the same basic air-cooled, rear-engine, rear-drive platform. These included the [[Volkswagen Type 2]] in 1950, the [[Volkswagen Karmann Ghia]] in 1955, the [[Volkswagen Type 3]] in 1961, the [[Volkswagen Type 4]] in 1968, and the [[Volkswagen Type 181]] in 1969.

In 1960, upon the flotation of part of the [[German government|German federal government]]'s stake in the company on the German stock market, its name became ''Volkswagenwerk [[Aktiengesellschaft]]'' (usually abbreviated to ''Volkswagenwerk AG'').

On 1 January 1965, Volkswagenwerk acquired [[Auto Union|Auto Union GmbH]] from its parent company [[Daimler-Benz]]. The new subsidiary went on to produce the first post-war [[Audi]] models, the [[Audi F103]] series, shortly afterwards.<ref name="chronicle">{{cite book|title=Volkswagen Chronicle|editor1=Manfred Grieger|editor2=Ulrike Gutzmann|editor3=Dirk Schlinkert|publisher=Volkswagen AG|year=2008|series=Historical Notes|volume=7|isbn=978-3-935112-11-6|url=http://www.volkswagenag.com/content/vwcorp/info_center/en/publications/2010/05/chronicle.bin.html/binarystorageitem/file/HN7e_www2.pdf|access-date=31 May 2015|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304055559/http://www.volkswagenag.com/content/vwcorp/info_center/en/publications/2010/05/chronicle.bin.html/binarystorageitem/file/HN7e_www2.pdf|archive-date=4 March 2016}}</ref>

Another German manufacturer, [[NSU Motorenwerke AG]], was merged into Auto Union on 26 August 1969, creating a new company, Audi NSU Auto Union AG (later renamed [[Audi AG|AUDI AG]] in 1985).<ref name="chronicle"/>