Volkswagen was founded in 1937 under the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, and was operated by the German Labour Front. Austrian-born engineer Ferdinand Porsche was called in to design a mass-produced ‘people’s car’ that would be affordable to most Germans. However large-scale production of what we now call the Beetle didn’t begin until after the Second World War when the factory was placed under the control of British Army officer Major Ivan Hirst. Although Hirst was a civilian member of the Military Government, he wore his officer’s uniform in the factory as he found that it made the workers more responsive to his orders.

Volkswagen began to develop the Type 2 after Ben Pon, a Dutch businessman who imported Volkswagen cars into the Netherlands, produced a sketch of a proposed van. The final design was approved on 29 May 1949 but, due to the factory already running at capacity to turn out the increasingly popular Type 1 Beetle car, production didn’t start until March the next year.

The Type 2 finally debuted on 12 November and by the end of its first year over nine and a half thousand vehicles had rolled off the production line. Having got over the initial concerns of its Nazi roots, the hippie movement in the United States adopted the Type 2 and made it an icon of the counterculture movement in the 1960s.

The Type 2 continued to be produced until 31 December 2013, when the last one rolled out of the Volkswagen factory in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil.

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