“It runs, and runs, and runs, and runs,” proclaimed a famous 1960s German advert for the Volkswagen Beetle. While the slogan was both a nod to the car’s reliability and its runaway global success, the ad-men behind it could not have guessed that some 50 years later, the scarab–shaped vehicle would still be rolling off production lines.

Although the new Beetle has been reworked from the ground up, it still draws heavily on the design of the original, a vehicle that is now as much a cultural icon as a mode of transport.

But suppose for a moment that the VW Beetle had never existed – would the world have missed this vehicle with the impish grin formed by the bonnet and bug-eyed headlights?

The scenario is not as unlikely as it might first seem. The VW Beetle could easily have never risen from the ashes of World War Two in the way it did.

The original designs for the Beetle can be traced back to the dark days of Nazi rule in Germany. In 1934, Adolf Hitler instructed the German automobile manufacturers to produce an inexpensive family car that could be afforded by ordinary working citizens. The job of designing this Volkswagen – meaning “people’s car” – was given to the racing car engineer Ferdinand Porsche, who later went on to found his own company.

At the Berlin Motor Show in 1935, Hitler announced the completion of the initial designs for the car that he named the Kraftdurch Freude Wagen, or ‘Strength Through Joy Car’. The Nazi leader’s interest in the vehicle was such that he even contributed his own sketch of what he felt the vehicle should look like, although it only has a passing resemblance to the final designs.

A factory was built in the city of Fallersleben in Lower Saxony, which would later become known as Wolfsburg, but only a handful of vehicles were finished. The outbreak of war in 1939 halted production and the factory was instead used to churn out military vehicles.

Allied bombing heavily damaged the factory and at the end of the war it passed into the hands of the British Occupation Forces, who sent a Yorkshire-born British Army Officer called Major Ivan Hirst to reopen it. Under his direction, production of the KdF-Wagen restarted, although it was given a new name – the Volkswagen Type 1.