For its first seven years the city did not really have a name. It had a description: Stadt des KdF-Wagens bei Fallersleben, the City of the Strength Through Joy Car near Fallersleben. It was founded on 1 July 1938 on farmland in Lower Saxony, where roughly a thousand people lived, and its entire purpose sat inside that unwieldy title. A factory was rising beside the Mittelland Canal to build a cheap car for German workers, and the workers who would build the car needed somewhere to sleep. Only on 25 May 1945, six weeks after American troops took the plant, was the town renamed after a castle on a hill above the river Aller. Almost everything Wolfsburg is today - one of the most productive places in Europe, one of the most international cities in Germany, a city with no old town whatsoever - runs back to that founding.
Adolf Hitler laid the factory's foundation stone on 26 May 1938 in front of an estimated 70,000 spectators. The town followed five weeks later. Its first mayor, a government assessor named Karl Bock, was not elected but installed by decree effective 1 July 1938, and the planned settlement was laid out from nothing around the existing village of Fallersleben. The KdF-Wagen it was built to serve - Strength Through Joy being the leisure arm of the German Labour Front, and the car being the machine the world would later know as the Beetle - was pitched as a reward for ordinary Germans. Hardly any of them ever received one. Within a year the country was at war and the plant had turned to military work, producing 50,788 Kübelwagen and 14,276 Schwimmwagen between 1940 and 1945, along with aircraft components.
Around 20,000 people were made to perform forced labour in armaments production at the Volkswagen plant between 1940 and 1945. They were prisoners of war, civilians deported from occupied Europe, and concentration camp prisoners, and they were building the machinery of a war being fought against their own countries. Two camps served the site: Arbeitsdorf, which operated from April to October 1942 and where at least six people died, and Laagberg in 1944 and 1945. When American troops captured the city and the factory on 11 April 1945, about 7,700 forced labourers were liberated there. Volkswagen did not publicly account for any of this for a very long time. The company acknowledged its wartime use of forced labour in 1998 and established a restitution fund, and a memorial to those workers opened on the factory grounds in 1999 - on the same site that still builds Golfs today.
Schloss Wolfsburg first appears in a document in 1302, as the seat of the noble Bartensleben line; when that family died out in 1742 the castle passed to the Counts of Schulenburg. A Weser Renaissance building on a rise above the Aller, it supplied a compromised town with a usable name in May 1945. The Americans occupied the city until the end of June, after which the region fell into the British zone, and under British military administration, led by Major Ivan Hirst, the plant restarted. Nearly 2,000 hand-built cars came out in 1945, roughly 10,000 in 1946. The millionth Beetle was made here in 1955. The last one left the Wolfsburg lines on 1 July 1974. The city's coat of arms, a gold wolf with a blue tongue pacing a silver castle's battlements, was awarded in 1952; Volkswagen used a version of it on its steering wheels until the early 1980s.
About a thousand residents in 1938 became 25,000 by 1950 and 50,000 by 1958. During the German economic miracle, Italian workers arrived in large numbers, and Wolfsburg still has the largest Italian community in Lower Saxony as well as some of the biggest Tunisian, Cameroonian and Mexican communities in Germany. The Wolfsburg-Act of 1972 folded in twenty surrounding localities, pushing the population past 100,000 and expanding the city's area from 35 to nearly 204 square kilometres; the peak came a year later at 131,971. Today people from more than 150 nations live here, and in 2024 some 44.0 percent of residents had a migration background, second in Lower Saxony only to Salzgitter. The gross regional product in 2019 came to €188,453 per head. A city founded as an instrument of the Nazi state has become one of the most polyglot places in Germany, which is not irony so much as consequence.
Where other German cities have a medieval market square, Wolfsburg has commissions. Alvar Aalto designed three buildings here, among them the Church of the Holy Spirit and the Alvar Aalto Cultural Centre, both from 1958 to 1962. Zaha Hadid designed the Phaeno science centre, with 250 experiment stations spread across nearly 6,000 square metres. The Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg has shown modern and contemporary art since 1994, and Alt-Wolfsburg still keeps a few half-timbered manor houses from before the factory. The city has a sense of humour about itself: for the launch of the fifth-generation Golf, from 25 August to 10 October 2003, it rebranded every city limit sign and piece of official stationery as Golfsburg. When VfL Wolfsburg won the Bundesliga in 2009, roughly 100,000 people filled the centre - the first celebration on that scale the city had ever had. The women's team has won more, including consecutive UEFA Women's Champions League titles in 2013 and 2014.
Wolfsburg sits at 52.42 degrees N, 10.79 degrees E, on the southern edge of the ancient Aller valley in eastern Lower Saxony. The Volkswagen plant is impossible to miss from the air: roughly 6.5 million square metres of works on the north bank of the Mittelland Canal, with the four tall chimneys of the power station marking the western end and the two glass car towers of the Autostadt standing just beside them. The canal runs dead straight east-west through the city and makes an excellent navigation line; the Allersee lake in the Allerpark lies just east of the works. Nearest airports: EDVE (Braunschweig-Wolfsburg) about 20 km southwest with no scheduled passenger service, EDDV (Hannover) about 75 km west, and EDDB (Berlin Brandenburg) about 185 km east. Annual precipitation here is only around 532 mm, among the lowest tenth of German weather stations, so clear-air days are comparatively common. Recommended viewing altitude 3,000 to 5,000 feet.