Qualla: Wolfsburg

Wolfsburg: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Wolfsburg: A Name That Was a Slogan

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 s...

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Wolfsburg: The Workers Who Did Not Volunteer

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 bein...

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Wolfsburg: Renamed for a Castle

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 usabl...

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Wolfsburg: The Miracle and the People Who Came For It

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 an...

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Wolfsburg: A City With No Old Town

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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