Doctors orders

In a world of slammed ’n’ rimmed Split Beetles, a stock one stands out from the crowd.

It may seem faintly ridiculous to talk of ‘late model’ Split Window Beetles but that’s exactly what any Split built in the ‘50s could be considered. By 1950, VW was back in German hands, export agreements were in place with various European countries and over 50,000 units a year were rolling off the production lines. These were genuine production cars and had improved enormously over their wartime brethren, with hydraulic brakes available on Export models, sunroofs open for business and gloss paint a regular occurrence.

These days you’re likely to see a line-up of such cars at pretty much any show you go to, so we’re all now pretty familiar with Splits. What you won’t ever see regularly is a line-up of pre-’50 Beetles, and certainly not pre-’48 cars. The reason is that in the immediate post-war period, when the VW factory was in the hands of the British Army, the factory was in tatters, raw materials were in short supply and much of the effort went into repairing British Army machinery and building vehicles for the occupying forces to try and get the country up and running again. Production of civilian vehicles was haphazard at best.

Prior to that, in the war years themselves, Beetles weren’t exactly top of the list of priorities either. While Porsche and his engineers soldiered on developing interesting variants of The Peoples’ Car, the workers at the Volkswagenwerk factory in the town of Fallersleben were mostly building stoves, Junkers aircraft, stationary engines, V1 flying bombs and various VW-based vehicles for use in the war effort. What few civilian Beetles – designated by this time as Type 60s – were produced were being tested to destruction by members of the Porsche organisation or were delivered to high-ranking members of the German government. Such was the fate for this car here – chassis number 1-016909 and body number 264. Built in March 1943, it was delivered to the Chancellery of the German Government in Berlin that same month and stayed within the city for the rest of the war.

As the historic treaties that marked the end of the war were being signed across Europe in May 1945, all such government vehicles were impounded, and it was from here that a gentleman named Eberhard Lerbs managed to liberate a handful of wartime Volkswagens. Along with a number of Kübelwagens, he secured this lone Type 60, which he kept in his private collection up until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Prior to that, he had been making a living renting his collection of wartime relics out as props to the German film industry but, in 1991, he called it a day and put his collection up for sale. The most amazing part of the story is that the car was a running, driving car all this time, and was in fact driven to the docks at Hamburg and off the boat again in Los Angeles, straight into the hands of the good Doctor (though Dick admits it did make the final leg of its momentous journey to Arizona on a trailer).

Though the car was as complete as one could ever hope a KdF Wagen to be, Dick knew all along that it would at some stage need a thorough restoration, but it wasn’t until he, together with a few of his vintage VW buddies, came up with the idea of the ‘Return to The Fatherland’ tour in 1998 that the process actually began. He hadn’t been sitting on his laurels in the meantime though; Dick had been in constant contact with some of the VW world’s foremost experts in vehicles of this vintage, amassing some of the extremely rare parts needed to restore the car.

The body, which still has all its original wings, bonnet and decklid, was found to have had a lot of poor quality repair work in the past, but four months of intensive metalworking by Matt Howard at Deano’s Body Shop in Arizona saw that all straightened out and repaired in readiness for paint.

Mechanically, the car was also extremely original but, as you might expect, had been given a few updates over the years – one of which was to extend the front shock towers and fit ‘normal’ length front dampers. Naturally, this was put back to standard and items like the engine and gearbox gone through and rebuilt with all NOS or era-correct parts, the latter coming from a scrap Kübelwagen gearbox that Dick sourced.

The same attention to detail went into the interior and exterior restoration. As with all cars built during the war, and in fact all cars built up until 1949, it is extremely difficult to be certain what specification they would have had as most were simply put together with what parts were lying around. If one type of interior material ran out, for instance, the next available material would have been used. Volkswagens of this vintage were ‘production’ cars in the loosest sense of the word, so this is probably as faithful a restoration as you’re ever likely to see. Some of the parts Dick has sourced are beyond rare – items such as the aluminium cog logo spring plate covers, the aluminium cog logo bonnet badge, the Bakelite external horn and the tail and number plate lights are genuine KdF pieces, prised out of collectors’ stashes across the world. Some parts, such as the centre exit exhaust, the seat material and the wooden luggage slats behind the rear seat, are faithful reproductions made especially for the car. Other parts have still, after 20 years of ownership, eluded even someone with the resources Dick has at his disposal: “I still don’t have KdF lenses for the semaphores. I only know of one in the world,” he told us. So instead the car has the earliest lenses he could find. But it would be churlish to dwell on such things for, as you can see from our pictures, Dick loves nothing more than driving this incredible piece of VW history.