Well welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the Trabant video. It was also fun to put together. It was
interesting learning all about the Trabant history and also the Eastern Bloc and how
that whole thing came together. And during it sometimes I find additional facts, and I think
it'd be useful to put them together into an extra video, and sometimes I don't and this is
the one of the cases where I found some additional information. So, I thought I'd share it with you.
So, first of all the F 8 was a car which I talked about in the video. It was sort of the forerunner
of the Trabant. But there was also an F 9. So, the F 8 launched in 1939 just before the Second
World War and the F 9 was scheduled to launch in 1940. Of course that didn't happen
because the whole War happened, and they were busy trying to make armaments and things like that. So,
the F 9 never really came about. But they had the design for it. So, after the war the F 8 was made
in East Germany and Auto Union then scrambled to go to West Germany, and they abandoned all their
factories in East Germany. And they looked around for factory space. They eventually found it and
they made the F 9 as the F 89 in a former armaments Factory in Derendorf in 1950. So,
it took them five years to get everything together and get everything working.
So, the F 89 was actually a pretty smart car. It had a drag factor of 0.34 which is amazingly
low for the time, and probably points to Auto Union's Motorsports pedigree in the 1930s with
all the svelt, sleek designs they were coming up with to try and win motorsports events.
So, the F 89 is produced in 1950 and then in 1953 it becomes the F 91,
and then in 1955 becomes the F 93. So, basically just iterate it and keep developing it. But of
course the East German companies also have the plans for the F 9 which has now become these other
cars and maybe some of the tooling as well, and so then they start making their version of the F 9.
So Auto Union, who are now in West Germany, sue the East German company which is making
the forerunner of the Trabant because they're making this F 9 copy, and they
sue them for copyright infringement. It ends up turning into not really much of a thing because
the East German company gives up on that and then makes the P70, the forerunner of the Trabant. So,
they end up ending production of that. Anyway it uses metal in a lot of its construction and as I
talk about in the video the East German company didn't really have access to a lot of sheet
metal. So, that's not really in their interest anyway. So, over in Auto Union land in West Germany
this car which is a DKW which is one of the four Auto Union Brands, the DKW F car eventually turns
into the F 102 in 1964, and as you can see from the what it looks like it's starting to look more
like a modern Audi. And of course all the full Auto Union Brands eventually they get bought by
Mercedes, and then of course they eventually merge with Volkswagen. But they drop all the Horch and
DKW and brands and they just focus on Audi, and of course they become the Audi that we know today.
So, the Trabant wasn't the only car which the Trabant factories were making. They also made
another car called the Sashsenring I can't say this! the Sashsenring P 240 which they launched in
1956. It was originally called the Horch P 240 but as I mentioned before Auto Union owned the brands
for Horch and Audi and DKW and so Auto Union over in West Germany said “you can't do that.
That’s our copyrighted name!”, and so the East German company decided that they weren't going to call
it the Horch they called it the Sashsenring. So, this was actually a brand new all-new designed car
and it was meant to be something as good as the current Mercedes - the Mercedes 220 that was out.
So, it's a very fancy, very expensive car. It was used by authorities, party officials and
also the main TV company for some reason. It cost three times the price of a Trabant, and so a very
fancy car, but it was rushed to market. They wanted to launch it for the East German head
Walter Ulbricht. They wanted to launch it for his birthday in 1954, but
there was no way they were going to be able to do that. It was just rushed to market even it took it
until 1956 to get it to market, and even then it was unreliable because they were having all kinds
of problems because they rushed it to market. So, the Soviets had a lot of control over Eastern Bloc
countries and they dictated you should only have one of your countries making a luxury car, and
you're all trying to do different things and it's just not really working in this planned socialist
economy that they're trying to create. So, eventually they decide that the Czechoslovakian
Tatra 603 would be the luxury car for the Eastern Bloc, and so P 240 production ended in 1959.
So, moving on to the Trabant, and I mentioned in the video “Trabant” means “satellite”,
but it also means “companion” and I'm not sure if the double meaning was intended or not. Maybe
the car was meant to be a companion for you or something like that. But anyway there was
a double meaning, so I thought I'd point that out. So, the Trabant is launched in the late 1950s and
one of the first things people try and do is make it more practical. So almost as soon as
it's launched people designed small caravans for it, and you can imagine it's what a 20hp (15 kW)
engine, two-cylinder two-stroke engine, and loaded up with people and all their luggage and a caravan
behind it must have had awful, awful acceleration! But you know needs must and if that's all you've
got then that's what you'll do. If you want to go on holiday that's what you're going to do.
So, later on in 1979 a guy called Gerhard Müller invents this pop-up roof tent which
I think is just fantastic. So, the idea behind this tent is that it's when you take it with you
on holiday it's completely flat. It's just a like a big flat thing on top of the roof,
and then you erect it as just a regular tent on top of your car. It looks dangerous. I'm
surprised that you don't just take a tent with you and then just erect it next to the car. But well,
it's fun and interesting if nothing else. But it looks sort of dangerous. Yeah you have a little
ladder up the back and you got the ladder and then you sleep in it on a little mattress and
at least with the… it looks sort of dangerous that you might tip the car over if you're
standing on one side of it. Who knows what might happen! But at least the triangle
shape at least sort of persuades you to stand in the middle of the car, not on the edges!
So, moving on. I mentioned in the 1970s the East German State decides to work with Czechoslovakia
to create this joint car that's going to replace the Trabant, the Wartburg and the Škoda,
and it's called the RGW-Auto project. I don't mention a lot of these names just because it
gets in the way of telling the story, just like I don't mention a lot of people in my videos because
it tends to get in the way of telling the story, because you're trying to remember the
names of all these people and it doesn't matter because these people sort of pop
in and out of the story. So, anyway it's called RGW-Auto if you want
to look it up. And the Škoda version of it was actually styled by Giorgetto Giugiaro,
the Italian designer who designed things such as the Volkswagen Golf, the Uno, Ferraris all
kinds of things like that. So, they were spending a lot of money trying to make this project a go,
but it was just disagreements between East Germany and Czechoslovakia and lack of money,
and it just ended up going nowhere. So, it was just this big waste of money. East Germany
spent a lot of money on the project, and of course all that money was just down the drain.
So, there's a Trabant fan called Tim Keil who told me about this. He was very helpful.
I don't know how I got in touch with him. Maybe he watched one of my videos.
Oh that's right. I think I put something about the Trabant and it was because the Trabant was a video
which won a community poll, and I think Tim maybe messaged me and said “oh I know all these things
about Trabants. If you need more information let me know.” So, of course I’m always interested
if the someone knows a lot about a particular car that I can maybe check a script and find out more
information to try and help get things right. And he helped me a lot with some of the facts
and also some of the photos, particularly the 1995 car that came back from Turkey
because he happens to have one, or he happens to have one that's sort of one of those.
Anyway enough of that! He enlightened me to something called the Genex scheme, and Genex
doesn't mean Generation X or Generation Y or whatever terms people use nowadays. Genex refers
to a scheme that East Germany and West Germany sort of agreed with where West Germans could buy
products for East German relatives - usually relatives. So, of course because East & West
Germany split up, but people in Germany are still families, and you've got uncles and
cousins who are either side of the border. And so relatively rich West Germans could buy things for
East Germans because they were doing relatively poorly. So, what would happen is you would have
this catalogue, and you could pick items from the catalogue and then you would spend your West
German Deutsche marks and then the items would appear at the doorstep of these East Germans.
And it was a way for East Germany to get Western currency, and most of the products were from East
Germany. So the idea is East Germany's making products and they're getting Western currency.
Not all of the products were East German. Some of them were western products, but most of them
were. And it was a real incentive to do this because not just you would get essentially
stuff that you couldn't otherwise afford, but for example you could buy a Trabant through this
scheme. Now normally there's about a 10 to 15 year waiting list to get a Trabant in East Germany,
but if you did it through this scheme, this Genex scheme, where you're buying it through this
catalogue, you could get a Trabant in East Germany within four to six weeks. So, there's obviously a
lot of incentive to go and do this. But it really annoyed East Germans because it turned into this
sort of two-class society. There's the class that no people in West Germany who are willing
to buy things for them and people in East Germany that don't know people in West Germany or aren't
getting these things from rich West Germans. So, between 1967 and 1989 about 3.3 billion Deutsche
marks were got for the East German economy through this. So, it was a fairly big thing. It
worked out quite well for East Germany, and West Germany I think sort of suffered it. They didn't
really like it. But it was just what it was. So, I was looking up more about this Genex
scheme and on the Wikipedia page there was actually a joke about the Genex scheme which
I thought I'd share with you. You may or may not find it funny, but anyway here's the joke.
“So East German president Erich Honecker travels across the country and stops in a small town at
a well-preserved group of houses. A little boy who doesn't recognise him asks “Who are you?”.
The president smiles and replies “I'm the one you owe everything here to”.
So, the boy runs into the house and calls to his mum, and says “Mum, the man from Genex is here!”
Moving on, so then we get to the late 1980s, and I'm talking about the Berlin Wall falling,
and the border becoming very porous. But it was quite interesting exactly how this porous
border came about. So, there's a guy called Miklós Németh who was a Hungarian president at the time,
and there's an organisation called the Pan European Union, and they agree to host this
“picnic” on the Austria Hungary border on August 1989. So, my first question was “what the heck is
the Pan European movement”? Well, the Pan European movement founded in 1923 because there was a
bunch of people that had this idea that Europe should be one big country. It should be unified,
a unified State. And so, they were there promoting it from 1923. And then of course it didn't get
very far before the war but after the war it helped to form the present-day European Union.
So anyway, 1989 the president of this Pan European Forum is
Otto von Habsburg who is not just an MEP he's also the former Crown Prince of Austro-Hungary
whatever the country is that, so he's a former Crown Prince of that. So, of course he's
very interested in Austria & Hungary becoming one country again. So, they decide to hold this picnic
in August 1989 as a test of the Soviet response in the Gorbachev area to see if they'll crack
down and see if they'll crack down on it or whether they'll just let it happen.
So, the border gets opened for three hours and a whole load of people from Hungary go over the
border. A whole load of people from East Germany who go to Hungary also go over the border, have
this wonderful picnic and then a lot of them don't come back because they don't want to stay in the
Eastern Bloc Nations! So yeah, it becomes a kind of real problem. And at the same time this is the
summer, and a lot of East Germans go holidaying in Hungary, and there's like 100,000 of them there
and the Soviets want each Eastern Bloc country to essentially ship people back to their own country
if they stay too long in in one place. But there's 100,000 of them there, and it's too expensive to
ship them home, and the Hungarian president isn't really interested in doing it anyway.
So Hungary can't really sort this problem out. So essentially they stop policing the Austrian
border and so people just start leaving from Hungary through to Austria. And so this picnic
eventually leads to all of these Eastern Bloc States having peaceful revolutions
which leads to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. So the Pan European movement not only shaped the
Common Market that turns into the European Union, it also helps shape the fall of the Soviet state
and the Eastern Bloc state in the 20th century. So a lot of the 20th century can be attributed
to this Pan European movement, but no one's ever heard of or I've certainly haven't heard of it!
So finally we get to 1995 and I talk about these 500 cars that were exported to Turkey, and then
they didn't pay, so they took these 500 Trabants and move them back to Germany and try to sell them.
Well then didn't try to sell 500. They tried to sell 444 of them because these 500 had been sitting
for four years at a salty port and just sitting there rusting, and only 444 of them could be sold.
The remaining 56 were scavenged for parts to help the other 444 actually go. Each of the cars got a
paint job, but of course they were just covering up problems and so these 444 cars were riddled
with rust and just rotted away to nothing. And so very few of them are actually around today.
But anyway that's all I have for the Optional Extra video. Thank you for watching to the end.
Thank you for watching the Trabant video. I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next video!