David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…It's an interesting question. I suspect the answer is more or less. In some brands, I bet they were selling direct-to-consumer, and some I bet they weren't, some of the smaller ones maybe. I suspect the reason this worked out is because these companies didn't want to be the ones who were distributing all these cars across and doing all this. They were focused on manufacturing. I think there also might have been a technical reason, which is, even though this new Volkswagen was reconstituted as a company, it's only shareholders at this point in time who were the German government. So both the national West German state and the state of Lower Saxony within West Germany, which still to this day holds 20% of Volkswagen, which is crazy. They would IPO Volkswagen (I believe) in 1960 or 1961. Even though it was a company, it was a German national company to operate in other states, other countries in Europe. They probably needed third parties. Wild, right? Okay. Ben, you hit on this a minute ago. What the hell? Why is the new western-controlled West German, post-Nazi government giving this deal of a lifetime to these former Nazis? It's not just we'll pay you for the cars you distribute that we make. We will pay you for all cars that we make, every Beatle, regardless of whether you distribute it or not.…

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