Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…He was a genius. This also runs in the family, too. Many of his descendants are both engines and cars geniuses. After the war, Ferdinand and the son-in-law, Anton Piech, are both arrested by the French as war criminals. Tried in France, they ended up being imprisoned for two years in France. Ben, you did a little research on this, right? Yeah. I think the technical thing they got them on, which is why they only had two years, was for the forced labor that they took the imprisoned Jews and forced them to work in the factories. But all the other war crimes that were stacked against them ended up not being charged, so quick trip in and out of war criminal prison. Ferdinand' son, Ferry Porsche, who had been working in the business I think a little bit before the war and then during the war, too, was also arrested for war crimes too at the end of the war. He gets released after six months in the summer of 1946. He and his sister Louise are like, what are we going to do? We got to rebuild the family. Are we going to restart the business? Let's go figure things out. They return to the family's ancestral home in Austria. That happens to be quite convenient because during the last days of the war, as Stuttgart and other large scale German military production facilities were getting bombed by the Allies, Porsche took about 20 or so of the best, most talented engineers and production people that they had, they move them out of Stuttgart, and they moved them to the Austrian countryside so that they wouldn't be targeted, so that the Allied bombers wouldn't know where they are. This is pretty crazy. They are literally operating out of a sawmill in a farming village in southern Austria named Gmund. We're talking about a couple of thousand people maybe that live in this area.…

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