The NSU Vehicle Works in Neckarsulm, north of Stuttgart, was the world’s largest motorcycle maker by unit output in 1938/9. Such scale, at this point in time, was only possible by acquiescing to Germany’s ruling National Socialist Party. By weighing costs and benefits of managerial actions, we can surmise why and how the NSU corporation navigated the constraints and incentives of the “Third Reich’s” increasingly restrictive economic institutions. NSU managers, in deciding to work with the regime, seem to have enacted an entrepreneurial logic that generated considerable autonomy for the company. But that’s not really surprising.
What can we learn from yet another company history in Nazi Germany? In the case of NSU, the dearth of sources that document internal decision-making is an advantage since it forces relating the company to the German motor vehicles market of c. 1928-1950, across traditional periodizations. In this light, long-run restrictions of relatively low German purchasing power and volatile but increasing state demand were the company’s main problems. NSU understood that the low-cost motorcycle was the true vehicle of popular motorization, but that it had limited utility to institutions like the military. The key strategic decision, then, was to construct something that could straddle both markets.
The "Kettenkrad", one of the weirder vehicles in military history, did the trick. Developed since 1937/8, it grew to account for 60-90% of NSU’s production in 1942-5 and was the company’s first successful product directly after the war. Through the Kettenkrad, the company was able to maintain production capacities and configurations across massive disturbances. For NSU, this paper argues, a strategic embrace of dual-use products discounted the expected costs of the 1930s and 1940s – though dealing with the state also meant partaking in the exploitation of forced labor.