These shiny cabriolets make the hearts of many classic car fans beat faster: an Audi built in 1934 with 40 hp, a four-seater DKW F7, a Horch 830 BL with eight cylinders and a Wanderer W40 with a Porsche engine.
In the Horch Museum in Zwickau, they each stand for one of the four rings – the signet of what was once the second largest German car manufacturer. Auto Union was founded 90 years ago through the merger of four previously independent manufacturers. While the company name has largely disappeared, its four rings are still present on the streets. Since 2021, cars with today’s Audi logo have also been built in Saxony again.
Several mergers in the twenties
After the early years of the auto industry, there were numerous mergers at the end of the 1920s: Daimler and Benz, for example, BMW and the Dixi works in Eisenach, or General Motors and Opel. The Saxon manufacturers were also under pressure to find potent financiers. The result in 1932 was Auto Union, based in Chemnitz, which was 75 percent owned by the Saxon State Bank.
The Zwickau exhibition organizers titled their show on the history of the company “Power of the Four Rings”. Because the Saxons advanced to become one of the mainsprings of motorization in road traffic – not only in the then German Reich, but also through export to numerous countries.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and be notified by email.
This was reflected in the books: Group sales climbed from 65 million (1932) to 276 million Reichsmarks (1938), employment from 8,000 to 23,000 people, the number of registered vehicles from just under 6,700 to almost 52,200. According to the museum, that was less than Opel, but more than twice as many as Daimler-Benz.
For its time, Auto Union was a modern multi-brand group that used important synergies, for example in sales and the central design office, explains Ralf Friese, an expert on the Audi company history in Ingolstadt. “Each brand had its own profile.”
While DKW delivered large numbers of robust small cars, Wanderer served the middle class, Audi the upper middle class, and Horch represented the group’s upper class with its elegant vehicles. The company also produced motorcycles and became the largest manufacturer in the world at the time.
The first post-war Audi came in 1965
The caesura brought the Second World War. At that time, Auto Union was also used for armaments production, and many forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners had to build cars and motorcycles for the Wehrmacht, as well as armored tracked vehicles, torpedoes and machine guns. After the war and the expropriation, vehicles were built again at the former Auto Union locations in Saxony, but the four rings moved to Bavaria, where they became the nucleus of today’s Audi AG.
“It was a thorny new beginning,” explains Friese. First of all, it was about the supply of spare parts for the vehicles that were still available. Then they started with the production of a van and a motorcycle to get money in the till.
The name Audi initially played no role. From 1950 onwards, a simple car was built with the DKW F89, which fit into the times. But over time, the two-stroke engine fell into disrepute, so the manufacturer finally decided to use the name Audi instead of DKW. According to the expert, the first post-war Audi was presented at the 1965 International Motor Show.
The term Auto Union was part of the company name until the mid-1980s. Today it can only be found in the address of the manufacturer in Ingolstadt. In the meantime, cars with the four rings are being manufactured again at their place of origin in Saxony: Two electric models from Audi have been rolling off the assembly line at the Volkswagen plant in Zwickau since last year. And the Horch name also appears again in the company: Not as a separate brand as it used to be, but as a version of the A8 luxury sedan for China.
More: Descendant of the Silver Arrows: Mercedes classic car breaks Ferrari record with 135 million euros