After World War II, German companies aggressively worked to whitewash their Nazi past and rebrand themselves. By the 1960s and 1970s, as the youth market exploded and memories of war faded, advertising campaigns for German companies such as Volkswagen promoted their products as symbols of the counterculture. Across America, young men and women strapped on their Birkenstocks, hopped into their VW Beetles, and rolled a joint with Efka papers—all before heading off to protest what they often described as “American fascism.”
Few of these protestors knew, however, that the products they used had been tightly linked to German fascism just decades earlier. At times, these histories are murky. Carl Birkenstock joined the Nazi Party in 1940 in the hopes of securing Nazi contracts, although—unlike Hugo Boss—he never did. But, as journalist Tim Loh points out, it wasn’t for lack of trying.
In contrast, the Volkswagen car company was closely allied with the Nazis and saturated with its ideology. The car company was founded in 1937 by the Nazi program “Strength through Joy” (Kraft durch Freude, KdF), an initiative aimed at improving the quality of life for the German “Aryan” population (i.e., the Volksdeutch) and thereby strengthening their indoctrination into Nazi society. The company was tasked with producing an affordable car for the unified German Aryan people. In many ways, Volkswagen became a symbol of the Nazi Party throughout the late 1930s and 1940s. Ironically, Volkswagen plants never produced a single consumer model, having been absorbed into the German war machine soon after its founding, as Natalie Scholz points out in Redeeming Objects: A West German Mythology.
Efka’s story falls between these two—demonstrating the ways in which small, lesser-known companies benefited from both the initial rise of Nazism and the subsequent push to rebuild Germany in the years after World War II as well as from the lax approaches to de-Nazification and the dissembling of corporations that had been linked to Nazism.
Like many twentieth-century German companies, Efka’s financial success was perversely tied to the economic collapse after the First World War but also the rise of Nazism. Smoking is a relatively inexpensive habit that provides instant gratification and which its practitioners find pleasurable. It’s also addictive, which means that even those who are struggling financially often find it difficult to give up. Germans smoked in heavy numbers during the 1920s and 1930s.