Why is the Hitlermobile still fashionable in 2013?

Volkswagen recently butched up its girly New Beetle of 1997-2011 to make it look less like Daddy's Little Princess's off-to-college present and more like a Wehrmacht steel helmet:

Today, the latest Volkswagen Beetle resembles what Hitler would have come up with if he'd had a second testicle.

In reality, Hitler didn't actually design the Volkswagen Bug. He  just gave Dr. Porsche the specifications (carry a family of five at 62 mph, and sell for under 1000 marks) and a lot of enthusiastic suggestions.

Of all production cars in the 21st Century, the Volkswagen Beetle has, by far, the oldest body style. It's recognizably the same shape that was delivered to Hitler on his 49th birthday in 1938. That's particularly interesting because -- although the original rear-engined car was manufactured in Mexico up through 2006 -- for the last decade and a half, the VW Bug sold in the U.S. has been all new under the sheet metal, with a front engine and front-wheel drive. But VW has gone to great pains to keep the silhouette recognizable as the same beetle-like one that Hitler loved three quarters of a century ago. Even as Volkswagen has flipped the current front engined Beetle back and forth from a feminine style to now a masculine style (on the sensible grounds that girls will buy guy cars, but guys won't buy girl cars), they've kept the overall look recognizably Hitlerian.

I wonder if Porsche ever asked Hitler why Germany, a densely populated country well-served by rail and lacking in petroleum resources, truly needed a mass market car seemingly best suited for a continent-sized and resource-rich country like America. Hitler might have replied, "You get me the car, I'll get you the continent." Then, again, Porsche wasn't really the question-asking type, or so he explained to the Allies in 1946.

This is not to say that the VW Beetle caused the War. Yet, in Hitler's mind, it was one of the pieces of his plan.

To der fuhrer, the Volkswagen Beetle was the physical embodiment of National Socialism. In the long run, the VW Bug was what it was all going to turn out to be about, the German masses finally on wheels, sporting about in all that lebensraum from the Rhine to the Urals. The Beetle, or as Hitler called it, the Strength-through-Joy car, was an integral part of his vision of a New Order for Europe, in which happy Germans would motor at high speed down the autobahns to vacation on their newly conquered Crimean beaches. As Hitler explained to his long-suffering tablemates:

The Germans must acquire the feeling for the great, open spaces. We must arrange things so that every German can realise for himself what they mean. We'll take them on trips to the Crimea and the Caucasus. There's a big difference between seeing these countries on the map and actually having visited them. The railways will serve for the transport of goods, but the roads are what will open the country for us. ...

The Volkswagen—and I think our war experiences justify us in saying so—is the car of the future. One had only to see the way in which these Volkswagen roaring up the Obersalzberg overtook and skipped like mountain goats round my great Mercedes, to be tremendously impressed. After the war, when all the modifications dictated by war experience have been incorporated in it, the Volkswagen will become the car par excellence for the whole of Europe, particularly in view of the fact that it is air-cooled, and so unaffected by any winter conditions.  

In theory, being closely associated with Hitler is a downer from most marketing perspectives. For example, consider the term "eugenics," which was associated for about a century with the British Darwinian tradition, and with Anglo-American progressivism. Inspired by Galton's vision of increasing eugenic awareness, scientists who were eugenics enthusiasts made major breakthroughs in fields as disparate as genetics, psychology, evolutionary theory, statistics, psychometrics, and electronics. For example, it's not a coincidence that what's today Silicon Valley was a center of IQ research and eugenics promotion (e.g., the Termans) from the early 1900s into the 1970s. And, yet, somehow, Stanford didn't invade Poland.

But, since the 1970s or 1980s, eugenics has been as closely associated in the popular mind with Hitler as the Charlie Chaplin mustache, even though the connection between eugenics and World War II is certainly no more direct than between the VW Bug and WWII.

But, the past is mutable. To propound the central role of eugenics had to wait for a generation to pass so that those who actually remembered the era were in decline in numbers and energy. 

In contrast, in the late 1950s, the Volkswagen company hired Bill Bernbach's advertising firm to write a long series of brilliant ads to make the Beetle seem cute rather than sinister, to wash away the memories of all those pictures of Hitler with his Beetle. In 1999, Advertising Age named Doyle Dane Bernbach's  "Think Small" ads the greatest ad campaign of the 20th Century.

Marketing matters.