Post-war auto-production revival aborted
Like many German auto-makers, Adler emerged from the Second World War confronting many obstacles. It avoided having its factory plant crated up and sent by train to Moscow, unlike Opel, and it did not share in the fate of DKW and BMW of finding its principal plant in the Soviet occupation zone, cut off from control, customers and principal suppliers. However, its Frankfurt home base turned out to have been chosen as the focal point for the US occupation zone. The company's factory had been badly damaged in an air-raid on 24 March 1944, and after the war the site was commandeered by the US military so was no longer available to Adler.
Ironically, at a time when no new cars were being produced, a disproportionately large number of the few private cars that had survived the hostilities were prewar DKW F series cars and Adler Trumpf Juniors. Many cars had been commandeered during the war by the military, and after the collapse of the German army cars that had been carefully concealed from German soldiers were now requisitioned by American, Russian and British soldiers. However, soldiers from each successive army demonstrated a shared reluctance to be seen driving pretty but small and not particularly fast front wheel drive Adlers and DKWs.[1]
Despite the loss of the factory and of the company's (and the country's) principal supplier of steel car bodies (Ambi-Budd's Berlin factory having ended up in the Soviet sector of Berlin), Adler director Hermann Friedrich authorised the development of a post-war Adler Trumpf Junior. The chassis was to be little changed, apart from the repositioning of the gear-box ahead of the front axle, which required a lengthening of the car at the front by 150 mm. This would create more space in the passenger cabin and improve the weight balance over the drive axle. At the 1948 Hanover Trade Fair two prototypes Trumpf Juniors were exhibited, with bodies by Karmann of Osnabrück and Wendler of Reutlingen. The bodies were updated versions of the prewar Trumpf Junior sedan/saloon, resembling a slightly smoothed off Renault Juvaquatre.[7] Production tooling was available, and there being no prospect of building the car at Adler's Frankfurt plant, an agreement was in place to use a nearby factory belonging to MAN, located on the north-eastern side of Gustavsburg.[1]
Directly after the war, the victors, including the Soviet Union, had initially planned to deindustrialise Germany. Therefore, it would have been hard to anticipate in 1945 that by 1955 four of Germany's top five leading auto-producers from the 1930s were in some shape or form back in the business of producing cars. The exception was Adler, whose plans to resume auto-production were shelved during 1948, when the two prototypes exhibited at Hanover were scrapped.[1] Until the company's demise in 1957, they concentrated instead on manufacturing motor cycles and type-writers.
