Fritz Nallinger.

In May 1935 Nallinger became technical director for large-engine development: aircraft, ships, railcars and army vehicles. Secret trials with direct petrol injection produced the DB 601, the inverted-V twelve that broke aviation records in 1937 and 1939 and later gave the 300 SL its defining technology. He created a special-powerplants department under Karl Leist; its DB 007 became one of the earliest turbofans ever built, then was cancelled for being too complex.

The achievement served rearmament. The Wehrmacht appointed Nallinger Wehrwirtschaftsführer in September 1938. He sat on the advisory board of the Genshagen aero-engine works from 1940, became a deputy Daimler-Benz board member that April and a full member in 1941. During his tenure the company built roughly 100,000 aero engines.

By 1944 almost half of Daimler-Benz's 63,610 workers were civilian forced labourers, prisoners of war or concentration-camp inmates. At Genshagen, whose technical success his biographer attributes substantially to Nallinger, coerced workers outnumbered free German workers and women from Ravensbrück laboured inside a concentration-camp satellite. No located document ties Nallinger to a specific labour decision. The record shows what he presided over, not what he ordered.

On 19 January 1945, as Germany collapsed, Nallinger presented a scheme for a carrier aircraft that would carry a disposable bomber toward the United States; its crew would land on the enemy coast and wait for a U-boat. Since 1943 he had criticised armament projects on technical grounds. That was technical criticism, not political resistance.

Nallinger, Rudolf Uhlenhaut and Alfred Neubauer began discussing a return to racing in the early 1950s. Nallinger suggested using the new 300 saloon as the basis of a sports racer, as Jaguar had done with the C-type. The resulting 300 SL opened what he reportedly called “a little window” onto motorsport; direct injection carried his aero-engine work into the first production four-stroke passenger car to use it.

The window became a wall of trophies. Under Nallinger, Hans Scherenberg and Uhlenhaut developed the W196 and 300 SLR: Fangio took two Formula One titles, Mercedes won ten of thirteen championship Grands Prix, and the sports car won every major event it finished. At Le Mans in 1955 Pierre Levegh and eighty-three spectators died. The board ordered the leading Mercedes withdrawn; no source establishes whether Nallinger was on the telephone vote.

His strangest legacy is the rebirth of Audi. Nallinger wanted a Mercedes below the existing range and had Ludwig Kraus develop the front-wheel-drive W118 and W119. The company cancelled them, then sent Kraus and the engine to its Auto Union subsidiary. In 1965 that engine entered production under a name unused since 1940: Audi.

The same man who revived a rival also signed off the 600 and the Pagoda, advocated passenger-car diesels and set safety as the highest principle. His single-joint swing axle eventually acquired a vicious reputation; his compact Mercedes was rejected; his 230 SL was mocked as a sports car for men with pigskin briefcases. A programme broad enough to matter was broad enough to be wrong.