Join Josh and Chuck in this classic episode as they go down the sport shoe rabbit hole, detailing the strange tail of the brothers who brought Puma and Adidas to the world. Sibling rivalry, Nazis, shoes - there's a lot to unpack here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Who are the hosts and what is this episode about?
Hey friends, it's me, Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our 2018 episode on Adidas versus Puma. It's the German version of the Hatfield versus the McCoys, except with cool sports apparel rather than overalls.
And one of the things I noticed at the end of this episode is that sometimes when we're just doing our thing, talking back and forth like we do, we'll have some throwaway comment or side conversation or something that takes on much greater significance years on. It's One of the interesting things about talking out loud for 17 years. At any rate, Ciroc Vodka, anyone?
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Andrew over there, the guest producer. I'm wearing Adidas. Chuck is wearing Puma. Andrew's wearing Reebok. None of us are speaking to one another right now.
Yeah, it's weird. Andrew is wearing white Reebok high tops with bronze pantyhose and orange dolphin running shorts. And he claims he doesn't work for Hooters part-time. Oh, oh, oh, yes. Yes. I like that you didn't know that because that means you don't go into Hooters.
No, no. I've seen pictures on TV.
I had to go. Actually, I've only been there once, and that was when I worked at that awful job with the chicken killers. And it was on a stupid work trip they made me go on, and that was like the only place in town. And all these yokels that I worked with were like, yeah, man, let's go to Hooters. And I went in there and I was just like, oh, my Lord, what is – they were trapped in time.
I've been there a couple of times actually when I was a younger man.
It's the same, I imagine.
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Chapter 2: What is the origin story of Adidas and Puma?
No, those are cool, but I don't know if I can pull those off at 47.
You could, but people will laugh at you behind your back. That's already happening.
Yeah, I'll remember at some point. Okay, well, just shout it out. And plus, I just wanted to cover our basis by saying as many name brands as possible. Don't forget British Knights. Oh, the BKs?
Yep. So, Chuck. Yes. Let's start the story, shall we? We're going to have to get in the Wayback Machine for this one. Okay. Okay.
And this is also full of urine.
So that was you, though. Let's let everybody know. We're going to go back to the end of World War I in Germany, and we're going to go to a little town that I'm going to let you pronounce because I've been trying and I cannot do it.
And I thought it was interesting that we're recording this now because we just acknowledged and recognized the— 100 years removed from World War I?
The end of World War I. Yeah. And the beginning of the Spanish flu that killed like three times as many people right after it. Yeah, that's another celebration. Right. So we're going back there. We're just going back 100 days almost to the day.
Yeah, and so the name of that town is Herzogenarach. Herzogenarach.
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Chapter 3: How did the Dassler brothers start their shoe business?
It's not exactly said like that. Here, let's play this. Herzogenaurach. That's how it's said. Okay, so maybe we should just have that voice say it for us, but we're not going to. It turns out the locals just call the town Herzog, so that's all we'll call it. But it's a little tiny village in Bavaria. They can't even pronounce it.
No, they're like, we're not even going to try, and we were born here. Don't be too hard on yourself, Josh, is what they're saying. So in Herzog, it's a little town in Bavaria, a little village. There's a river running through it.
Yeah, significantly. Yeah.
Yes. And in around 1918, one of the villagers who was born there, a guy named Adolf Dassler, takes a seat in his mother's laundry. His mother ran a laundry out of out of their house and he starts cobbling athletic shoes, specifically track shoes, I think, to begin with. And he had a knack for it. He started making shoes that athletes actually wanted shoes.
pretty early on, pretty much out of the gate. And he started doing so well so quickly that within a year or two, he asked his older brother, who is by far the more outgoing extrovert salesman-y type of the two brothers, his older brother Rudolph, to start selling his shoes, start kind of creating a business operation out of it.
And I think within just a few years, they had 12 employees, and they founded a company called Sportsfabric.com. Gebruder Dassler, which they call Geta for short.
Yeah, so Gebruder is, you know, for brother. So Gebruder Dassler is the Dassler Brothers shoe company. And people were like, wow, so I don't have to wear my high-heeled leather sport boot any longer on the pitch?
I don't have to tie some sharp rocks to the bottom of my feet?
So their nicknames, you'll probably hear us refer to them as Adi and Rudy, R-U-D-I. And if you kind of put your head to it, you can see where this is headed.
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Chapter 4: What role did Adidas and Puma play during World War II?
The FBI went around to all their neighbors and said to them, do you think these people are good Americans? It's got heists, tragedy, a trial of the century, and the goddamnedest love story you've ever heard.
I picked up the phone, and my thought was, this is the most important phone call I'll ever make in my life. I couldn't believe it. I mean, Brendan, it was divine intervention.
Listen to Divine Intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We've got to go back in time a little bit because we sped right up to World War II.
It was just too interesting to wait to talk about any longer.
But we need to go back to about 1933 because these brothers ended up fracturing in a big, big way. And there have been some legendary sibling rivalries through the years, but this is really one of the greats. And I believe even Rudy wrote as an older man, the relation to my brother was ideal from 1924 to 1933.
Then his young wife tried to interfere with business matters, although she with her 16 years had no experience at all and the warfare began. So here's how the story goes. Is that in 1933, Adi was indeed married to a 16-year-old, which seems very creepy now, but back then it was not the strangest thing in the world. Slightly less creepy. Slightly less creepy.
Well, they just, it was a different time.
Okay.
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Chapter 5: How did the sibling rivalry between Adi and Rudy Dassler begin?
Chapter 6: What impact did the 1936 Olympics have on Adidas and Puma?
So... The fact that Jesse Owens was wearing these shoes immediately brought international attention to Geta, the Gebruder-Dossler company. So I saw one article that said, had World War II not happened, this business would have just gone global immediately. And it started to. Yeah. But then when World War II broke out, and that was the 1936 Olympics. I think I said the 1928 Olympics.
It was, I think, the 1932 Olympics that I talked about first. But at the 1936 Olympics, within just a couple of years, the Nazis invaded Poland and were running Germany. And World War II kicked off in earnest. And the time for sports apparel kind of got derailed a little bit.
Yeah. So just like in the United States and actually in countries all over the world, the war effort was it's not like they were just like, all right, we have a few companies that manufacture military needs for our military and that's going to be good enough. It's like, no, we need to really co-opt kind of any manufacturing that we want to. to go toward the war effort.
And certainly Germany did that along with the U.S. and kind of everyone else. And everything from Hugo Boss to Lufthansa to these little shoemakers in this small town in Bavaria.
Yeah, their factories were co-opted for the war effort, basically. And what the Dassler Brothers factory ended up making are something called the Panzerschreck, which means the tank terror, basically.
And it was modeled after the American bazooka, which was one of the first shoulder-mounted, recoilless rocket launchers that had enough power to punch right through a tank and blow up everybody inside. They were nasty little buggers. And the Panzerschreck was the German version of the bazooka. And the German version of the bazooka was created in the Dassler Brothers shoe factory.
Yeah, it's December 1943 is when they kind of made the full switch in these little, you know, German ladies who were sewing shoes the week before were now manufacturing German bazookas. The good news is by this time – because these things were really effective actually. And had they been – Had they been brought into the war sooner, things might have really changed.
But thankfully, by this time, even though they were doing the job, it was too late. The tides had turned and the Allies were steaming toward victory. And even though they started pumping out these bazookas, it was sort of too little too late.
Yeah. Have you ever wondered about the name bazooka?
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Chapter 7: How did the Dassler factory convert to war production during WWII?
Then his young wife tried to interfere with business matters, although she with her 16 years had no experience at all and the warfare began. So here's how the story goes. Is that in 1933, Adi was indeed married to a 16-year-old, which seems very creepy now, but back then it was not the strangest thing in the world. Slightly less creepy. Slightly less creepy.
Well, they just, it was a different time.
Okay.
So he was married to a 16-year-old and tried to get involved in the business. Rudy was not happy about this. And they all lived together. The two brothers and their wives all lived together in the same townhouse.
Yeah.
Which is not a great recipe for success anyway. Right. You know, you need to have your own place. Yeah.
So you can imagine that all the little bickering and snide remarks and just all the stuff that if you have two couples that don't really, really, really like and love each other, living together will accumulate. If you translate that to a business relationship, it's going to be hard on the business. And it was.
For sure.
So there is apparently a series of just little things like that. But as far as the family legend goes, the real break happened during World War II when the Allies were bombing the village of Herzog. And Rudy and his wife made their way to the bunker, the bomb shelter. Mm-hmm. And shortly after that, Adi and his wife, I think her name was Kata, they made their way into the bomb shelter.
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Chapter 8: What caused the Dassler brothers to split and create separate brands?
And then he gets arrested for desertion. And he's sure that his little brother ratted him out for desertion. Which he may have. And so he's arrested. He's held for a while. And as he's making his way back after the war to Herzog... he gets picked up by the Allies for under suspicion of being a Gestapo agent. Yeah.
He's sure again that it's his little brother, Adi, who got him this time landed in a POW camp that he stays in for a little while. And it turns out he was right. There is documentary evidence from an American officer who took the accusation down. And apparently it was Adi who went to the Americans and said, my brother is a Gestapo agent.
You may want to...
What a jerk. This is the level of stuff these brothers are doing to one another. And the rift just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. There's one other thing we have to say because the wife, the younger wife, the 16-year-old Kata, gets historically blamed for creating this rift, I think, in a lot of ways unfairly. Sure. She's also the one who saved the family business single-handedly.
Yeah, so in April 1945, the Americans march into Herzog. Those tanks pull up in front of that factory. And the soldiers, the American soldiers are out there like kind of going over what they should do. Should we destroy this building or not?
This is the place where the Panzerschrecks were made.
Yeah, so Adi's wife, Kata, comes out, and she basically walks right up to these enemy soldiers and says, we only want to make shoes. We only desire to make shoes. And they're like, why are you talking like Colonel Klink? And she said, we all do. Oh, okay. And that's basically like she convinced them to spare the factory. They did so. And not only that, the Air Force, the U.S.
Air Force set up operations there at their air base and realized that they really liked these shoes.
Well, they found out that this was the company that made Jesse Owens' famous track shoes.
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