The Broom Porsche 356 Swept up Coffee Smugglers in 1950s Germany

Coffee was introduced into Europe as far back as the sixteenth century, and by the seventeenth, coffeehouse culture was at the heart of the Age of Enlightenment. As on the rest of the continent, coffee quickly became a part of everyday society in Germany. The only problem was that people weren’t always easily able to get a cup of java, and if you’ve got a bit of a coffee habit yourself, you will be unsurprised to learn that they went to great lengths for that caffeine fix.

Of course, that included smuggling. One of the oldest underhanded tricks in the world, and a profession that we can’t help but feel slightly affectionate towards. From Han Solo to the Dukes of Hazzard, we do love a roguish smuggler, at least in a fictional sense. And, if you were a German in the early 1950s, you probably thought your local smuggler was a standup guy.

But the post-WWII era wasn’t the first time Germans resorted to, erm, krafty behavior to get their beans. After the Seven Years War, Frederick the Great decided to hit coffee imports with punitive luxury taxes. The war, a globe-spanning conflict that actually lasted six years and eight months (apparently even historians round up), had drained the imperial coffers, and Frederick levied all manner of taxes to balance the books. He also suggested that people could just drink beer instead, which is very German but probably not a great idea for morning productivity.

To make sure people weren’t skirting the new tax, the imperial German government even went so far as to employ kaffeeschnüffler, which directly translates to “coffee sniffer” but is much more fun to say. The kaffeeschnüffler were basically human bloodhounds who literally sniffed out roasting coffee and penalized any illicit supplies they found.

Similarly, in the period immediately following WWII, coffee was a hard-to-find commodity in postwar Germany. To some extent, everything was hard to find in these lean times, but it’s not like you can plant a coffee tree in your Stuttgart backyard and harvest the beans for a nice cappuccino. Coffee was considered an imported luxury item and taxed as such, and a pound of roasted beans would cost you about the equivalent of thirty bucks today. With the country still picking its economy out of the rubble, it might as well have cost three hundred.

To make things worse, just across the border in Belgium, those waffle enthusiasts were paying less than half the price for coffee beans. In Germany’s westernmost city, Aachen, which also abuts the border with the Netherlands, a large forested area provided a porous membrane for those who were tempted by illegal trade.

At first, the smuggling started out small, with individuals exchanging goods and valuables for those precious, dark brown magic beans. However, once the potential for profit alerted the more professional criminal element, smuggling gangs began cropping up with large-scale operations. Just as Prohibition in the U.S. went from small-scale stills to full-out gangland wars, German coffee smuggling became big business. A smuggler could make a customs inspector’s monthly salary in just a week of bean hustling. Unfortunately for our would-be coffee Bandits, Smokey was about to get a couple of Porsches.

The use of Porsche cars in law enforcement didn’t really start with the regular German police until much later in the 1950s. The choice of the little cars, specifically the 356 cabriolet, was a little odd, but it was the officers’ go-to—they preferred to stand up in the car to direct traffic. The top stayed down, and officers were issued a hat and goggles like a motorcycle cop. It was obviously a prestige position.

But the German customs investigations department got two Porsches, both hardtops, though they did have retractable canvas roofs. They received the pre-A 356s in the early 1950s, right at the apogee of the coffee-smuggling epidemic, one red and one green.

The record is murky on where the money came from for these two early Porsches, but there’s a chance the company itself was savvy enough to know that keeping the German government happy was good business. After all, Ferrari would later do pretty much the same thing with a 250 GTE that it supplied to the Roman police at the personal directive of Enzo himself. That car was very effective, but more importantly, its high-profile exploits were nothing but good publicity for Ferrari.

In the case of the customs Porsches, investigator Walter Pohl was in charge of the two cars. I mean, come on: Walter Pohl? This guy is clearly a time-travelling Walter Röhrl wearing a fake mustache.

The name might be a coincidence, but it’s also suspicious that one of Pohl’s ideas was to use the actual Nürburgring to train customs pursuit drivers with the two Porsches. The Nürburgring is not far from Aachen, and the two cars were pushed to their limits.

Smugglers mostly used trucks to get contraband coffee across the border, sometimes in vehicles disguised as belonging to the Red Cross. However, period newspaper reports from the area talk about some smugglers using tuned-up cars much like the moonshine runners of the southern U.S. Further, and again like those sneaking white lightning across state lines, the coffee smugglers were not above using a few dirty tricks. In a move straight out of Goldfinger, vehicles being pursued by customs agents would drop caltrops—spiky iron scraps—to puncture tires.

In response to this nefarious behavior, Pohl’s team created perhaps the most unusual special-edition Porsche of all time, the besenwagen 356, or “broom Porsche.” Two variants of this vehicle were made, one with twin steel brooms positioned in front of the wheels to sweep obstacles away, the other, later version equipped with the brooms tucked under the bodywork.

The somewhat breathless reporting of the day spoke of a high-speed chase through the streets of Aachen and onto the actual Nürburgring itself, the fugitives driving an Opel Kapitan. In another story, Pohl was said to have intercepted a truck disguised as a Red Cross aid vehicle, then set his kaffeeschnüffler German Shepherd on the fleeing driver. All told, the two Porsches were responsible for stopping some 80,000 lbs of smuggled coffee, with forty-two arrests.

Things just got even more out of hand. One report cites smugglers using actual former WWII battle tanks, and there were dozens of shootouts and killings as things escalated. Eventually, the German government relented in 1953, and the coffee smuggling wars ended. Further coffee shortages would be restricted to East Germany, which had its own coffee crisis in the 1970s, leading to the rise of coffee cultivation in Vietnam.

Porsche pursuit vehicles would later find an unusual home in the Netherlands, and those cars have a strong collector market today. The two broom Porsches have since faded into obscurity, relics of a time when German reconstruction had curious side effects. Turns out, though, that the link between cars and coffee has long been the kind of thing that involved a fast Porsche.