Eleventh Mission, 19 March 1945    Target - Zwickau Motor Plants

Bombing the German auto industry into the StoneAge:

The original target for this mission were oil refineries in the Ruhr region of Germany but the weather conditions where horrible. Instead, the 486th Bomb Group ended up hitting auto-industry targets in Zwickau, home of major auto makers including Audi, Horch, VW, Auto Union, and others. Tony's log mentions small-arms plants being the target, but that's not correct according to the official records. 

Zwickau is a long way from Sudbury and ended up in the Soviet-controlled East Germany.

This video shows an interesting collection of Zwickau-made Horch military vehicles that were part of the German war machine. Starting in 1944, the Eighth Air Force started to pummel the German automotive industry. Aircraft, rail, oil, and war-materiel industries were all heavily targeted.

The fate of the German auto industry was not pretty. After the war, Zwickau ended up in the hands of the Russians and became part of East Germany. The Soviet Union was not one for superfluous consumer products such as cars and what "evolved" from the once proud German auto industry was awful. 

The cars below are freshly assembled Trabants coming out of the factory in Zwickau after the war. They were produced essentially without changes for 30 years. The quality of these cars was so unfathomably bad that there is widespread agreement among car enthusiasts the world over...the Trabant was the worst production car ever made!  Here's a link to wikipedia, The History of the Trabant .

VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau

After the re-unification of Germany, East Germans became painfully aware of the inadequacy of the Trabant. This is what happened to many of them!