THE tale is intriguing: a Jewish engineer and journalist, whose designs and published work in the 1930s laid out the basics for the Volkswagen Beetle championed by Hitler, was arrested, chased from Germany and nearly airbrushed out of history.

The story of Josef Ganz is the result of more than five years of research by Paul Schilperoord, a Dutch technology journalist who is studying industrial design in Italy. The trove of documents and photographs he assembled form the basis of “The Extraordinary Life of Josef Ganz: The Jewish Engineer Behind Hitler’s Volkswagen” (RVP Publishers, 2011).

The book provides a picture of the automotive culture in Germany between the wars, with many small, struggling companies. Published in English for the first time in November, the work had previously been available in Dutch, Portuguese and German.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Schilperoord addressed the book’s challenge to the standard history — that Hitler hired Ferdinand Porsche, who was known as one of Germany’s most successful automobile engineers from his work on military vehicles during World War I, to design and build his Strength Through Joy car. The Strength Through Joy movement was a Nazi enterprise that organized worker recreation programs, sponsoring sports and vacations.

Mr. Schilperoord said that before World War II the word Volkswagen was so common as to be a cliché. “People’s car” in Germany in the 1930s was like “personal computer” in the United States in the 1980s. Inspired by Henry Ford, many young engineers sought to build transportation for the many.

Ganz was one. Ganz wrote for the magazine Motor-Kritik, which faulted German cars as antiquated and often unsafe, while he also consulted on engineering matters for automakers. He held a number of patents for suspension, steering and other systems.

Ganz advocated a people’s car with an air-cooled engine placed at the rear, based on a backbone-type frame and using independent suspension at both ends. He was a friend of Paul Jaray, an aeronautical pioneer, and pushed for Jaray’s streamlined body designs whose shape resembled what is now known as the Beetle.

Ganz promoted these ideas as a journalist. As part of the press gaggle covering the new chancellor’s visit, Mr. Schilperoord said, “He probably stood a few meters from Hitler at the 1933 Berlin auto show.”

But little more than a year later, according to Mr. Schilperoord, Ganz was arrested by the Gestapo, removed from his magazine job because he was Jewish and driven from the country. Ganz felt his life was in danger in Germany and Switzerland, where he settled.

Ganz had run afoul of the Nazis even before Hitler took power. In 1931, a Nazi propaganda publication highlighting the ostensible shady business practices of Jews charged Ganz with editorially intimidating car companies to give him consulting fees. He was hired by Adler, BMW, Mercedes and Standard.

“Yes, it is a slightly strange position,” Mr. Schilperoord said. “How can you be a consultant and also be the critic? But I believe he honestly wanted to see progress in car design.”

At the time, Mr. Schilperoord said, Ganz was the only one arguing for a combination of tubular chassis, rear engine, streamlined body and independent suspension — a formula that would produce a light, affordable family car. The Ganz story even has a villain worthy of a period thriller, Paul Ehrhardt, a former colleague at Motor-Kritik. The two had a falling out, and it is thought that Ehrhardt probably denounced Ganz to the Nazis.

After fleeing Germany, Ganz tried to develop a people’s car for Switzerland. In 1951, he moved to Australia and went to work for Holden, the General Motors subsidiary. In 1965 he told his story to Australian Motor Sports and Automobiles magazine under the headline “How I Invented the Volkswagen.” Ganz died in 1967.

Perhaps because it is hard to accept that a feel-good car like the Beetle could be so closely linked to the evils of Nazi Germany, people have long been captivated by stories of alternative origins. Ganz is just one of several engineers considered to have a rightful claim to being the Beetle’s creator.

The Automotive Hall of Fame in Detroit, among other groups, supports the position that key ideas came from Bela Barenyi, the genius engineer from Daimler Benz who invented the crumple zone and other safety features.

Hans Ledwinka, of the Czech automaker Tatra, may have the strongest case; Hitler and Ganz saw the impressive Tatra 77 at the 1934 Berlin auto show. After the war, a German court agreed on Ledwinka’s role in creating the Beetle and ordered a payment of three million marks.

Whether the readers of Mr. Schilperoord’s book will accept the thesis that without Ganz the Volkswagen would not have existed is less certain. Ganz’s ideas showed up in models he helped develop, like the Standard Superior and in his Maikäfer, or May bug, prototype.

But there were many similar cars: the rear-engine Mercedes 140, 150 and 170H models, the small Tatra 11, even the oddball Bungartz Butz. Porsche himself designed two VW-like models, in 1931-32, one for Zundapp, the motorcycle maker, and another for NSU.

“The Beetle was an accumulation from many ideas and from so many people that it is impossible to say one person was the originator of it,” Mr. Schilperoord said.

But the Beetle was more than a collection of technical innovations. To build cars for a whole people, as Henry Ford showed, required the creation of a huge manufacturing, sales and distribution enterprise.

In a country as economically desperate as Germany was between the wars, only an ego-driven tyrant would have undertaken such an enterprise. But as history proved, the sound principles underlying the Beetle’s design enabled it to outlive the reign of the murderous dictator who made the project possible.