By the time Claus Luthe joined BMW in 1976, he had already experienced enough “history” – both personal and professional – to fill several lifetimes. A native of Wuppertal, Germany, Luthe had lived through the ravages of World War II in his native Germany, during which time he had lost his own father to the conflict, and he had already done tours of duty as an apprentice at the Voll bus manufacturing company and as a designer at the Fiat’s German subsidiary, followed by a stint at NSU, where one of his designs, the NSU Spider, was the first car in the world with a rotary engine.