in 1937 Rosemeyer's father owned an auto and motorcycle garage and repair shop
Rosemeyer & Co sur Bahnhofstraße, where young Rosemeyer worked on motorcycles and cars. Having started by racing motorcycles, Rosemeyer became a member of the
Auto Union racing team with hardly any experience in racing cars. This was later considered a benefit as he was not yet used to the handling of
traditional layout race cars. The
Ferdinand Porsche-designed
mid-engined
Silver Arrows of
Auto Union were fast, but hard to drive, and only he,
Tazio Nuvolari and to a lesser extent
Hans Stuck truly mastered the machines. Rosemeyer was also a very skilled mechanic, so, like
Hermann Lang of Mercedes, he was able to give good technical feedback to Dr. Porsche and development engineer Eberan von Eberhorst to further develop the Auto Union cars and set his cars up for races to make them quicker and easier to drive. In only his second ever Grand Prix, at the daunting
Nürburgring, Rosemeyer took the lead from the great
Rudolf Caracciola and was almost in sight of the finish line when he missed a gear and was overtaken. However, in subsequent years he made up for this mistake by winning three consecutive races at the
Nürburgring, one famously in thick fog. Later in 1935 he won his first Grand Prix at the
Brno Masaryk Circuit in
Czechoslovakia. Whilst on the podium in 1935 at the
Czechoslovakian Grand Prix he was introduced to the famous aviator
Elly Beinhorn. Their celebrity relationship was too good an opportunity to miss for the
Nazi Party. Rosemeyer and Beinhorn were exalted and instrumentalized by the Nazi Party to the ideal German celebrity couple of that time. Rosemeyer joined the SS in November 1933, though it is not known if he did it out of opportunism or ideological sympathies. Though he was not a member of the
Nazi Party, he was made a member of the
SS for propaganda purposes and held the rank of
Hauptsturmführer. Several sensational
Grand Prix motor racing victories in 1936 and 1937, in addition to the
AAA-sanctioned
Vanderbilt Cup in the U.S, made him popular not only in Germany. He won the
European driving championship in 1936. Of the twelve Grands Prix contested in 1937 between Mercedes and Auto Union, Rosemeyer won four of Auto Union's five victories against Mercedes's formidable new W125. Rosemeyer's superlative performances that year cemented him alongside Rudolf Caracciola and Tazio Nuvolari as three of the greatest drivers of 1930s Grand Prix racing. His marriage to Beinhorn added even more celebrity hype. It also made it possible for him to learn to fly a private plane. Before a testing session, he once used a now-defunct airfield next to the
Flugplatz section of the
Nürburgring as a landing strip, and rolled his plane to the pits via the race track - in the opposite direction. His son Bernd Jr. was born in November 1937, only ten weeks before his death. Rosemeyer considered 13 to be his lucky number. He was married on 13 July 1936. 13 days later he won the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring. His last Nürburgring victory came on 13 June 1937. His last race victory came at his 13th start of the 1937 season at
Donington Park. == Fatal record attempt ==