fantastic video. hill-climbing beetles!

I used to drive my '69 bus along horse paths in the woods to deliver camp site supplies when I was working as a camp counselor in the Pocono Mts in Pennsylvania. That rear-mounted engine gives good traction.

The name beetle was used first time by New York Times in 1938.

...In a short time, Der Führer is going to plaster his great sweeps of motor highways with thousands and thousands of shiny little beetles, purring along from the Baltics to Switzerland, from Poland to France, with father mother and up to three kids
packed inside and seeing their Vaterland for the first time during their own windshield....

I think the reference to beetles in that context is a generic reference to cars, the majority of which were black, rather than specific reference to Volkswagens.

True. That was a term assigned to several similar vehicles of that period; not the VW specifically.