Veritas was founded by Ernst Loof, Georg Meier, and Lorenz Dietrich. The founders initially rebuilt and modified pre-war BMW 328 cars using components supplied by customers, producing hybrids known as BMW-Veritas cars. The first of these was raced in 1947 by Karl Kling, who used the car to win at Hockenheim and subsequently became the 1947 German 2-litre champion. After BMW objected to the use of its name, the cars were rebranded simply as Veritas.
The first Veritas road cars were launched in 1949, beginning with the Komet coupe, which was essentially a road-legal version of the Veritas RS racing car. More refined models followed: the 2+2 Saturn coupe and the Scorpion cabriolet, both styled by Ben Bowden. These models used a 1998 cc engine designed by Eric Zipprich and built by Heinkel. Over 200 orders were reportedly received for the new cars, but the company lacked the capital to purchase components in sufficient quantities. Production came to a halt in 1950 and the company survived its final two years of the original venture partly by fitting new bodies to Panhard cars.
A total of 17 privately entered Veritas cars participated in five FIA World Championship races during the early 1950s Formula One era. The cars competed at the edge of the championship's coverage, representing one of few German constructors attempting to return to international racing so soon after the Second World War.
After the original company ran out of capital, Ernst Loof relocated to the Nurburgring in 1950 where he rented the former Auto Union workshops and established a new company, Automobilwerke Ernst Loof GmbH. Under this entity he continued producing Veritas cars, using the Heinkel engine with bodywork supplied by coachbuilder Spohn in saloon and cabriolet configurations. Funding again proved inadequate; the final cars built at the Nurburgring were fitted with Ford or Opel engines as replacements, and the number of cars completed at this facility is estimated at between six and twenty.
After a gap of nearly fifty years, a small German firm known as VerMot AG of Grafschaft, Rhineland attempted to revive the Veritas name from 2001 onwards. A concept car called the Veritas RS III was presented, initially using a BMW-sourced 6.0-litre V12 engine producing 670 hp. Pre-production models were exhibited at trade shows and used as press demonstrators over several years, with the engine later changed to a 5-litre BMW unit. In 2011 VerMot announced plans for a hybrid variant and a fully electric version, but production never commenced. Various start dates from 2008 onwards were announced without result, and by 2014 the company appeared dormant.
Veritas occupies a small but historically meaningful place in the story of German motorsport's postwar recovery. The cars demonstrated that German engineering talent could rapidly rebuild competitive machinery after the war, and Karl Kling's 1947 championship with the BMW-Veritas prefigured his later career as one of Mercedes-Benz's factory drivers in the 1950s. The chronic undercapitalization that ended the original Veritas is a recurring story in the history of small European constructors of the era, making it representative of the fragile ecosystem that surrounded the early postwar racing calendar.