By Scott Longman
We can only imagine the reaction of the first police officer into that basement.
The German authorities were conducting a raid on a beautiful villa in a wealthy suburb of Kiel called Heikendorf, and they’d hit the home of an elderly financier named Klaus-Dieter Flick. There are varying reports: either the police had come seeking Nazi art artifacts, or they had been tipped off by another entity that was first seeking them. Either way, in Germany it is illegal to possess any Nazi anything let alone former state property, and Klaus was believed to have verboten bronze statuary.
Turns out he had a little more than just statues.
Descending into the basement, the raiding party found what the Germans call a Ruhmeshalle, or Hall of Fame. It was enormous, elaborate and museum-grade expensive. They first went down a ramp lined with big granite sculptures of German soldiers’ heads, then they saw huge imperial “Reich Eagles” on the walls, then they punched into a cache of historic German small arms, including automatic weapons, about 70 of them. Then, they found live ammunition, a U-boat torpedo, and a replica V1 rocket. He kept them right about where we’d put a bar and big screen.
The Reich Ruhmeshalle
If that wasn’t far gone enough, Klaus had somehow sourced an immense four-wheel-chassis-mounted 88mm anti-aircraft gun. That gun is a monster, weighing about 16,000 pounds, serviced by a crew of 10 soldiers, and capable of firing a 20-pound high explosive shell six miles up. The 88 also proved itself a lethal tank killer, tragically capable of slicing through our Shermans like cans of Spam. Klaus set up his 88 right where the sectional sofa should go.
But all that wasn’t quite enough. Nein. He somehow managed to locate and secure despite the apparent legal obstacles … a Panther tank. The Panther was rightly respected by Allied forces, perhaps second only to the Tigers, because it was both highly lethal and hard to kill. He put it right in the middle of his Ruhmeshalle, right where everyone reading this would have put the pool table.
Klaus’s Panther had been fully restored, and it ran just fine. Indeed, longtime residents of his town recall him plowing streets with it after a massive blizzard in 1978. Oh, and it still retained its 75mm high-velocity main gun, although that’s alleged to have been dewatted.
German police, so well recognized for their sense of humor, apologized to Klaus for the inconvenience, gave him a 20-Euro gift card to a local cafe, and left. Wait, no. That’s France. Sorry. Instead, they immediately tore a huge hole in his home and called in a Bundeswehr tank recovery crew with heavy Armored Engineering Vehicle wreckers and spent nine hours confiscating everything but his spork collection.
While that did disarm Klaus, it didn’t answer the question: how the hell did he lay hands on this thing to begin with? Upon first hearing the headline, you might think that Klaus had served in the war, and simply scavenged everything in the aftermath, as so many people historically have. But in point of chronological fact, his newborn self probably first glimpsed daylight in or about 1945. Somehow by his thirties, he’d both secured a bunch of disposable income and he’d gotten heavily into the whole Nazi collecting thing. Which brings us to the 1970s. At that point, if you were out looking for barn finds, Nazi tanks were pretty much gone. So … Klaus sourced his, in of all places, England.
The British Blitzkrieg Bop
At the end of the war, the British were on fire to lay hands on German armor and test it extensively. Problem was, folks like George Patton, the Eighth Air Force and a bunch of ground-pounders with M9 bazookas had been reducing the Panther population. Nor could the Brits simply re-fire up the Panther assembly line, because we blew that to pieces, too.
But what the Brits could do was collect enough unscathed new parts to assemble themselves some brand new Panthers, and that’s exactly what they did, nine of them. Following extensive testing in England, those Panthers, or whatever was left of them, went to their final, ignominious defeat in a scrapyard. Klaus found this one and somehow managed to repatriate it and then fully restore it.
So, what happened to Klaus and his Panther? He got prosecuted under something called the War Weapons Control Act, but was only left with a suspended sentence, a fine, and with the requirement that he relinquish his collection to some entity that der Staat deemed appropriate.
As for the tank itself, the record is murky. One rumor is that it ended up in a collection in Everrett, Washington. Another is that it was purchased by a Wal-Mart heir. It’s rare enough and famous enough that it will eventually resurface. Until then, at least whoever got it won’t have to worry about German police blowing a hole in their home and confiscating it. Or the Eighth Air Force.
