Quote:
Originally Posted by Idle
One car that was titled to one specific Nazi. This armored car was built on the chassis of a 540K at Hitler's order for use by what were known as 'The Big Heads'. Out of seven (?) built this is the only survivor.
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That is actually not totally clear;
The Reich Chancellery was by the Fuhrer bunker in Berlin, and Hitler had a small fleet of cars there in the Chancellery garage, in fact that was where the jerry cans of Petrol were fetched and then brought back to the garden outside the bunker and poured the fuel from them over Hitler's corpse to be burned. What was left was used to burn the bodies of Magda and Josef Goebbels..
Some of these Mercedes Benzes actually were reported being seen driven on the streets of Berlin during the first week of May 1945, but after that they were never seen again.
Almost certainly they were transported to the USSR, along with mountains of other war booty.
There is one other car with amazing provenance that is known.
It is a 540K cabrio that was given by Hitler to Stalin upon the signing of the nonaggression pact in August 1939, that had the secret protocol that set forth the division of Poland.
But Stalin considered the car decadent, and passed it undriven, on to one of his top Generals.
It was discovered in 1962, in the USSR, (I believe in Ukraine/Crimea) in the hands of the General's son, who a Swedish photographer went and talked to, and convinced him to let him buy it.
The Swede then managed to somehow to quietly export it to Sweden, where he then photographed it and made a book about it, which many years ago, I actually saw.
The 540K looked mint, absolutely fabulous, and had Swedish number plates fitted to it.
Upon learning of this, the Communists in Russia were outraged, but could do nothing, BUT immediately passed a vey strict law regarding export of classic vehicles so that it could never happen again.