Back in the late 1930's and early 1940's, the Mercedes-Benz Company of Germany manufactured any number of automobiles that were used as staff cars by members of the high command of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Among those cars was the Grosser 770K Model 150 Offener Tourenwagon. The 770K's were massive limousines. They were twenty feet long that would seat eight people. The seats were made of glove soft leather and filled with goose down. With their special armor plating and inch thick bullet proof glass, they weighed over 10,000 pounds. They were as menacing and as evil looking as the were the men that they were meant to carry.
As WW II was coming to a close, much of the Reich's automotive fleet was destroyed, but many of the cars were confiscated by Allied Forces and taken as "spoils of war." Two of the 770K's eventually found their way to America, and this book, "The Devil's Mercedes", tells the unlikely story of what happened to these two cars. At first, they were put on display as a means of raising funds for various charities (which did happen). Each was touted as "Hitler's personal car", but were they really? In time they moved from being curiosities to becoming symbols of Hitler and Hitler's Germany itself. Backlash against them developed and there were factions of people who thought that the cars should be destroyed. On the other end of the spectrum, many people used them as rallying points for neo-Nazi sympathizers. Owning these cars - and at least one of them was responsible for setting record sales prices on more than one occasion among car collectors - became a burden and curse in itself.
By the way, one of the secondary threads of this book was the hobby of Car Collecting. People we're doing this almost since the beginning of automobiles themselves. Back in those days, it was possible to ask permission to root through some old farmer's barn, find an ancient car, offer thirty or forty bucks for it, and then restore it and either keep it, or sell it for a profit. Such a hobby is now a Rich Man's game, and it is so in large part for the then enormous prices that the "Hitler cars" were able to fetch in post-war America.
As I said, each of these cars was heavily hyped as being "Hitler's cars", but tracing the actual provenance of each of them was an almost impossible task. The story of how one man, a native German working as a librarian for a Canadian museum, was able to do so makes for a terrific detective story. It should be noted that it wasn't until the 1980's, forty years after the conclusion of the War that such a positive identification was able to be made.
Both of the two cars that Klara tells about in this book are still out there, and one of them can still be seen by the public, but you're going to have to read the book to find out where they are. You won't be sorry.
Three Stars from The Grandstander.
By the way, this is the third book by Robert Klara that I have read and written about on this Blog. The first was about the funeral train of President Franklin Roosevelt:
The second was about the restoration and remodeling of the White House during the Truman Administration:
All three of these books are fascinating and worth reading. I can't wait to see what Mr. Klara will write about next.
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