Not surprising seeing how he bought this tank disarmed and was trying to rearm it.
Given the strong gun laws in Germany, I think he's lucky to get away with a fine for illegally acquiring a tank, anti-aircraft cannon, mortar, torpedo as well as an assortment of guns.
There is the "Kriegswagfenkontrollgesetz" (law to control weapons of war) that deals with owning and trading these kind of things.
Comment on rearming:
»Ich wollte den Panzer so herrichten, wie er aus dem Werk kam«, soll F. am 12. Juli 2015 gesagt haben. In einem Telefonat am 12. August 2015 soll ihn ein Gesprächspartner daran erinnert haben, wie er ihn mehrfach darauf hingewiesen habe, den Panzer zu demilitarisieren. »Aber Sie, Herr F., sagten: Einen Teufel werde ich tun«, zitiert der Staatsanwalt aus den Protokollen.
gun laws are not that strong in Germany actually, they are just strong in the sense that you cannot carry/own without a license, but for collection purposes I'd say they are even lighter than the US' in some aspects.
Indeed. It’s often the nuances that matter. My understanding is that acquiring a silencer in Europe isn’t much harder than acquiring a firearm (obviously country dependent).
While in the US it’s much harder to get a silencer as they fall into a category similar to automatic weapons.
And the US laws are very strict for things like tanks and such since they fall under the NFA which again, lumps all these things into a similar category as automatic weapons and even if you’re a cop they’ll put you in prison for violating those laws.
This is one of the ways in which the USA is more like 50 little countries than a single one. At the federal level most everything besides post 1986 machine guns, including 120mm cannons and explosive shells along with a tank to move them around, can be had with some paperwork and a tax stamp, which is $200 or less.
There are businesses in Nevada[1] that will let you drive tanks and fire off howitzers[1] that are privately owned.
However many states, and in some states counties and cities, have additional restrictions on what they permit. For example, a muzzle loading revolver isn't even considered to be a firearm federally, but in NY State if you happen to have powder and lead handy congratulations you're now a felon even in your own home unless you have a handgun permit.
The barrel of the revolver is effectively 6 terribly short smooth bore muskets. Be sure to load them before the shooting starts. Then you can fire six shots in rapid succession, before changing to your other revolver. You did remember to buy two?
You load all six chambers, or five if it’s an antique without a firing pin safety. Typically this is accomplished by pouring the powder charge into the front of the cylinder and then placing a lead ball on top of it and ramming it into place, although one can also remove the cylinder altogether with some models and load it externally.
The end result is you can get 5-6 shots off quickly, but reloading will take rather a lot longer than with a cartridge firearm. This is one reason people carried two revolvers in the old West. Needless to say they’re of little interest to criminals, but fairly popular amongst sportsmen and re-enactors and such.
Not always. One of the biggest advantages of a revolver is that if you have a misfire you still have your next chamber waiting for you. That doesn't go away.
> My understanding is that acquiring a silencer in Europe isn’t much harder than acquiring a firearm (obviously country dependent).
True. You don't need any special permits for suppressors at all here in Finland as long as you got a valid permit for the gun it will be installed on. So basically the seller just checks that you actually legally own the gun you say you are going to install it on (nobody actually checks what you install it on)
You have to invite a notoriously capricious and hair trigger federal agency into your life, sure less so than an automatic weapon but you still need to put yourself on their radar to some extent. After you've done that the first time $200 a pop isn't that big a deal but a lot of people are unwilling to take the initial plunge of putting their name on that list.
Harder than Europe though. Basically the same amount of effort as getting a machine gun. Full fingerprints, $200 tax, submit to ATF, wait months, then take possession.
And each state can have additional laws that differ from federal laws. CA bans ownership entirely I believe.
$200 tax is quite crazy though. You can get a cheap suppressor for that (or less). So the "tax" is literally doubling the actual price of a suppressor in the worst case.
At most this is as legitimate as seizing someone's house because they once sold some pot to a friend in said house. Yeah it's within the letter of the law but it's still dumb and wrong.
"Rearming" a 70yo tank is fundamentally a historical restoration project and the kind of people who do it are no hazard to public health. The law was not written for these kinds of people. It was written for people who are actually up to no good. It's pretty clear from patterns of behavior who is arming tanks to have a cool historically accurate tank and who is doing that sort of thing as a means to a more nefarious end.
Defending this sentence is only a hair away from defending insane drug sentencing "because the law is the law". The law is dumb and if this were the US I'd say the judge has poor judgement for not using his discretion to hand down a practically nonexistent sentence. I don't know to what extent German judges can influence sentencing.
Calling arming a tank a "historical restoration project" is already quite an example of Olympics-level mental gymnastics. And no, it's not comparable to selling pot either.
> The law was not written for these kinds of people. It was written for people who are actually up to no good.
What "good" purpose does arming a tank have then? Authorities don't like to wait and find out, and that's not unreasonable in any way.
> the kind of people who do it are no hazard to public health.
Well they do, you know, keep weapons of war in their homes.
Unless they have 24/7 armed guards and their home is defensible from armed invasion that alone is a pretty sizable risk to public health.
Then of course there is the added factor of what sort of person thinks this is a good idea. If someone is going to have an armed tank, it would be preferable if they also didn't have questionable judgment.
I think the number of people killed in the world each year by personally owned novelty military vehicles is approximately zero. Hundreds of people are killed in the United States every year by unarmed assailants. When will we wake up and pass common-sense karate-chop control?!
How many people would die from personally owned military vehicles if they were not illegal and how many people would die from karate chops if there were (magically enforced) laws banning them?
Please also compare the relative numbers of people with rearmed military vehicles and people with karate-chop capable arms. The important comparison is the conditional probability, not the total numbers.
0 divided by a small number is going to be smaller than a small but nonzero number divided by about seven billion.
If you want to be obtuse you should argue the "tanks in the service of foreign warlords seeking to overthrow their local governments are privately owned" angle.
Something being irrelevant in war between nations doesn't mean that it is irrelevant at all scales. You could make the same argument about a Spanish galleon, and that for historical accuracy it should be stocked with at least a few tons of gunpowder, but I'm still not allowed to stockpile more than 50 pounds of black powder. And that's reasonable, because there's a lot of other uses for large quantities of gunpowder.
Rearming a 70yo tank greatly increases the likelihood for neighborhood disputes to become, um, "explosive".
Well, contrary to the BBC, the Spiegel source does not directly specify if he was arrested for the possession of the tank. It simply says "he agreed to sell the tank".
Quite possibly, there might be nothing illegal about owning the disarmed tank for a law-abiding collector.
I don't recall the details, but from memory prosecuters dropped charges directly related to the tank itself. It seems that having demilitarised tank is indeed not per se illegal in Germany.
There was some other stuff going on, like shit loads of live ammunition in the guys possession.
"Previously violated weapon control laws" is not exactly helpful to obtaining a license to legally own them. (And I'm not sure how they apply in the case of a tank, even though collection licenses cover a lot I don't think the usual ones apply). If the alternative is seizure without compensation, being allowed to sell it seems fairly nice.
1. It was foolish of the man to have munitions stored with the weapons, he was asking for big government to come knocking.
2. Equally, the man has been known in the Heikendorf community for years and restored the tank, after buying it from the British Army's REME. Even helped the locals get out of snowdrifts with the tanks. If he was going to cause trouble he would have.
3. In the BBC article it says - "Many US historians argue it was the most efficient such vehicle deployed by Germany during World War Two. "
The Panther was a good tank but was over-engineered, the Panther Ausf G versions were better and had the issues rectified.
He sounds to have had quite the collection. If he actually had it in a shooting condition complete with a big case of live shells I can imagine it but the article doesn't really specify.
If you want ammo, just get yourself some field where a trench war has been fought. It will spit out unexploded ammo, bombs and mines at an alarming rate. You'll fill about a shed every year.
It is of course illegal to own these things. You're supposed to call the army (DOVO in my case), who will then tell you they have no time, have lost the capability to process these things, are on holiday for the next 5 years, whatever.
If this bothers you, you might drop them in a truck and dump them off at an army base, which will scare the bejeesus out of the poor soldiers, especially if you start jumping up and down on the heap like an angry madman (this might make it to some local newspaper). The army will declare this stuff far too dangerous for their base, and demand you to drag them back to your own field. If you can get kids to steal the stuff, this solves your problems with both the ammo and the kids. You might have a new complaint about noise levels.
What exactly is the problem with an old farth owning a few sheds full of world war ammo? Damn, my sarcasmometer just broke.
"What exactly is the problem with an old farth owning a few sheds full of world war ammo?"
Uh, the explosive potential? If his house catches fire and firefighters arrive only to be hit by a vicious explosion, that is quite a problem? IDK if that particular person lives in wilderness or has close neighbours, but if the latter, those people may also be pissed of when they learn that they live next to an improvised Vesuvius?
Old ammo is unstable and the region of former trench fighting of the Great War is still restricted for development, 100 years after the war has ended:
Just to be clear as this post managed to reach a scary -1 in less than 3 minutes.
That post was pure sarcasm. Nobody young or old should own live ammo that has been rusted away for about a century, especially if they desperately want to get rid of it. The governement should start funding the relevant orgs again so they can collect and safely disarm these things.
On a serious note, that's the reason why private EOD is quite busy in Germany. And the reason why Baltic Navy mine divers are among the best in the world, apparently these guys see more live WW1+2 mines in 6 months of training than US Navy divers in their whole career. Might be a tad exaggerated, but the Baltic sea is among the heaviest mined ones on the planet.
Civilians (including museums) that wish to own tanks need to cut out enough of the armor to make it unusable for war purposes.
That's why the Tank Museum in Munster is the only [correction: not only] museum in Germany where you can see tanks without modifications: the museum is technically part of the Bundeswehr's 9. tank brigade that is stationed there, and the civilian staff around it is just "in cooperation".
Yeah, I know. And still some years ago the Army did an engine revision on that particular tank. Through official channels and properly invoiced. Not saying that owning a tank is good, bit having thousands of rounds of ammo might be more critical. I'd have to look up the details so to be sure.
Excuse me but WTF is the problem with an elderly man having a tank? He can probably barely even climb into it let alone drive it (which would be a workout for a young man) or lift a shell (had he even had one).
It's clear from the few sentences about private collectors that this dude was active or otherwise known among the vintage military junk collecting community. You kind of need to be very active in those circles a a prerequisite for owning a tank. These kind of people aren't really doing anything wrong unless you think collecting and preserving junk is wrong. This dude had some sort of established collection, the .gov swooped in and took is and the rest of the collectors are trying to buy it off the .gov so they don't trash it.
They didn't say they found any art. We both know they'd announcing that one loud and clear if they did.
I'm not sure how he got on their radar for nazi art but this whole thing reeks of "we came up empty handed but when we lose we make sure you lose too" behavior on behalf of the government.
I think it's one of those cases where the authorities have to make a statement rather than a matter of believing he'd do sometthing stupid with it.
WW2-era or not, a Panther is a lethal piece of hardware, and apparently he's been seen driving it around at some point. And if one person does it then someone else can too. And the next one might not be a harmless old man content with merely collecting military hardware.
He also had an anti-aircraft gun, multiple machine guns, pistols, and lots of ammunition. The same logic applies there; old or not, it could be very dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands and that's why we have gun control laws.
I suspect selling the collection could easily pay the fines, so it's not like he's being punished that hard.
> I think it's one of those cases where the authorities have to make a statement rather than a matter of believing he'd do sometthing stupid with it.
What's the statement here? The statement I see is that intent does not matter, which kind of flies in the face of most of the history of European criminal law.
The law was written to prosecute people who are up to no good. Why the relevant parties here did not realize that some elderly collector is in fact not up to no good and prosecute and sentence accordingly I can only speculate.
>WW2-era or not, a Panther is a lethal piece of hardware, and apparently he's been seen driving it around at some point. And if one person does it then someone else can too. And the next one might not be a harmless old man content with merely collecting military hardware.
If you want to drive around and destroy things there are more cost effective options, there have been recent examples of such shenanigans in Europe. Some elderly collector is not really a threat to public health and more than a small fleet of construction equipment or heavy trucks is.
>I suspect selling the collection could easily pay the fines, so it's not like he's being punished that hard.
I think it's just as likely that the fine was sized so that between being forced to liquidate everything and paying the fines he will die penniless.
> What's the statement here? The statement I see is that intent does not matter, which kind of flies in the face of most of the history of European criminal law.
It’s because there is a certain school of thought that people should be punished and imprisoned for ‘immoral acts’ even it if hurts no one, they have no ill intent, and keep to themselves. See gun laws, drug laws, laws against homosexuality, obscenity laws, and speech laws.
Turns out regardless of where you are on the mainstream political spectrum, forcing people to live a live a certain way in the privacy of their own home never goes out of style, except for well, a certain disfavored minority political group.
That gun control laws are still being enforced, no matter who breaks them? That you can't get away with breaking the law just because you commit a crime that most people don't think is that bad?
> The law was written to prosecute people who are up to no good.
We're talking about someone who confessed to the crime he was sentenced for, and last time I checked, the law is supposed to be equally applied, no matter who you are. Intent does indeed matter, and if this had been some moron with intent to use the tank, we wouldn't be talking about a suspended 14-day prison sentence and a fine.
> If you want to drive around and destroy things there are more cost effective options
Definitely. I'd argue that the relative scarcity of tanks, however, is clearly correlated to the fact that military hardware ownership is pretty much limited to the military. I could -- in theory -- kill someone with a hammer I bought for 1€ at a flea market. That does not mean we should abolish gun control laws because "there's cheaper ways of doing it anyway". Nor should we allow private tank ownership, because I could clearly cause damage more cost-efficiently with a bulldozer.
That being said, I agree that this particular individual doesn't seem to have been a threat at all. Someone potentially stealing the stuff from the old man, however, wouldn't even have to think about things like costs.
> I think it's just as likely that the fine was sized so that between being forced to liquidate everything and paying the fines he will die penniless.
Well, he's been given two years to sell or donate the tank and the AA gun to a collector. There are definitely people who are interested. The final price depends on supply/demand and I'm not an expert when it comes to collecting military hardware.
Whether he'll die penniless or not, well, he was able to afford a tank and an AA gun, as well as a number of other weapons, and ammunition. Apart from that, he also had room for it all. That indicates he does have some money available (assuming he didn't spend it all on the hardware and resorted to living of instant noodles).
If I illegally obtained an item, was sentenced to a fine and to sell said item, and the proceeds of the sale covered the fine, then I'd say I got off lightly. In this particular case the fine wasn't handed out solely for the two items that the perpetrator was sentenced to sell, it was also about illegally obtained machine guns, automatic pistols and lots of ammunition.
> Excuse me but WTF is the problem with an elderly man having a tank? He can probably barely even climb into it let alone drive it
Besides the fact that the law doesn't stop applying to you when you're old enough, maybe the more convincing argument would be that it's easier to steal it from an elderly man than from the army or museum
The dude stole a modern-ish at the time tank. People who spend stupid amounts of time and money on restoring vintage hardware don't go on rampages. People who want to go on rampages buy bulldozers because that's a more efficient means of accomplishing that goal.
The LA guy is as relevant to an elderly collector as a dude on meth stabbing a cop is to a high school pot head.
As a citizen I am equally afraid of a Pantzer and a modern tank. I guess most civilians wouldn't even notice the difference when it is crushing their car or threatening their life.
I mean, this is almost a counter argument. If someone can just steal a tank from the govt what’s the harm in letting them buy one? It’s not like access is an issue.
Apparently, there was some stolen artwork but it someone else's:
>Authorities discovered the illegal military arsenal during a 2015 raid of the collector’s storage facility in northern Germany in an investigation into black market Nazi-era art that turned up two bronze horse statues which once stood in front of Adolf Hitler’s chancellery. Those items were in another man’s possession.
The more interesting thing to me is that it took the government 6 years to figure out that his collection was a problem. And this is the German government which is supposed to be efficient.
Not that I think that an 84 or even 78 year old man is going to be committing an acts of terror.
That is a fair point. My counter point would be that there are other heavy machinery that you do not need to get special permission to own that can be used in the same capacity. Large trucks, bulldozers, excavators. Those can also be easily stolen to commit crimes as well, yet are not.
Also this particular tank, while they talk about it being used to remove snow at some point also seemed to be fairly hard to move.
>It took about 20 soldiers almost nine hours to extract the Panther tank - which was without its tracks - from the property.
Unless they were taking very special care not to damage other property, it does not seem like it would have been easily stolen.
Excavators and heavy trucks definitely were stolen. Thieves used them to ram the facades of jewellers, ATMs etc. This is why such businesses now have those poles that are raised out of the street. It was very common in the Netherlands before the thieves upgraded themselves to explosives (which I mentioned in the post below).
Stealing a tank is so conspicuous that no self respecting criminal would ever try it. It doesn't blend in and you'd never even get close to your target. It also doubles the number of crimes you need to pull off because first you need to steal the tank and the cops will be on your tail starting then vs starting when you commit the real crime you set out for.
Want to run over crowds? Rent a truck
Want to break buildings or infrastructure? Rent construction equipment.
In Amsterdam passengers of a tram had to drop to the floor because some assassins wanted to kill someone and took the whole area under machine gun fire, didn't care about collateral damage.
In Belgium there was the "bende van Nijvel" that would rob supermarkets with machine guns and kill civilians on the motorways just to slow down pursuers. (This is a couple of decades ago though)
I wouldn't be surprised if someone steals a tank just to gain access to a nearby bank by ramming the walls or something, and then of course use another vehicle for escaping.
I expect in America if a government agency looking for confederate memorabilia (illegal yet?) told the ATF to conduct a raid over guns they saw… there would be very angry people talking about rights
Given the strong gun laws in Germany, I think he's lucky to get away with a fine for illegally acquiring a tank, anti-aircraft cannon, mortar, torpedo as well as an assortment of guns.
There is the "Kriegswagfenkontrollgesetz" (law to control weapons of war) that deals with owning and trading these kind of things.
Source in German: https://www.google.de/amp/s/www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/k...
Comment on rearming: »Ich wollte den Panzer so herrichten, wie er aus dem Werk kam«, soll F. am 12. Juli 2015 gesagt haben. In einem Telefonat am 12. August 2015 soll ihn ein Gesprächspartner daran erinnert haben, wie er ihn mehrfach darauf hingewiesen habe, den Panzer zu demilitarisieren. »Aber Sie, Herr F., sagten: Einen Teufel werde ich tun«, zitiert der Staatsanwalt aus den Protokollen.
Source behind paywall: https://www.google.de/amp/s/www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/k...