He had a WWII tank in his house: he will have to sell it and pay a fine | The case of a retiree from northern Germany

A 94-year-old retiree who has a home a WWII Panzer tank and an 88mm anti-aircraft gun, was fined 250,000 euros and a suspended prison sentence of fourteen months. It is for violating the law on the control of weapons of war. You now have two years to sell the equipment.

This is Klaus-Dieter Flick, an 84-year-old real estate agent, who claims he bought the tank for scrap in 1977 in Britain and owed pay an additional $ 35,000 to the German army to repair the engine. The tank and cannon he kept in a bunker under his crate in the town of Heikindorf, northern Germany.

Not only are there war material from the greatest conflagration in history. The bunker is a veritable arsenal, with seventy assault rifles, more than two thousand cartridges of different ammunition, a mortar and a torpedo. No more SS uniforms and Nazism memorabilia, for which he was not charged, despite the fact that the law in Germany prohibits thean exhibition of symbols of Nazism, except for educational or historical reasons.

The material was made public in 2015 when police arrived at Flick’s to check if, as had been reported, there were any bronze sculptures from the Third Reich years. What they found exceeded all of their expectations.

At that time, the mayor of Heikindorf, Alezander Orth, said that in 1978, right after acquiring the tank, Flick “blew” on the tank during a snowfall. Flick argued that the weaponry was unusable and did not pose a threat to neighbors. The judge rejected that line of defense and urged the old man and the prosecution to come to an agreement.

During this time, the tank was removed from Flick’s house. It took twenty German Army soldiers, two transport vehicles and nine hours to pull the 44-ton, two-meter-wide and five-meter-long carcass out of the house. Regarding a sale, there have already been bidders. A German private collector has expressed interest in the gun, while the Panzer could end up in a museum in Seattle, USA.