View Photos of The Car in the Barn, a Long-Lost Mercedes 540K
In the early '90s, a colorful group of car collectors made it their business to find and recover a Nazi bulletproof car, hidden for decades in a set of barns in Eastern Europe.
Late in World War II, Hitler ordered Daimler-Benz to produce a run of bulletproof cars—chiefly, 20 supercharged 540K models, called Aktion P cars (the P stood for panzer, or armored vehicle) for his inner circle. At war's end, the cars wound up being treated as so much Nazi trash. Misused and discarded, they vanished into the fog of history. This is the story of how one of these cars was found in a barn, to be discovered and spirited out of Eastern Europe by a group of adventurous collectors. The story first appeared in Car and Driver in October 1996. Read to the end of the story to find out what ultimately happened to it.
The ultrarare (and elusive) Mercedes-Benz 540K Aktion Panzer.
Fearing his Aktion P car would attract the Russian mafia, the owner took it apart and hid the parts in four different barns.
Having cut the car in two with tin snips, Dick Fritz (right) and a helper use planks to slide out the body of the Aktlon P from the barn. The car had been buried under junk for many years.
The barn where (some of) the car spent long years in hiding.
The only other extant Aktion P car, shown here, is in a Prague museum. The 5401-cc OHV straight-eight was supercharged and made 180 horsepower.
Note the thick bulletproof glass.
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