Cleaning up Germany after World War II was a pretty big task. After losing the war and having their head guy merk himself in a bunker, Germany set to work — picking up the rubble of the cities, rebuilding their infrastructure, and removing the Nazis from their government (not really).


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Given this chaos, it was easy for the government to lose track of things. This may be how one German man ended up with a whole goddamn tank.


Back in 2015, local police in the German town of Heikendorf received a tip that a man was hoarding items from the Nazi period. While some of these items were technically legal, one of them almost certainly was not — a full World War II-era Panther tank, complete with ammunition.



According to the BBC, the man had been keeping the tank in his basement — and, if Mayor Alexander Orth is to be believed, had even brought it out on a few occasions. “He was chugging around in it during the snow catastrophe in 1978,” Orth said. “I took this to be the eccentricity of an old man, but it looks like there’s more to it than that.”


As it turns out, you can’t just own a tank in Germany. As Insider notes, “The military collector had broken Germany’s War Weapons Control Act, according to prosecutors.” Consequently, the man was made to pay €250,000 and serve a suspended prison sentence of 14 months.



He also, of course, could not keep his precious tank. “It took 20 soldiers nine hours to remove the trove of military hardware from the unnamed man’s home,” writes Bethany Dawson for Insider. Once the trial had finished, he was given two years to “sell or donate the tank and an anti-aircraft cannon to a museum or collector,” per the BBC. Oh right, he also had an anti-aircraft cannon. Interesting man, I tell ya.


It’s unclear where the tank ended up going, but don’t be surprised if you see it in your hometown sometime soon — while you apparently can’t own a tank in Germany, it’s a-okay in the US of A. Hooray for us!