Notorious cars fetch high prices

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32661, 17 July 1971, Page 11

Notorious cars fetch high prices

(By

JUDSON BENNETT)

In the comer of a museum in Vienna lies a 1911 car which, 57 years ago, was involved in an incident that resulted in the deaths of nearly ten million men.

It is the open Graft Um Stift tourer in which the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated at Sarajevo in June, 1914—a car with an astonishing record of bringing bad luck and death to its owners.

Yet recently an American .enthusiast unsuccessfully offered the museum £50,000 for the notorious “Red Car of Sarajevo,” continuing a trend that antique Car dealers have noted for some time. For the more notorious and “hated” a car happens to be, the greater the demand for it.

At the moment German V 8 Horch tourers, built for Nazi officials, are fetching around £6OOO in America—five times their original price. No wonder specialist dealers are currently scouring the world for cars which belonged to the famous and notorious—for there’s no shortage of potential customers.

The car that dealers are most anxious to find is undoubtedly the prestige eightcylinder Horch Prunkwagen, presented by Adolf Hitler as a birthday gift to Eva Braun, the woman he afterwards married in the bunker beneath the Chancellory during the last hours of the siege of Berlin. “Teutonic monster” “It was a brutal Teutonic monster,” says an old-car specialist. "It was undeniably well-built, but too big, too heavy and too clumsy.”

Another expert condemned it as possessing "the inspired ugliness that only Germans can achieve.” But that would not stop it fetching what would probably be a world record price. After the fall of Germany in 1945, the car was commandeered by the United States occupational forces who placed it at the disposal of General Sir Brian Robertson.

The general used it when he was appointed United Kingdom representative on the Allied Control Commission in Bulgaria, and went to Sofia in it.

But the stbry did not end in Sofia. When the Comission was disbanded, the United States Army car surplus authorities offered it for sale, and it was bought by a diplomat stationed in Bulgaria. When he moved to Israel, he took the Horch with him. But when the diplomat was moved on to yet another post, he sold the car to a Tel Aviv businessman. And what happened to it after that no-one seems to know. Hitler’s car Anything that Hitler regularly rode in is guaranteed to fetch a top price. Recently, a Mercedes Nazi High Command staff car built specially for the Fuehrer, was auctioned for £3OOO at a sale in Monaco.

When Hitler wasn’t using the car it was frequently lent to the Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Goering, and even Mussolini was photographed riding in it. The car was sold complete with work sheet signed by Goering in Paris in 1940.

Built to Hitler’s specification, the Mercedes has a fivelitre, eight cylinder engine, four forward gears and two reverse, and hydraulic brakes.

The chassis is the threeaxle type with two pairs of driving wheels at the rear, an open body and canvas hood.

The staff car found its way to Monte Carlo after periods in Italy, France and Germany. It is still in excellent mechanical condition. A 12-cylinder Maybach Zeppelin, one of the most expensive and elegant cars in the world, and said to have belonged to Martin Bormann, is also thought to be in existence in Austria, but hasn’t been traced for years. Nor has an AustroDaimier which was the personal property of Rudolf Hess.

But not only Nazi cars fetch sky-high prices. Gangster transport is in enormous demand too. A 1913 Mercer Raceabout, said to have been

owned by the prohibition racketeer, Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, fetched nearly £19,000 at an auction in America. The seven-ton armoured limousine used by Al Capone is now in the possession of a private collector after a varied career in crime and show-business.

It toured theatres throughout America and was even shipped to Europe in the late 30s to accompany the showing of “Scarface,” a film about Capone. Enormous, ugly

An enormous ugly vehicle, made of bullet-proof sheet steel, it certainly served its original purpose. Although many of Capone’s competitors died with their boots on. Scarface himself lived long enough to serve an 11-year term for tax evasion. In fact, the vehicle was

among property seized and sold by the tax authorities.

Another Capone car—a 1921 bullet-proof Rolls Royce —is at present thought to be in South Africa. Not long ago it was used for an 8000 mile cabaret tour by an actor who paid around £lOOO for it. How it got to Africa from Chicago is something of a mystery. Certainly, if it came on the open market today it would fetch five times that amount.

For the sky’s the limit for cars with a murky past. Only recently the owner of an SSK Mercedes Benz, said to have been used by Himmler, sold it back to the manufacturers for restoration and exhibition at their Stuttgart museum. The price was around £6OOO. A week later, an American enthusiast who didn’t know the car had been sold, offered £14,000 for it.