View Photos of The Car in the Barn, a Long-Lost Mercedes 540K
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.
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