Minenräumer

"The curiously looking German 38-ton tricycle protected with up to 40mm thick armor makes many an eyebrow rise. Legends are circulating about it, hundreds of specialists, big and small, wrote and said strange things about its history and design, basing them on hearsay, hypothesis and outright lies. (...) This vehicle had me hooked on since the first moment I saw it in the German armor pavilion at Kubinka Tank Museum. At first, as prudence called for, I tried to study the available German literature to find out more about it. After quite a while I had to quit, though - there was not a hard fact to base the further research on in any number of the works I studied. I have leafed through everything that was written about it abroad - and still nothing, only the more or less distorted versions of the above legends. And that was that. Then I started to study the documents concerning the last phase of the war and times immediately after the war. Still nothing revolutionary, but finally I have found a clue, leading to some hardly disputable facts, that I'd like to share with my readers. By looking at the internal tally plates of the mechanisms, it becomes obvious that the vehicle was created by a joint effort of the three German companies: Krupp, Daimler-Benz and Alkett, with the latter being in charge of the final assembly. The transmission tally plate was dated 'IX/41', which would date the vehicle back to the fall and winter of 1941. (...)"