Hitler's Motorcars: The Führer's Vehicles From the Birth of the Nazi Party to the Fall of the Third Reich

By John Starkey

As well as providing photographs of Hitler’s cars and the men who became his chauffeur, John Starkey lists the technical specifications of those cars, and describes many of the journeys undertaken by the German leader over the course of two dramatic decades.

Many are the photographs of Hitler standing proudly in the passenger seat of a midnight blue Mercedes, arm outstretched in his famous salute to the adoring German crowds. Hitler loved cars and loved to be seen in and next to the special automobiles he purchased or was presented with through friends and Nazi Party funds.

His first car was a 1920 green Selve 8/30, purchased in 1922, which was soon disposed of in favor of a Daimler-built Mercedes 15/70/100 – and from that moment on every car in which Hitler was chauffeured around the Third Reich and occupied countries would be a Mercedes. Indeed, even while in Landsberg prison following his failed putsch in 1923, he was writing to a Mercedes-Benz car salesman in Munich about his next car, concerning the merits of the Benz 11/40 versus the larger 16/50. It was a grey 11/40 in which Hitler was driven away from Landsberg on his release in 1924.

It was in his next car – a super-charged Mercedes-Benz 15/70/100 – that Hitler was involved in an accident with a large truck in March 1930. The truck was completely wrecked while the large Mercedes suffered only minor damage. This prompted Hitler to remark: ‘It was then I decided to use only a Mercedes for the rest of my life.’

From 1930 onwards, Hitler was driven around in a Mercedes-Benz 770, also known as the Grosser Mercedes. Only 205 of these huge, luxury cars were manufactured with many of those being used by top-ranking Nazis.

Such was Hitler’s interest in cars, he arranged state sponsorship for Mercedes and Porsche (Auto Union) to participate in Grand Prix racing (today’s F1). So strong was the resulting financial support that German teams swept all before them between 1935 and 1939.

Security was always a great concern of Hitler and his entourage and his 770 was protected with bullet-proof windows and steel armor-plate built into all metal work. Wartime brought increased security fears, resulting in another Mercedes entering the German leader’s car collection. This was the heavily armored, six-wheel G4, the first off-road Mercedes, in which Hitler could safely parade through the streets of conquered lands.

As well as providing photographs of Hitler’s cars and the men who became his chauffeur, John Starkey lists the technical specifications of those cars, and describes many of the journeys undertaken by the German leader over the course of two dramatic decades.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Sep 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781399071420

Book preview

Chapter 1

Hitler’s Early Life and Cars, 1889–1921

There he stands, lips set in a grim, no-nonsense line under his toothbrush moustache. Like some Roman Emperor of old, he acknowledges the salutes and roars of approval from the adoring crowd as he passes by, with his backhanded acknowledgement of their cries of ‘Sieg Heil!’¹

A Roman emperor of old would have stood in a gold-plated chariot but Hitler’s chariot is a chrome-plated Grosser Mercedes, and he has not four, but two hundred and thirty horses to propel him.

In the old black and white photographs of him, we can clearly see that Hitler, in his customary uniform jacket, or, if the weather is perverse, his long black leather raincoat, is standing on a special platform built into the passenger seat of his open Mercedes-Benz open touring car. This allows him to see and be seen, as he waves his careless offhand right-handed salute to the crowd. Alongside him, his black cap clearly showing the skull and crossed bones badge of the SS, is his chauffeur, usually, particularly in the latter years of the Reich, the imperturbable Sturmbahnnführer Erich Kempka.²

Hitler loved parades. The bigger the cars, the more of them in the parade itself, the better. Just where did this leader of Germany, der Führer, originate?

Hitler had come from a middle class background. His father, Alois Schicklgruber, was illegitimate and he later on changed his name to Alois Hitler. That may have been the name of his real father. Alois was a customs official, a bureaucrat. Young Adolf had been born in a house in Braunau am Inn, near to Linz, Austria, in 1889. In 1892 the family moved to Passau, in Bavaria, Southern Germany. Two years later the family was back in Austria, in Leonding. A year later saw another move, to Hafeld, near to Lambach.

School at Fischlham beckoned but there were, apparently, ‘disciplinary problems’ which involved young Adolf, his father and the school. In 1897, Adolf is noted as having sung in a choir in Lambach before moving back to Leonding in 1899. Two years later, Hitler was at ‘Realschule’ in Linz, Austria, before moving school yet again in 1904 to Steyr, again in Austria. At the age of sixteen, he left school.

Hitler wanted to be an artist and in 1908 he moved to Vienna in order to take the entrance examination of the Vienna Academy of the Arts, but he failed it. Hitler’s mother, who he loved dearly, died of breast cancer in the same year and by 1909, after going through the money that his mother had left him, he was reduced to being a casual labourer, sleeping in homeless shelters or men’s dormitories in the Mariahilf district. To earn some extra money, he would paint and sell watercolours, helped by a friend who acted as his agent, one Reinhold Hanisch.³

By 1913, Hitler’s father had also died and Adolf received part of his father’s estate. More importantly where Hitler’s finances were concerned, his aunt Johanna in 1910 bequeathed him his inheritance, from her, of 2,000 crowns.⁴

On 13 May 1913, Hitler received orders from the Austrian military authorities to attend a medical examination prior to being drafted into the Austrian army to serve his compulsory military service. This was not something that Hitler wanted to do, if he was going to serve in any army, it would, by his choice, be the German army. He moved to Munich in Bavaria, Germany, on 24 May, in an attempt to escape this but the Austrian authorities tracked him down and on 18 January 1914 he was arrested in Munich, held in jail overnight and was in court the next day.

There he pleaded an inability to serve in the Austrian army due to frostbite that he had suffered while a labourer in Vienna. He was instructed to attend a medical examination at Salzburg on 5 February. The verdict of the doctor was: ‘Unfit for general and limited service; too weak. Graded as F-4.’

Back in Munich, Hitler carried on with his painting until 3 August 1914. Then, he can be clearly seen in a photograph, taken by Heinrich Hoffman (later on to become Hitler’s official photographer from 1922), among the crowd that had gathered in front of the city hall that day. That crowd was wildly cheering on the announcement of the outbreak of the First World War. Hitler enlisted in the Bavarian army, and on 16 August he joined the 6th Recruit Replacement Battalion of the 2nd Bavarian Infantry Regiment, number 16 (The List Regiment), after apparently petitioning King Ludwig III of Bavaria for permission for him to do so. Hitler was an Austrian by birth but was accepted into the German army.

Germany, as a country, was only forty-three years old in 1914. She had been formed by the actions of Otto von Bismarck, chief adviser to King Wilhelm of Prussia, in 1870, Prussia being the main state from which military officers and the estate-owning Junkers came. The other kingdoms, principalities, duchies and grand duchies that made up the new Germany numbered twenty-five, including Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg, to name some of the largest. In 1871, the new Germany had promptly gone to war with France and defeated it, absorbing Alsace-Lorraine as one of its spoils.

Hitler and his regiment were shipped to the Western Front in October 1914, after inadequate training. They took part in the murderous First Battle of Ypres in 1914. After this, Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross, second class, for his actions. He was also at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, where he was wounded by a shell fragment in his left thigh. Then he was present at the Battle of Arras in 1916 and at the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917. For most of the time, Hitler was a regimental runner, meaning that he took messages from the regiment’s headquarters, in Fournes-en-Weppes, a town in northern France far from the front-line trenches, to battalion headquarters, all behind the trench lines. He did not fight in the trenches. Nevertheless, Hitler was also awarded the Iron Cross, first class, on 4 August 1918. But he was only ever promoted to be a gefreiter, loosely equivalent to a squad leader/ lance corporal, not having even been promoted to full corporal.

On 8 October 1918, Hitler was blinded in a British mustard gas attack in Belgium and hospitalised. Whilst in hospital, he learned of Germany’s defeat and the acceptance of an armistice, signed on 11 November 1918. This news led to him suffering a second bout of blindness, this time psychosomatic. One doctor classified him as ‘a psychopath, with hysterical tendencies’. On 21 November, he was discharged from the Pasewalk Military Reserve Hospital, near to Stettin, and some days later he was back in Munich, still attached to the List Regiment, stationed at the Max II barracks on Oberwiesen Field.

By this time, the King of Bavaria had been deposed and Bavaria was now governed by a left-wing government, led by Kurt Eisner. Eisner was assassinated on 21 February 1919, by Count Anton Arco auf Valley, a former 2nd lieutenant in the German army with right-wing sympathies.⁵

Hitler and a few other men of his unit walked behind the coffin at Eisner’s funeral to show their respect. Hitler wore the black armband of mourning, but also the red armband of the socialist revolution that was about to take place in Munich. On 6 April, the Socialist Republic of Bavaria was proclaimed and Hitler was elected as a deputy battalion representative, liaising with the Department of Propaganda.

There is a reported story that during this time (February 1919), Hitler and another soldier were attacked by some 200 others after Hitler gave a speech in a gymnasium. A German-speaking Irishman, Michael Keogh, who was fighting with the Freikorps at the time, later reported that he and seven other men had broken up the fight and that: ‘The fellow with the moustache gave his name promptly: Adolf Hitler.’ We have no way of corroborating this story but it was reported in later years in Irish newspapers.⁶

The Bavarian Soviet Republic, a rival of the Socialist Republic, was put down by the Freikorps, who were a volunteer militia, mainly ex-army soldiers who re-joined the army to help put down left-wing insurrections. During the first week of May, some 606 people, both soldiers and civilians, were killed. Over 1,000 people were later tried and executed and the attempted communist domination of Bavaria was averted.

Hitler’s role in this mini revolution was shadowy but he probably informed his commanding officers as to who were the main leaders of the proclaimed Soviet Republic. While no proof has ever emerged, it seems likely that Hitler was acting as a double agent at this time, with his true allegiance being to the officers of the army, who commanded him and who were opposed to the new republic. It may have been at this juncture that Hitler’s hatred of communism, particularly Bolshevism, began. At this time, although a mere corporal, Hitler had an expense account and was allowed to wear civilian clothes. He had obviously impressed his superiors with his ability in gathering intelligence.

During the First World War, Hitler had never shown any signs of being anti-Semitic; indeed, there were several Jews in the List Regiment and there were no reports of them being treated badly by their comrades. It seems probable that Hitler, casting about after Germany’s defeat for a culprit, saw the people who financed the war, many of them being Jews, as the people responsible for Germany’s humiliation. In Southern Germany and Austria, there had long been a history of anti-Semitism. This, coupled with Hitler’s unfailing respect for the mainly right-leaning officers who commanded him during and after the war, led to his anti-Semitic and anti-communist leanings. These thoughts manifested themselves in his speeches of later years.

After this, Hitler remained in the army, being appointed as an intelligence/ propaganda agent of a reconnaissance unit in July 1919 under a Hauptmann (Captain) Karl Mayr. Hitler was sent by Mayr and his military intelligence superiors to anti-communist training courses and university seminars, which were financed by the military administration and the Thule Society. There are many rumours that this society was based on black magic and, certainly, the rituals and parades of the Nazi Party seem to show a love of ritual.

With his work on intelligence matters while in the army, Hitler had learned that the DAP, (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, German Workers’ Party) was also funded by the Thule Society, which had been formed in 1912. This was a lodge, based on Freemasonry and named the Order of Teutons. Its members were anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist, and several of them were also in positions of power and influence and some were very rich. A certain Rudolf Hess, later to become Hitler’s secretary, was a very active organiser for them. It was at this time that Hitler met many influential scholars and politicians, who were to come to his party’s help in the future.

Hitler, in his everyday work, gave talks about politics to soldiers and then, on 12 September 1919, and now a private first class in section Ib/P 4th Bavarian Reichswehr ‘Armed Forces’ Group HQ, he was assigned by Hauptmann Mayr to investigate the small DAP in Munich.⁷

The DAP had been formed on 5 January 1919 by Anton Drexler, with Dietrich Eckart, Karl Harrer and Gottfried Feder. Harrer was a member of the Thule Society, as were many early members of the DAP.

Hitler was so impressed by the DAP that he joined it, apparently on the orders of his army superiors. He was member number 555 – membership started with number 500 – and, on 12 September 1919, Hitler gave his first speech in public in the Leiber Room of the Sternecker beer hall in Munich. The main speaker that night was engineer Gottfried Feder, who talked about how Jews controlled lending capital. Feder was also a member of the Thule Society.

Straight away,