Neighbor Kristin Schroeder told the local Kieler Nachrichten newspaper that the man had even fired up the tank during the particularly bad winter of 1978-79 and helped plow others’ snow.

“It was well known, at least to all the older Kitzebergers, that he had a tank,” Schroeder said.

Plowing snow with a Panzer. Thats like Mr. Rogers lighting your kids birthday candles with napalm.

I know that every so often little leftovers from WW2 turn up in peoples posession over there…just recently some grandma passed on and the family found her issued Sten gun tucked away. In Russia, there are groups that go into the forests specifically to find old WW2 relica, dig them up, get them running, and sell them illegally. In Germany, it seems every time they dig a subway tunnel they find something interesting.

Point is, guns last a long time…and they can fall to apretty crappy state and still be restored enough to go bang with some reliability. As something of a collector, my ears always perk up when I hear about someone’s aged grandpa or uncle passing away and the kids going through his mountain of ‘stuff from WW2 or Korea’.

I suspect that this article is mostly a guy who had some awesome toys from WW2 and somehow, inadvertently, got on the wrong side of the law when something wasn’t dewatted 100% he way the rules called for. Look at ATFE’s guides on dewatting a gun and you can see it’s changed quite a bit from the old days when filling the barrel with lead was pretty much all you needed to do. There are quite a few machineguns on the registry that were ‘re-watted’ from guns that had been dewatted in the earlier, easier, manner.