Since then, it has demilitarised over 16,000 military vehicles, including 800 U.S. Battle Tank Dismantling, now a 32 person company, grew out of a business founded in 1991 that decommissioned tanks from former Communist East Germany. The other scrap material is piled up outside the warehouse and eventually recycled. The engines, which are quickly sold off to German engineering and electronics companies, are the most valuable spare parts. With three workers paired to a single tank, the entire dismantling process takes around two to three days-much of which is done by hand. At any given time, there are around three tanks being dismantled in two adjacent warehouses. With seemingly endless neat rows of green tanks, Koch's team of around a dozen technical labourers have plenty to do. Koch's firm buys the tanks from private German defence manufacturers Rheinmetall and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, as well as from the German Armed Forces, or Bundeswehr. Other parts go back to the manufacturers or the defence ministry but the majority of it disappears in the blast furnace," said Peter Koch, managing director of the company. This means they are used for scrap metal. "Most of the tanks here are being recycled. The 1970s "Marder" combat tanks are the latest batch set to be destroyed by Battle Tank Dismantling GmbH Koch, a firm that disassembles old German military vehicles. History question! To receive notification whenever any new item is published on HistoryNet, just scroll down the column on the right and sign up for our RSS feed.Nestled in the rolling, green farmland of Germany's eastern state of Thuringia, over 300 former West German battle tanks are parked idly in an expansive scrap yard. The German 88’s ability to kick butt may have been legendary, but so were those of Richard Coeur de Lion at an earlier time.ĭon’t miss the next Ask Mr.
New explosive reactive armour, which explodes against the incoming shell that activates it to counter its effects, makes it unlikely that a conventional 88mm shell would penetrate the hide of an M1 Abrams, a T-80, a Merkava or, for that matter, a Challenger, all of which are armoured to resist the sort of 120mm to 125mm SABOT or HEAT rounds that they themselves fire using various advanced guidance systems. I was a “war baby” and over the years I have everyone praising the power of the Nazi German “88” gun when used against Allied tanks, etc. Just as a matter of interest, how would a modern, say, Abrams tank with all its much vaunted armoured protection fare if struck by one of these huge shells?Īside from the fact that we and the Germans have not been trading shots since May 1945, the state of the art of armoured-or armored, as we spell it over here-warfare has changed considerably since then.
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