Get This: Buy the Car Hitler Cruised In

A very rare 1939 Auto Union D-Type racecar is being put up for auction in August, and it’s expected to snag a lot of money – like 5.5 million British pounds, which is more than 9 million real dollars.  Why such making of rain?  Because the car was owned by Adolf Hitler, a man who appreciated fast cars, chaste women, and very specific hair/eye color combinations.

Driven by the Führer’s friend Hans Stuck in the 1939 Grand Prix racing season, it is one of only three D-types known to exist – and was lost behind the Iron Curtain for 50 years.

Hitler liked auto races because he hoped to show off to the rest of the world the superiority of German cars driven by white people.  More pictures of Hitler’s pussewagen, ATJ.

After 50 years missing, this one was found by an American collector and restored by a British firm.  

When the Red Army overran Berlin at the end of the war, all Silver Arrows cars were immediately shipped back to the NAMI motor research institute in Moscow to be reverse-engineered: a brutal process that destroyed almost all of them, one being chopped in half to serve as a trailer for an apparatchik’s car. 

Nobody knew this chassis – number 19 – had survived, until American car enthusiast Paul Karassik tracked it down, adding an original engine from a separate D-type carcass and handing it over to British Silver Arrow specialists Crosthwaite and Gardiner to restore to its original form. 

Some more fun facts: this car, built 70 years ago, has a 485 hp V-12 engine, and tops out at over 200 mph.  And Hitler’s pet driver Hans Stuck?  Well, when the German racing team offered his spot to someone else, the SS paid them a visit and Hans Stuck was back on the team!

Source: The Daily Mail, which has no less than 4 Hitler jokes in the headline and lede of the article before the main text even begins.