A signed copy of Mein Kampf goes for around $31,000. Despite the trade of Nazi antiquities being banned or strictly regulated in many countries, the market’s annual global turnover is expected to be in excess of $47 million. The French theorist Jean Baudrillard once noted that collecting mania is found most often in “pre-pubescent boys and males over the age of 40” the things we hoard, he wrote, tend to reveal deeper truths. He readily admits that his urge to accumulate has been monomaniacal, elbowing out the demands of friends and family. He has travelled the world tracking down items to add to his collection, flying into remote airfields, following up unlikely leads, throwing himself into hair-raising adventures in the pursuit of historic objects. Since that initial stormtrooper’s helmet, Wheatcroft’s life has been shaped by his obsession for German military memorabilia. Underground trade Wheatcroft’s collection is estimated to be worth over $160 million. There is no official record of the value of Wheatcroft’s collection, but some estimates place it at over $160 million. The collection has largely been kept in private, under heavy guard, in a warren of industrial buildings. The ruling passion of his life, though, is what he calls the Wheatcroft Collection - widely regarded as the world’s largest accumulation of German military vehicles and Nazi memorabilia. He lives in Leicestershire, England, where he looks after the property portfolio of his late father and oversees the management of a racetrack and motor museum. Wheatcroft is now 55, and worth $190 million. He spent his spare time touring wind-blasted battle sites in Europe and North Africa, searching for tank parts and recovering military vehicles that he would ship home to restore. Getty ImagesĪfter Wheatcroft left school at 16, he went to work for an engineering firm, and then for his father’s construction company.
Wheatcroft asked his father to buy him Hitler’s G4 when he was just six-years-old, and cried when his father said no. Hitler rides in a Mercedes convertible in 1935. He invested the proceeds in four more vehicles, then a tank. When Wheatcroft was 15, he spent birthday money from his grandmother on three WWII Jeeps recovered from the Shetlands, which he restored himself and sold for a tidy profit. Tom Wheatcroft refused to buy it and his son cried all the way home. The next year, at a car auction in Monte Carlo, he asked his multimillionaire father for a Mercedes: the G4 that Hitler rode into the Sudetenland in 1938. When he was 5 years old, Kevin Wheatcroft received an unusual birthday present from his parents: a bullet-pocked SS stormtrooper’s helmet, lightning bolts on the ear-flaps.
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