#20
Post
by Bill Murray » 30 Mar 2004, 01:10
Larrister:
Sad about the Benz. Looks like no seat belts resulted in a couple of heads cracking the windscreens.
The Buessing Nag is really cute, but I cannot ID it. Never seen anything like it. I suspect it is late twenties early thirties though.
As to vehicle conscription, I have a lot of information but nothing that ties the whole thing together. The impression that I have formed, not official by any means, is more or less as follows.
Passenger cars: In Germany and most likely all occupied countries, these were fair game. There was a war on and people just had to understand that the fairly robust cars of the day were ideal for umbau or kubel conversion or could be used as found.
Light commercial vehicles: Probably not so bad in Germany as they tried for a long time to maintain a "normal" distribution of goods/food/medicines throughout the country. Not so good in the occupied countries who were left to rely on other forms of transport such as horses and waggons.
Medium to heavy commercial vehicles: Seem to have been least affected in Germany and in the occupied countries to depend on age, scarcity of parts for limited production vehicles etc. Also, a lot of the heavies were not real good for military use.
Tractors (Zug) seem to have been conscripted quite heavily whether in Germany or the occupied countries.
In terms of volumes, it was an incredible amount of machinery. I would suspect 10s of thousands of vehicles in total, bearing in mind that Germany conquered virtually all of Western Europe which is where most of the suitable vehicles were located.
Hopefully, someone will be able to document this part of history for us.
Almost all of the conscripted vehicle photos I have in my collection have a license/number plate on them whether it be WH, WL, WM or whichever.
Given the German mind set about everything will be documented, they must have somewhere in a dusty archive records of what was conscripted and what plate was assigned to the vehicle along with a description of the vehicle and from whom it was taken.
Anyone want to search for that batch of records?????
Bill
