< Bulgaria to Auction WWII Nazi Tanks

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Heard on Morning Edition

March 20, 2008 - STEVE INSKEEP, host:

Bulgaria is preparing to auction off a piece of European military history. It's been lying forgotten and half-buried in the ground for decades. Collectors of vintage military vehicles are already lining up to bid on some of more than 40 Nazi German tanks. Those tanks were once used to protect Bulgaria's southern border. That was during the Cold War.

NPR's Ivan Watson reports.

IVAN WATSON: Sunset in the rolling farmland of Bulgaria's southern border with Turkey.

(Soundbite of sheep)

WATSON: Sixty-year-old Piotr Dmitrov is on horseback, herding a flock of sheep past a hilltop where a half-dozen rusting tank cannons poke out from between the weeds.

Mr. PIOTR DMITROV: (Foreign language spoken)

WATSON: The tanks have been there since I was a child. They're from the Germans, Dmitrov says. The government used to make us practice shooting the guns in case the Turks invaded.

In the dark days of the Cold War, communist Bulgaria fortified this border with NATO's Turkey by embedding scores of Soviet and Nazi tanks in a network of concrete bunkers. The bunkers have been abandoned for years.

I'm walking now down concrete steps that are littered with twigs and old leaves into what was a bunker here. It's pitch black as I step in here and there's a shaft of light coming down. And I can see up, I'm looking up into it now, into the turret of a tank gun that was half buried in the ground here with the cannon facing towards Turkey.

In 2004, Bulgaria joined the NATO alliance. The old German panzers were left rusting and all but forgotten. That is, until this month, when the Bulgarian government suddenly announced it was unearthing the vehicles and selling them in an auction.

Blagoy Milenov is the deputy director of Bulgaria's National Museum of Military History.

Mr. BLAGOY MILENOV (National Museum of Military History): (Through translator) We see much more interest in the tanks today after one of the most valuable vehicles was stolen. This tank had an inscription, proving it was a gift from Adolph Hitler to the queen of Bulgaria.

WATSON: Milenov says Hitler's tank mysteriously disappeared sometime last fall. In December, Bulgarian authorities arrested two German citizens and a Bulgarian army officer and accused them of stealing the tank and somehow smuggling it out of the country.

Mr. THOMAS GMEINER (Museum Curator): No, they have no proof, nothing. It's just talking...

WATSON: Thomas Gmeiner is one of the German defendants in the case. He runs a private tank museum in Germany, which has a collection of more than 60 mostly World War II-era tanks.

Gmeiner denies stealing the tank and fought the charges against him in a Bulgarian court. But then he fled the country last month. He spoke by telephone from Germany.

So are you a wanted man here in Bulgaria now?

Mr. GMEINER: Now, at the moment in Bulgaria, yes.

WATSON: You are wanted for stealing tanks right now.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. GMEINER: Yes, it's very funny.

WATSON: This week the Bulgarian government was supposed to hold an auction for some of the remaining Nazi tanks. But at the last minute the auction was postponed.

Blagoy Milenov of the military museum says the Bulgarians realized the starting prices of the vehicles were far too low.

Mr. MILENOV: (Through translator): Collectors are prepared to pay inappropriately large amounts of money for these valuable pieces of military heritage.

WATSON: Milenov calls the tanks a historical goldmine, but for some other Bulgarians, they were more of a playground.

(Soundbite of sheep)

WATSON: At this sheep farm near the border, 25-year-old Ivan Zheliaskov says he grew up playing on the tanks near his childhood home.

Mr. IVAN ZHELIASKOV: For me this is normal, when I see the tank.

WATSON: Zheliaskov is a border guard now who's protecting the Bulgarian frontier from a very different threat - economic migrants from the Middle East and Africa, who are desperate to smuggle themselves illegally into Bulgaria and the much wealthier European Union.

Mr. ZHELIASKOV: Dangerous is the people from Iraq, from Iran, want - here want to come many people. This is the problem.

WATSON: Illegal immigration is a 21st century challenge for Bulgaria that even modern-day tanks cannot solve.

Ivan Watson, NPR News, Mernitze(ph), Bulgaria.

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