So picture that you just
snagged up a car for, let’s say $3,800, and it is a great car that you
completely fall in love with. A year later, you find out that the car
was illegally seized according to a court ruling and you have to hand
the car over to the heirs of its original owner. You’d be pretty upset,
right? Well, add three zeros to that price and you that exact situation
unfolding in Germany.
A Dutch car collector purchased a 1935 Mercedes-Benz
500K Roadster from RM Auctions last year for a whopping $3.8 million in
California. When the collector shipped the car back to Germany, the
German government seized the car stating that it was illegally taken by
an American military official around 1945 and shipped to the U.S., as
the heirs of the pricy automobile are claiming that the American
serviceman stole the vehicle and hid it in the U.S.
Typically,
Germany has a 30-year statute of limitation on this sort of case, but a
German court stated that since the car was not in Germany for 30 years,
the limitation clock never started, which is an odd interpretation of
statute of limitations laws. The strangest thing is that between 1945
and 1970, no one has any idea where the car was and what was being done
with it, so there is technically no proof that the car was not in
Germany, and we find the ruling a little off the wall.
We
certainly hope that the buyer can recoup at least a majority of the
$3.8 million he used to purchase the car from the seller. Also, there
has to be some U.S. law on the books that puts RM Auctions on the hook
for selling a car with a shady and undocumented past that just may cost
the collector millions of dollars.
One thing’s for
sure, if this car wasn’t worth $3.7 million, we are willing to bet that
the heirs couldn’t have cared less about getting back the property…
We’ll keep you updated as this story progresses.
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