Rare Mercedes-Benz 540 K from 1939 will be put up for auction (19 photos)

The extremely controversial personality of the first owner makes the car even more attractive in the eyes of collectors. The auction is scheduled for August 16-17, and the estimated price of the Field Marshal's Mercedes-Benz 540 K is listed within the range of 500-700 thousand US dollars.





The car is very famous, so it makes sense to cover only its long history, since the fate of almost every one of the 419 MB 540 K cars manufactured by the company has been meticulously tracked by enthusiasts of the brand. The example with chassis number 408420 in question was assembled in Sindelfingen in 1939 by order of the Deputy Reichsmarschall Goering Erhard Milch and was handed over to him on November 6 of that year.

To a certain extent, Milch (1892–1972) can be considered unique among the military-political elite of the Third Reich, if only because he was half Jewish and had a dizzying career in the Luftwaffe, rising from colonel to colonel general in five years, and in 1940 he received the rank of field marshal general.

Sent to prison by the victors in 1945, Milch lost not only his freedom, but also his own vehicle fleet. However, his 540 remained in Europe and was not taken to the USSR as a trophy, like many other cars and motorcycles. Thanks to this, many years later, the MB 540 K was restored for a private collector, Count Hartenburg from Baden, who had acquired it in an abandoned state somewhere in the late 1960s.

Experienced Swiss coachbuilder and restorer Walter Köng from Basel converted the original Cabriolet B body into a sporty Cabriolet A without a rear seat and additional side windows, which, in combination with the sloping windshield, made the soft top line shorter and lower when raised, and the silhouette itself more graceful.

After Hartenburg's death, the Mercedes was sold to Coys auction house in Kensington, London, and in May 1991 it ended up in the hands of Fred Kemp, an architect and developer from St. Louis, Missouri. In the following years, the magnificent roadster in burgundy with a cream interior collected awards at the Meadow Brook Concours d'Elegance, Amelia Island Concours d'Elegance and Cincinnati Concours d'Elegance competitions, until Kemp's death in 2015 led to another change of ownership, which became millionaire and classic car enthusiast Donald Davis from Fort Worth, Texas.

The name of the new owner of the 85-year-old car will be announced at the Gooding & Company auction, which will be held as part of the Pebble Beach Automobile Beauty Concours in the USA on August 16-17.