Where Are The Last Surviving Jagdtiger Tanks Now

On May 5, 1945, three days before the war in Europe ended, three German tank destroyers drove out of the Nibelungenwerk in Austria and went looking for someone to surrender to. Each weighed about 73 tons and carried a 12.8 cm gun on a barrel seven metres long. Near the village of Strengberg they met a roadblock, stopped, and handed themselves over. Soviet troops then welded the place name and the date onto the front armour of one of them. That inscription is still there, and so is the vehicle. The Jagdtiger was the heaviest armoured fighting vehicle to see combat in the Second World War. Germany ordered 150 and built fewer than 90. Only three survive anywhere in the world. In this video, we trace what happened to all three. We cover the design that made the Jagdtiger nearly invulnerable from the front and almost unusable in the field, from the 250 mm casemate armour and the 4,000-metre gunner's sight to the ten degrees of gun traverse that forced the driver to pivot the whole hull and wrecked transmissions doing it. We follow the two battalions that ever took it into battle, the one engagement at Auenheim where it worked exactly as designed, and the week in March 1945 when one battalion's operational strength collapsed from 38 vehicles to 2 without a major battle being fought. We look at Otto Carius's own verdict on the machine, Albert Ernst's filmed surrender at Iserlohn, and finally the three survivors themselves: the trials vehicle at Bovington that may never have fired at an enemy, the combat veteran blown up by its own crew that then stood outdoors in Maryland for 65 years, and the last-week factory runner outside Moscow with its own surrender date burned into its armour. 🔔 Subscribe so you don't miss the next one 🔔 Chapters: 0:00 Three Tanks Looking For Someone To Surrender To 0:55 What The Jagdtiger Was 2:26 Why So Few Were Built 5:01 The Two Battalions 6:22 Destroyed By Their Own Crews 7:35 Carius And Ernst 8:48 The Iserlohn Surrender 9:33 Survivor One: Bovington 11:26 Survivor Two: Fort Benning 12:01 Survivor Three: Kubinka 12:56 Closing The three surviving vehicles are chassis 305004, the only one left with Porsche suspension, at The Tank Museum in Bovington, Dorset; chassis 305020, the wartime "331" of Heavy Panzerjäger Battalion 653, at the U.S. Army Armor & Cavalry Collection at Fort Benning, Georgia; and chassis 305083 in the Liberation pavilion at Patriot Park, Kubinka, outside Moscow. Bovington's is on permanent public display. Kubinka's is open Tuesday to Sunday. The Fort Benning vehicle sits in a closed bay and is only visible on the collection's scheduled open house days, which are announced by the National Armor & Cavalry Heritage Foundation. Sources: The Tank Museum, Bovington (chassis 305004 history, capture near Paderborn, Porsche suspension) Panzerplace (Haustenbeck trials, the February 1945 bogie failure, shipment to Britain) Patriot Park / Russian Ministry of Defence (the welded inscription, current display) Tank Encyclopedia (production figures, survivor chassis numbers) Panzerworld (production and specification tables) Lone Sentry (surviving Jagdtiger inventory) Tank Archives (Otto Carius interview) National Armor & Cavalry Heritage Foundation (Fort Benning collection and public access) Otto Carius, Tigers in the Mud (travel lock, gun traverse, assault gun quotes) Jentz & Doyle, Panzer Tracts No. 9 (production data) Karlheinz Münch, Combat History of German Heavy Anti-Tank Unit 653 (Auenheim, readiness figures)