I bought this model a while ago as i heard only good things about the kit and i wanted to add the first German heavy tank to my collection. I´m very impressed by the kit, its fantastic. It simply falls together, level of detail is great and compared to the Trumpeter Neubaufahrzeug it is also more accurate. I can highly recommend the kit although it is quite expensive. The decision to build a diorama for this tank showing it in Norway was made when i was reading the novel "Nacht über Narvik" (engl. "Night over Narvik) by Karl Hans, I realized that i haven´t made a model or diorama related to the Norway campaign before and wanted to change that. The diorama shows one of the few Neubaufahrzeug tanks deployed in Norway in April 1940. They landed in Oslo and advanced north. The tank i showed is standing on a muddy path nearby the city of Kvam, later it was nocked out in the city by a 25mm Hotchkiss AT gun, the commander and drive got killed. Few remainings of this tank are displayed in a museum in Kvam today. I painted the model with Revell acrylic paints only, black oil paint and odourless turpentine were used for the wash. The mud on the tank and diorama is made out of earth from my garden, wood glue and Woodland Scenics "water effects". Apart from rust pigments on the exhaust pipes i used no pigments at all, instead i used earth and several brown acrylic washes to get the muddy look. The German Neubaufahrzeug series of tank prototypes were a first attempt to create a heavy tank for the Wehrmacht after Adolf Hitler had come to power. Multi-turreted, heavy and slow, they did not fit in with the Blitzkrieg tactics and therefore only five were made. These were primarily used for propaganda purposes, though three took part in the Battle of Norway in 1940. Though these tanks were never placed in production, they provided a propaganda tool for Nazi Germany, for example being shown at the International Automobile Exposition in Berlin in 1939. This propaganda role was extended with the German invasion of Norway, when a special Panzerabteilung was formed which took the three armored prototypes with them to Oslo. They saw some combat there, with one being blown up by German engineers when it got stuck in swamps near Åndalsnes. To replace it, one of the mild steel prototypes was used. It is unclear what happened to the tanks after the Norway campaign, but none of them survived the war. The surviving vehicles were ordered scrapped in 1941, which took place in 1942 according to documents captured by the British in 1945. The dates upon which the vehicles were scrapped are unclear, but it is thought that the beginning of the construction of the Sturer Emil prototypes dates from the same time. All that survives of these tanks is a small number of running gear parts, preserved in the Gudbrandsdal Krigsminnesamling (Gudbrandsdal War Memorial collection), at Kvam in Norway. (Wikipedia) This Wikipedia entry is quite vague, we actually know that the remaining Neubaufahrzeug tanks were used in Russia 1941 and got destroyed there pretty quickly. Unfortunately we have only few pictures of this period, but combat reports of Germans and Soviets. I don´t own the rights for the music in this video. Music: "Briefing 2" from the game "Codname Panzers: Phase One"

• published: 02 Nov 2013
• views: 1370