http://www.thelocal.de/society/20080302-10441.html
SOFIA (AFP) - Bulgaria is to auction off World War II Panzer tanks thought to be worth millions of dollars, the country's defence ministry said Thursday.
"People from all over the world, from America to Jordan, have declared an interest in these rare German tanks," the deputy director of Sofia's military history museum, Blagoy Milenov, told a press conference.
Six Panzer IV tanks will go under the hammer on March 19 "to gauge their value," with another 41 going on the market in May, according to Emil Petrov, a defence ministry heritage official.
A Russian collector has already offered five million leva (2.5 million euros, 3.6 million dollars) to buy one such model held by the museum, Milenov has said.
Eight of the best-preserved have been recovered by the museum with some set to be exchanged with German counterparts. Parts from among the most dilapidated have been used in restoration of the auction lot.
Most of Bulgaria's tanks were smelted down, Petrov said, adding that 2,500 Soviet-era models were destroyed between 2006 and 2007.
The former communist regime intentionally buried others on its frontier with Turkey, which was a member of the rival North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The tanks acted as a Cold War line of defence should NATO forces attack.
After the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, these tanks and their adjacent bunkers were eventually forgotten by the army, but not by the looters. They moved in to strip and sell the guns, hatches, even whole turrets for scrap -- a lucrative business in cash-hungry Bulgaria.