When he was five years old, Kevin Wheatcroft received an unusual birthday present from his parents: a bullet-pocked SS stormtrooper’s helmet, lightning bolts on the ear-flaps. He had requested it especially.
The next year, at a car auction in Monte Carlo, he asked his multimillionaire father for a Mercedes: the G4 that Hitler rode into the Sudetenland in 1938. Tom Wheatcroft refused to buy it and his son cried all the way home.
When Wheatcroft was 15, he spent birthday money from his grandmother on three second world war Jeeps recovered from the Shetlands, which he restored himself and sold for a tidy profit. He invested the proceeds in four more vehicles, then a tank. After Wheatcroft left school at 16, he went to work for a Leicestershire engineering firm, and then for his father’s construction company.
Kevin Wheatcroft at home in Leicestershire, where he keeps one of the largest collections of German military vehicles and Nazi memorabilia. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian
He spent his spare time touring wind-blasted battle sites in Europe and North Africa, searching for tank parts and recovering military vehicles that he would ship home to restore.
Wheatcroft is now 55, and according to the Sunday Times Rich List, worth £120m. He lives in Leicestershire, where he looks after the property portfolio of his late father and oversees the management of Donington Park Racetrack and motor museum (which he also owns).
The ruling passion of his life, though, is what he calls the Wheatcroft Collection – widely regarded as the world’s largest accumulation of German military vehicles and Nazi memorabilia. The collection has largely been kept in private, under heavy guard, either in the warren of industrial buildings Wheatcroft owns near Market Harborough, or at his homes in Leicestershire, the Charente in south-west France and the Mosel Valley in south-west Germany. There is no official record of the value of Wheatcroft’s collection, but some estimates place it at over £100m.
Wheatcroft is a large, quiet man and a legend in the blokey, Clarksonish world of online military history obsessives. Among the internet tribes of second world war enthusiasts, the Wheatcroft Collection is spoken about in hushed, reverential tones – a near-mythical trove of military treasures. Now Wheatcroft, who has long been reluctant to publicise his vast archive of Nazi artefacts, is guardedly opening up his hoard to a wider audience, launching a rather creaky website and putting a handful of vehicles on display at his motor museum.
Since that initial stormtrooper’s helmet, Wheatcroft’s life has been shaped by his obsession for German military memorabilia. He has travelled the world tracking down items to add to his collection, flying into remote airfields, following up unlikely leads, throwing himself into hair-raising adventures in the pursuit of historic objets.
He readily admits that his urge to accumulate has been monomaniacal, elbowing out the demands of friends and family. The French theorist Jean Baudrillard once noted that collecting mania is found most often in “pre-pubescent boys and males over the age of 40”; the things we hoard, he wrote, tend to reveal deeper truths.
Wheatcroft’s father, Tom, a building site worker from Castle Donington, came back from the second world war a hero. He also came back with a wife, Wheatcroft’s mother, Lenchen, whom he had first seen from the turret of a tank as he pulled into her village in the Harz mountains of Lower Saxony.
He made hundreds of millions in the post-war building boom, then spent the rest of his life indulging his zeal for motor cars. He ran Donington Park racetrack and counted Ayrton Senna and Jean Manuel Fangio among his drinking buddies. He had his own race team – Wheatcroft Racing – and built up the world’s largest collection of racing cars.
In his autobiography, Thunder in the Park, Tom Wheatcroft comes across as a tricky character, a cut-throat haggler and difficult husband. During the 1970s, Lenchen moved out of the family home for eight years after a period when Tom, in the bantery brogue of his memoir, “had not been quite so single-minded as far as my own family life was concerned”. Lenchen took Kevin and two of his sisters to live in nearby Market Harborough.
While there was, eventually, a reconciliation, Kevin spent the majority of his adolescence apart from his war-hero father. Tom supported his son in his early years of collecting; Wheatcroft speaks of his late father as “not just my dad, but also my best friend”. Tom died in 2009. Despite being one of seven children, Wheatcroft was the sole beneficiary of his father’s will. He no longer speaks to his siblings.
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