On a more positive note, the Polish Campaign provided Germans with a supply of captured Polish armoured fighting vehicles, including the 7TP three-man light tank and the TK series of two-man tankettes for light reconnaissance. These were locally produced versions of the British Vickers tanks and tankettes. The 7TP light tank was the Polish army’s main battle tank and some 170 were in service as of September 1939.
On 11th September 1939 Adolf Hitler’s order stated that military equipment was to he collected from the battlefields and moved to special collection points. Captured 7TPs were designated as Panzerkampfwagen 7TP 731(p), while TK-3s were designated as Leichte Panzerkampfwagen TK(p), TKS as Leichte Panzerkampfwagen TKS(p) and C2P as Artillerie Schlepper C2P(p).
During the course of the campaign the 5th Panzer Division had actually pressed captured TK series tankettes into service, while the 1st Panzer Division also used a few captured 7TP tanks. The 1st Panzer Regiment’s 4th Company’s commander, Second Lieutenant Fritz Kraemer, is known to have used one of them after his own machine was disabled. It remained in the original Polish camouflage scheme hastily painted with white crosses on the sides of the turret along with the number ‘400’ representing command tank of 4th Company.
On 5th October 1939 a grand Victory Parade took place in Warsaw and a small number (probably eighteen) captured 7TPs now belonging to the 203rd Panzer Abteilung stationed in Spala were presented to Adolf Hitler. A single captured 7TP, with its frontal armour plate penetrated by a 20mm anti-tank projectile, was displayed during the Leipzig International Fair in March 1940.
Following the Polish campaign, captured tankettes were repaired in the workshops in Warsaw and then pressed into service by Wehrmacht units stationed in the General Government of Poland. In 1940 two platoons of TKS tankettes were certainly part of a light Panzer company. In Warsaw a number of captured 7TPs were used as headquarters tanks in 1939/40, probably with 203rd Panzer Abteilung. In 1940 this unit was moved to Norway and later to France. A number of 7TPs anil TKS tankettes took part in the 1st anniversary of the General Government parade in Warsaw on 6th October 1940. Afterwards 7TPs were used for internal policing duties and later on as artillery tractors.
In Germany there was jubilation and a sense of restored national pride. The nation’s virile leader acquired new prestige and laurels from the fatherland, and the Third Reich felt that it was entering into a glorious new world of its own making.
A command version of the Panzer I photographed in August 1941. These vehicles were clearly redundant at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Only Hitler’s brinkmanship forced an unwelcome and unexpected war on the Panzerwaffe which meant that these unsuitable machines would see action in the Russian campaign.