WHEN he was 5, Kevin Wheatcroft received an unusual birthday present from his parents: a bullet-pocked SS stormtrooper’s helmet. He had requested it especially.

    The next year, at a car auction in Monte Carlo, Morocco, he asked his multi-millionaire 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.

    Kevin Wheatcroft is now 55, and according to the Sunday Times Rich List, worth £120 million (US$189 million). He lives in Leicestershire, Britain, where he looks after his late father’s property portfolio 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 private, under heavy guard, in industrial buildings Wheatcroft owns near Market Harborough, or at his homes in Leicestershire, southwest France and southwest Germany. There is no official valuation, but some estimates put the worth at more than £100 million.

    Among the Internet tribes of World War II enthusiasts, the Wheatcroft Collection is spoken about as a near-mythical trove. Now he is guardedly opening it up to a wider audience, launching a rather creaky website and putting a handful of vehicles on display at his motor museum.

    Wheatcroft’s father, Tom, a building site worker from Castle Donington, returned from World War II a hero. He also came back with a wife, Wheatcroft’s mother, Lenchen, whom he had first seen from a tank turret as he pulled into her village in Lower Saxony.

    Tom, who died in 2009, made millions in the post-war building boom, then spent the rest of his life indulging his zeal for motor cars.

    Exact figures are hard to come by, but the annual global turnover of the market for Nazi memorabilia is estimated to be in excess of £30 million. The trade is either banned or strictly regulated in Germany, France, Austria, Israel and Hungary. No major auction house will handle Nazi memorabilia and neither will eBay.

    Still, the business flourishes, with interest from buyers in Russia, America and the Middle East.

    “I want people to see this stuff,” Wheatcroft said. “There’s no better way to understand history. But I’m only one man and there’s so much of it.”

    He recently purchased two more barns and a dozen shipping containers to house his collection.

    “Every object has a story,” Wheatcroft said. He owns a squadron of 88 tanks — more than the Danish and Belgian armies combined.

    “Everyone assumes I’m a spoilt rich kid who wants to indulge in these toys,” he said. “It’s not like that at all. My dad supported me, but only when I could prove that the collection would work financially.”(SD-Agencies)