Where the hell did the Krokodil come from?

Hello warriors,

it's been a while since the Jagdpanzer E-100 "Krokodil" appeared on World of Tanks forums as the tier 10 German TD candidate. Sure, it looks good but it has one serious problem: it's a fake. Today Yuri Pasholok will explain where the hell did this fake come from.

As many other "German designs" (such as the E90 and E79) the "Krokodil" (the name is made up as well of course) is a fake started by artists on the internet. Internet in general allowed many German lovers to crawl out of woodwork and to start producing imaginary German designs. There is however one organization especially to blame - oddly enough it's French and it is a publishing company called Caractere. Caractere from Marseille is chock full of nazi lovers and is known for promoting some of the most outrageous wehraboo crap that you can read. They just love their nazis - the first number of the military magazine "Batailles & Blindés" was for example dedicated to Tiger, second to Rommel, third to Blitzkrieg in the USSR, fourth to Grossdeutschland, fifth to Jagdtiger, sixth had articles about Theodor Eicke (the commander of Waffen SS Totenkopf division) and so on.



It is thus no wonder that in the November of 2007 one issue of the above mentioned magazine had an article about "Krokodil" in it. The drawings of the article were made by Hubert Cance (infamous author of fake drawings) who became the main drawing artist of this publishing company (how surprising).

First variant he drew was the 12,8cm variant and it's completely made up by Cance:

Second variant has a 17cm K 18 gun - there is a grain of truth in that as the Germans really wanted to build a 17cm SPG on Tiger-Maus chassis but it was a different gun and the look is completely made up:

And then there's the French article itself:

It's one huge pile of crap and if you speak French, you can seriously have a great laugh at it. So, this is basically where the Krokodil legend came from. Fake crap from Caractere production will probably keep on appearing for years to come and in this sense it "catches up" to Wargaming in disseminating fake tanks (WT E-100, GW E-100) and passing them off as real.