After Germany began rearming in 1933, the Wehrmacht recognized that it would need heavy haulers to tow large artillery pieces and act as tank recovery vehicles. Many companies built a variety half-tracked vehicles of various sizes, but the Sd.Kfz 9 20 ton heavy hauler built by FAMO (Fahrzeug- und Motorenbau GmbH) of Breslau, a truck and tractor manufacturer, was the largest built in Germany during the war. Although designed at a time when the largest German tank was the Panzer IV, it proved powerful enough to tow the Tiger and Panther heavy tanks. Around 2500 thousand were built during the course of the war, including a number outsourced to the Tatrawerkes in Czechoslovakia. FAMO were considered such an important military facility that entire factory was dismantled and evacuated south as the eastern front collapsed in 1945.
A wartime article from the Ringhoffer-Tatrawerkes on the production of Sd.Kfz 9s.
The dismantled FAMO plant was abandoned in Leipzig at the end of the war, where it was recovered by the Soviet Occupation Forces. Some designs and machinery were shipped to the Soviet Union as reparations, but FAMOs tractor and engine lines were rebuilt in East Germany. The Sd.Kfz 9 did not continue in the post-war period, but those that did survive the war were too useful to simply be abandoned or scrapped and some went on to long service lives as heavy haulers and mobile cranes. Crane and hauler company R & H Heydemann of Duisburg acquired two Sd.Kfz 9s for their fleet, where they gave sterling service well into the 1960s.
