COBI Horch830BK Cabriolet - Limited Edition Set 2271

COBI's Horch 830 BK Cabriolet Limited Edition is a 1:35 model built from 302 blocks, 12 cm long. This edition adds printed hubcaps, a black brick display stand with a laser-engraved plate carrying the vehicle name and an individual edition number, a certificate signed by hand by COBI's president, and a figure of Erich Ludendorff. All markings are printed.

Who the figure is

Worth knowing before you build it, because the name will mean nothing to many buyers and a great deal to others.

Erich Ludendorff was the German general who, with Hindenburg, effectively ran Germany's war effort from 1916 to 1918. He was a genuinely capable commander — Tannenberg, the 1918 spring offensives — and in the autumn of 1918 he was the man who told the government the war was lost and it must seek an armistice.

He then spent the rest of his life denying he had said it. Ludendorff became the most prominent promoter of the Dolchstoßlegende, the stab-in-the-back myth: the claim that the German army had been undefeated in the field and betrayed by politicians, socialists and Jews at home. It was false, he knew it was false, and it did more damage to the Weimar Republic than any other single idea.

He marched beside Hitler in the Munich putsch of 1923, stood as a presidential candidate in 1925 and was humiliated at the polls, and then quarrelled with the Nazi movement and withdrew into occultism. He died in 1937.

COBI has put him in a box with a car. The figure is historically legitimate — he existed, he was driven about in vehicles like this — and the reason to say who he was is that a collector should not have to look him up.

The car

Horch was founded in Zwickau at the start of the twentieth century and built expensive, well-engineered cars. The 830 luxury saloon of 1933 sold well enough to spawn variants: the shortened 830 BK in this set, and the long-wheelbase 830 BL — the model General de Gaulle used, which COBI makes as sets 2260 and 2261.

Specifications

Pieces: 302 · Figures: 1 · Scale: 1:35 · Numbered plate and signed certificate
Model dimensions: 12 × 6 cm (4.7 × 2.4 in)