The Kaiser's Panzers: German Tanks of The First World War

by David Mitchelhill-Green

The Kaiser’s Panzers charts the development of German armoured vehicles during the First World War. Late to adopt the tank as an offensive weapon, in a theatre characterized by bloody trench warfare, the Imperial German Army’s fledgling tank force fielded only twenty A7V tanks by the time of the November 1918 Armistice. To address this shortcoming, the German Army pressed more captured British Mark IV tanks into service through a dedicated workshop facility in Belgium during the final year of the war. A handful of these vehicles later saw service in the Freikorps to suppress left-wing uprisings in Berlin and Leipzig.

Although German tanks played an insignificant part in the conflict, two early commanders rose to prominence in the Third Ernest Volckheim a leading interwar armour theorist and later Panzer commander; Josef ‘Sepp’ Dietrich a SS Panzer general implicated in the 1945 Malmedy massacre.

Drawing on contemporary records, newsreels and newspaper accounts, The Kaiser’s Panzers is a heavily illustrated record of Germany’s first tanks, the predecessor force to Adolf Hitler’s vaunted Panzertruppen, and will be enjoyed by all military history enthusiasts.

272 pages, Paperback

Published January 8, 2026