Sd.Kfz. 101 Panzerkampfwagen I Ausf. A — Leichter Panzer

Where it all began.

Before the Tigers. Before the Panthers. Before Kursk, before Normandy, before any of it — there was this.

The Panzer I was never supposed to fight a war. It was a training vehicle — a way to teach a rebuilt German Army how to operate armor after Versailles had stripped them of everything. Two machine guns. Thin armor. A two-man crew crammed into a hull the size of a small car.

Then Spain happened.

Germany sent Panzer Is to fight alongside Franco's Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, and for the first time since 1918, German armor saw combat. The lessons learned in Spain — about combined arms, about close air support, about what tanks could do when you concentrated them instead of spreading them across the infantry line — became the foundation of Blitzkrieg.

By September 1939, the Panzer I Ausf. A was rolling into Poland in large numbers. It was outgunned by almost everything it faced, but it was there. The genesis. The proof of concept. The tank that made the Panzerwaffe real before the big cats ever existed.

Every Tiger, every Panther, every Panzer IV that came after owes its doctrine to the crews who figured it out in these tiny, undergunned, overmatched machines.

What you're building:

• 565 pieces in 1:28 scale
• 3 crew figures included
• The compact Panzer I silhouette — twin MG 13 machine gun turret, riveted hull, that unmistakable early-war profile
• The first Panzerkampfwagen to enter serial production and see combat in large numbers
• The perfect bookend to the Maus — the beginning and the end of the Panzer lineage, side by side on your shelf