The vehicle is the German sibling of the American MBT-70 program, born from the 1963 cooperation agreement between West Germany and the United States. To this day, it remains a cautionary tale of how not to develop a tank and while it was certainly not the only blunder in American or German armor-designing history, it is one of the best known ones.

To that end, the United States and West Germany signed a cooperation agreement in August 1963, followed by a December 1963 agreement between the companies that were to make the intent a reality. The joint-developed tank that was the object of this agreement was supposed to be fielded in 1970, resulting in the name of the program – MBT-70 for the American side and Kampfpanzer 70 for the German one.

For the American side, the designated company was General Motors, for the German side it was a company called DEG (Deutsche Enticklungsgesellschaft mbH). DEG was a consortium of several industry companies involved one way or another in tank development. The list included:

Rheinstahl-Henschel
Krauss-Maffei
MaK
And several others. Both DEG and GM then participated in the discussions leading to the finalized requirements for the future MBT.

To understand the difficulties both parties faced and the later cooperation breakdown, one has to understand the conditions under which they worked on the project, because this was the year 1963. The Second World War ended mere 18 years earlier and was still very fresh in the memories of both the Americans and the Germans. The men, who in their 20s liberated Europe, were now in their 40s and the horrors of war with Germany were still relatively fresh in their memory.

Another issue was the language barrier and the measurement system, the bane of many a promising cross-Atlantic project. The Americans insisted on using the Imperial system while the Germans naturally preferred the Metric system. After many arguments, it was agreed upon to use the Metric system for assembly plans, but both sides kept their own partial drawings in their preferred measuring units, which added to the general chaos.

And last but not least, there were the production disagreements. In theory, both sides were supposed to cooperate and pick whichever vehicle component was the best regardless of who produced it, but in reality each side lobbied heavily for the components produced by its companies, resulting in a large number of conflicts. That way, even otherwise banal issues were sometimes escalated all the way to Minister of Defense level, resulting in massive delays.