What's the statement here? The statement I see is that intent does not matter, which kind of flies in the face of most of the history of European criminal law.
The law was written to prosecute people who are up to no good. Why the relevant parties here did not realize that some elderly collector is in fact not up to no good and prosecute and sentence accordingly I can only speculate.
>WW2-era or not, a Panther is a lethal piece of hardware, and apparently he's been seen driving it around at some point. And if one person does it then someone else can too. And the next one might not be a harmless old man content with merely collecting military hardware.
If you want to drive around and destroy things there are more cost effective options, there have been recent examples of such shenanigans in Europe. Some elderly collector is not really a threat to public health and more than a small fleet of construction equipment or heavy trucks is.
>I suspect selling the collection could easily pay the fines, so it's not like he's being punished that hard.
I think it's just as likely that the fine was sized so that between being forced to liquidate everything and paying the fines he will die penniless.