As Adolf Hitler consolidated his power over Germany and pushed his massive
political policies to rebuild and rearm the undermined European country, the West watched,
alarmed, as the possibility of a new War in Europe became ever more likely.
By 1936, the Third Reich was already orchestrating the incoming invasion of France and the eventual
conquest of the European continent. But there was a significant obstacle in Hitler’s way,
and that was the massive Maginot Line, an almost 300-mile-long array of bunkers,
fortifications, and huge guns specially designed to keep a German invasion at bay.
If the Germans were going to pierce the French border,
they would need a new and powerful solution to shatter the mighty wall into pieces,
and Hitler’s answer was to drastically increase the size and power of their artillery.
Relying on the prowess of German engineering, the Third Reich built some of the most gargantuan
pieces of weaponry ever concocted. And footage taken at the time shows one of these colossal
contraptions, the mighty Karl-Gerät, as it fires its two-ton artillery shells.
The terrifying self-propelled mortar could fire an SUV-size worth of explosive
material and was primarily designed to turn the Allies’ defenses into dust…
Super-Size It
Before the Wehrmacht finally decided to invade France through the Ardennes and Belgium,
they seriously considered a frontal attack through the Maginot Line,
the strongest fortification on Earth.
That was precisely what the French authorities expected the Germans to do and considered it
highly unlikely that they would try to take their Panzer division through the dense Ardennes Forest.
With that logic in mind, the French government spent a large part of their defense budget over
the last six years building an impenetrable wall along the 300 miles of shared border with Germany.
The defensive wall would halt any attack that the
Germans could muster and buy the Allies enough time to plan a counterstrike.
For the Germans, the structure proved a significant challenge;
breaking the heavy concrete fortification would be extraordinarily complex and time-consuming,
and the artillery units they had would undoubtedly
struggle to deal sufficient damage to the reinforced structures of the Maginot Line.
The solution for Germany was straightforward: to drastically increase the size of artillery weapons
and create a new generation of monster mortars and howitzers that would demolish the French defenses.
The new weapons would have to be so large and powerful that they could be transported by
train tracks while being able to fire shells as heavy as four tons over ten kilometers
in what would be the most colossal piece of artillery developed in the history of warfare.
The monster contraptions created by the Wehrmacht almost seemed too large and
farfetched to be real; nevertheless, the 1,490-ton Schwerer Gustav railway gun and
the massive Karl-Gerät self-propelled mortar would be built to attest that
no fortification was strong enough to stop the advance of the Third Reich.
General Karl Becker, a prominent German weapons engineer and artillery general,
was heavily involved in designing and testing the
machine, which would be known as the Karl-Gerät or the Karl device.
Limited Movement
Despite not being as titanic in scale as her sister, the Schwerer Gustav,
with its 1,490-ton weight and ability to fire 7-ton shells, the Karl-Gerät had the
significant benefit of being able to move on its own and was not limited to a railway.
The Schwerer Gustav required a set of two parallel railways to be able to
move and was designed to destroy the most fortified sections of the Maginot Line,
which could be armored with up to seven meters of reinforced concrete.
In contrast, the smaller Karl-Gerät could only fire 2-ton projectiles but had the
advantage of moving on its own to strike more minor fortifications.
Still, it was only small compared to her sister, but with a weight of over 137 tons,
it was the largest self-propelled gun on the planet during its initial deployment.
Karl-Gerät’s mobility was significantly more limited than its “self-propelled”
description implied. Due to its hefty size, the Daimler-Benz MB 503A 12-cylinder liquid-cooled
gasoline engine or a Daimler-Benz MB 507C 12-cylinder liquid-cooled diesel
engine could only provide a speed of up to six miles per hour, which meant that the
gun’s mobility was used chiefly for aiming and very seldomly to reach a specific battlefront.
Instead, the mortar was disassembled into seven parts for transportation, using an
included crane system that was also required to load the 2-ton projectiles into the gun.
The entire logistic process was highly complex and required a large crew and several man hours.
Moreover, the mortar was transported to its destined battlefront via railway on
a variant of a Schnabel car, and the whole chassis was suspended between
two substantial swiveling arms fixed to a five-axle structure.
When it arrived at its destination, the weapon was removed from the supporting arms and steered
to its intended firing location. As it was lowered from the railway and reassembled,
the mortar was then driven to its final firing location.
Still, it moved at a sluggish pace, making it highly vulnerable to enemy attacks.
Consequently, the German military was instructed to protect the mortar at all costs,
and special forces units were often tasked with protecting
the oversized gun as it reached its final position to fire and reload.
Repurposing Karl-Gerät
By the time Karl-Gerät was ready for deployment at the end of 1940 and the beginning of 1941,
the fall of France had already taken place thanks to aggressive Blitzkrieg
tactics and the decision to invade it through Belgium and the Ardennes.
With no need to destroy the Maginot Line,
the monumental artillery units concocted by the Third Reich seemed to have become purposeless.
Still, they continued to be produced, as the Germans believed they would be a formidable asset
when they launched Operation Barbarossa in their ambitious attempt to conquer the Soviet Union.
Seven Karl-Gerät units were fabricated in total and named “Baldur,” “Wotan,” “Thor,” “Odin,”
“Loki,” and “Ziu”; the seventh mortar, used primarily for research and testing, had no name.
The six weapons that would see combat were delivered to the Eastern Front from November
1940 to August 1941, and several pieces of footage show the guns being loaded
by several soldiers and then fired on the battlefront with all their might.
Combat!
The massive mortar units saw action for the first time in May of 1941 when they were used during
the initial incursion into the Soviet Union by shelling Soviet border fortifications near Lviv.
Later, in February of 1942, “Thor” and “Odin” participated in the siege of Sevastopol,
where they had considerable success destroying several
fortified armored turrets while they remained in camouflaged positions outside of the city.
The sheer size and power of the weapons were overwhelming to the Soviet forces,
and when one of the 2-ton shells failed to detonate,
it was quickly seized by Soviet troops and delivered to Moscow for further study.
The weapon also saw extensive use late in the war during the Warsaw Uprising,
where the Wehrmacht used the oversized artillery units to destroy numerous
buildings in the Polish capital where rebel forces were suspected of hiding.
Hundreds of buildings were bombed, desperately attempting to eradicate
the rising before the Red Army made it into Warsaw. It was on this battlefront that the
colossal Karl-Gerät saw the most use, just as the fate of Germany was sealed.
The footage shows that after the war, numerous dud shells were found embedded deep within
buildings and basements of Warsaw, attesting to the weapon's extensive use during the uprising.
Most undetonated explosives were disarmed and taken to museums, where they remain
as testimony of Germany’s unhinged efforts to make the largest artillery units known to man.
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