As the Allies tightened their noose around the neck of the Third Reich, the Nazis cranked
up their war machine to 11. Hitler and his cronies pulled out all the stops and threw
all of Germany’s resources into emergency projects and inventions. In this video,
we check out the last-ditch Nazi war efforts… that came too late to save them.
First up we have the Volkssturm — an emergency reserve formation of fighters pulled from
the civilian population. The Nazi party had enforced conscription since before the war,
but by October 1944, all fit men aged from 18 to 45,
not in protected occupations, had already been conscripted. To bolster the army in preparation
for the oncoming Soviet tsunami, conscription was expanded to include men from 16 to 60, and those
who had previously been designated as medically unfit. Hitler’s goal was to get the Volkssturm
to six million members and replace training, equipment, and experience with pure fanaticism.
The Volkssturm never reached six million members, and its supply situation was dire. Most units
didn’t have uniforms, and some weren’t even armed! Despite this, the Nazi elite made the Volkssturm
out to be a heroic partisan organisation of German patriots. The old men of the
Volkssturm found this hilarious, saying: "Why is the Volkssturm Germany's most precious resource?
Because its members have silver in their hair, gold in their mouths, and lead in their bones."
Some Volkssturm units were made up mostly of Great War veterans, and fought well.
The vast majority, however, were more of a liability than a capability.
Even Hitler wasn’t impressed, saying: “Volkssturm, emergency, and reserve
units have little fighting value when left to themselves, and can be quickly destroyed ...”
It was called the “Neger,” and was *supposed* to be a multi-use
weapon — only needing to have a new bottom torpedo fitted before being sent out again.
The problem was that, 80% of the time, the torpedo didn’t detach completely,
dragging the whole craft and pilot along until it exploded. Hopped up on "DIX" — tablets
chock-full of painkillers and stimulants — the pilot could at least go out on a high.
*Shockingly*, the first time they were deployed was a fiasco. Thirty were sent
to attack Allied ships in the Italian port of Anzio on the night of April 20th, 1944.
Thirteen capsized as soon as they were put in the water, and three more simply disappeared once they
had been launched. The remaining 14 carried out the attack but didn’t inflict ANY damage.
This suicidal watercraft was also used against Allied ships in Normandy and a few other
scattered attacks around the French and Belgian coast. These attacks managed to sink a cruiser,
a destroyer, and three minesweepers. Nearly all the Negers had been lost too, and the
Kriegsmarine overhauled the design — deciding they were more trouble than they were worth.
The Third Reich was constantly pounded from the air in its last year of existence.
Hitler blamed the Luftwaffe and ordered Goring to sort it out. He started the Emergency Fighter
Program — an initiative designed to develop a new kind of fighter. The Luftwaffe had noticed the
jet-powered Me-262 outperformed Allied aircraft but was very difficult to maintain, especially
with supply shortages. Goring needed a fighter with the performance of a Me-262, the armament
of a Spitfire, and the controls of a glider — as that was the only way of training new pilots.
He also needed a plane that could be mass-produced and was disposable when it stopped working.
Goring was a large man who was probably used to having his cake and eating it too.
But his designers just didn’t have the supplies to fit the Emergency Fighter
Program’s specifications. The best they could do was the Heinkel He-162.
The He-162 was a jet-powered fighter first deployed in February 1945.
It had numerous problems from rapid production but handled well and could reach speeds over
750 kilometres-per-hour. One hundred and twenty He-162s were delivered to squadrons
and several of these managed to shoot down Allied fighters.
The novel design might have made more of an impact on the air war, but it came too late.
Only five months after the He-162’s first deployment, the war in Europe was over.
With German war industry collapsing in the last year of the Third Reich, it’s a wonder that any
weapons found their way into the hands of the Volkssturm. Far from the beautifully-machined
Karabiner 98 or the battle-tested MP-40 was the rush-job Gustloff Volkssturmgewehr.
When the Volkssturm was formed in October 1944, it was immediately clear they had a critical
weapons shortage. German factories simply couldn’t pump out complex and well-designed
infantry weapons quick enough. To solve this, the Nazis initiated the Primitive Weapons Program.
Their goal was to design a rifle that could be mass-produced with the bare
minimum of machine work, ideally with stamped parts. Several bolt-action designs were tried
out — known as the VG-1, VG-2, and VG-5 — but they were pretty unsuccessful.
The Gustloff design, however, was different. Its firing mechanism was based on a scaled-up pistol,
and it could fire on full-auto. That about sums up its advantages. In terms of disadvantages,
the rifle was highly inaccurate because the sights were fixed and non-adjustable,
it had no pistol grip, and it sometimes *fell apart* due to poor construction.
For the unarmed Volkssturm, it was better than nothing, though not by much,
and by the end of the war, 10,000 Gustloff Volkssturmgewehr had been made.
Even if Germany had managed to produce enough planes to threaten the Allied air domination of
Europe, they still had one big problem: airfields. In the last months of the war
in Europe, the Allies had bombed nearly all the Luftwaffe airfields to rubble.
While one solution to this was jet-powered planes that could take off from a short landing strip,
the more sensible option was, of course, rockets.
That’s right. The German solution to a lack of runways was to build a manned rocket that took off
vertically. Designated the Bachem Ba-349 Natter, this cartoonish aircraft packed 24 *more* rockets
in its nose. This armament was meant to act as an explosive shotgun and annihilate Allied bombers.
Luckily, the designers had spared a thought for the pilot,
who was likely to be a teenage Hitler-Youth member with *zero* flying experience.
The Natter was fitted with an autopilot that would guide the rocket towards a bomber group. When it
got close, the pilot took manual control and fired the rockets. The Natter would then have *seconds*
of fuel left to get out of fighter escort range before the pilot parachuted back to base.
As far as we know, only one manned flight took place. It lasted 55 seconds,
and the Natter averaged a speed of over 800 kilometres-per-hour before violently crashing,
killing the pilot. The 22-year-old volunteer, Lothar Sieber, was the first man ever to take off
vertically under pure rocket power; the next man would be Yuri Gagarin — the first man in space.
The Gustloff Volkssturmgewehr wasn’t the only German emergency infantry weapon
that made its way to the Volkssturm units. Neither was it the most unreliable.
That dubious honour goes to the MP-3008.
The MP-3008, also known as the Volksmachinenpistole or People’s Submachine-Gun,
was a rip-off of the British Sten submachine-gun. Aside from a vertical magazine and extremely poor
production quality, the weapon *was* a Sten. This meant it suffered from the same issues the
Sten did. The worst of these was that if it was knocked, dropped, or banged against something,
it could go off, and it wouldn’t stop firing until the 30-round magazine was emptied.
The Germans had a clever fix for this problem. Their MP-3008 was made entirely from stamped,
recycled metal. Quality control was virtually non-existent — so if it accidentally went off,
there was a high likelihood that the weapon would jam before too many rounds were wasted.
In combat, the combination of crude design and minimal Volkssturm training
gave the MP-3008 a bad reputation, but it wasn't necessarily a complete liability.
The MP-3008 was manufactured on military-industrial assembly lines
but was so simple that small workshops could copy it. During the final few months of the war,
workshops and factories around Germany made thousands of MP-3008s for the Volkssturm.
Many of these bore the mark of their workshops, featuring different stocks,
pistol-grips, or being fed by captured enemy ammunition.
The last Nazi project doesn’t fit the same pattern as the others.
Far from being a slap-dash invention pulled out of the bag months before the war’s end,
this project had been in the works for years, but only came to fruition at
the end of the war. The project was the Type-XXI Electroboot submarine.
The world’s first true submarine, the Electroboot was a diesel-electric attack submarine designed to
operate fully submerged. It had a massive battery bank that gave it days of silent-running time
as well as a snorkel to run the engines while submerged.
The hull was built for speed and manoeuvrability underwater,
unlike the Kriegsmarine’s other U-boats, which were built for surface running.
Those of you who saw our video on the war’s best submarines will know the Electroboot wasn’t
included, and for good reason — it never came close to mass production. The world’s first true
submarine was such a complex piece of machinery that shipyards struggled to get their work up to
scratch. Two were completed and deployed, however, but neither managed to sink an Allied ship.
While the Electroboot wasn’t much use to Germany in the final years of the war,
it was a different story for the Allies. Immediately realising that the Electroboot
was the future of submarine design, they stole as many as they could. Britain, France, the US, and
the Soviets all managed to grab an Electroboot and used them to build a new generation of submarines.
These were the submarines that patrolled the next era of warfare, the Cold War.
THAT was seven of Germany’s best and craziest last-ditch weapons they hoped would turn the war.
But what do YOU think? Would YOU have volunteered to fly an experimental rocket plane?
How do YOU think the Germans felt using a copied British gun? Do YOU think a fleet of
Electroboots could have turned the tide in the Atlantic? Let us know in the comments!