The villain stares up at the plans for the powerful weapon. This is no
ordinary gun or rocket - when complete it will harness the power of the sun itself
and rain fire and death down on his enemies!
A mad scientist looking for revenge on a superhero? No. The villain was Nazi leader
Adolf Hitler - and this weapon and many others were really built or planned by his scientists.
What was the Wunderwaffe - the secret German program of “Wonder Weapons”?
It was 1942, and the Nazi war machine was flagging.
The United States had entered the war, the United Kingdom was stubbornly refusing to fall,
and Hitler had the brilliant idea of invading Russia - which meant the German army now had
to fight a war on two fronts. The morale of the military was fading, Hitler was devoting
more and more resources towards targeting German citizens, and even many of his own Generals were
starting to whisper - was the Fuhrer losing his marbles? Did Germany need a change in leadership?
Naturally, that meant there was only one thing to do - turn up the propaganda.
Led by Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda ministry started putting out news that would help turn
the tide of the war. Because Germany’s scientists were on the case, and they were designing a whole
new crop of Wunderwaffe - or wonder weapons - that the world had never seen before.
These weapons, straight out of science-fiction in some cases, were said to pack a power the
world had never seen before. Three years before the first atomic bombs were perfected,
these secret weapons were said to turn the tide of any war and send the enemy running.
So was there any truth to these announcements?
As usual, the answer is yes - and no.
The Germans did in fact have a top-secret weapons program, and it was led by some of the world’s
best scientists. Men like Wernher Von Braun, the aerospace engineer who later was taken out of
Germany by the United States and became one of the heads of the space program,
regularly presented Hitler with blueprints for wildly ambitious weapons. The only thing
standing between Germany and unleashing these beasts on the battlefield was a lack of time
and money - and Hitler was more than willing to give both of these to the Wunderwaffe program.
And the results were impressive - at least on paper.
The Wunderwaffe program went for quantity over quality in many cases, and they delivered designs
and prototypes for countless new weapons. Some delivered the foundation of future weapons and
innovations that swept the world. Others were created, but didn’t live up to the initial hype.
Still others were designed on paper but the German army ran out of time before they became reality.
And yet others turned into complete and total disasters that we still marvel at today.
Let’s crack open the secret files of the Wunderwaffe and see which
of these inventions succeeded - and which terrified even Hitler.
Germany had an impressive Navy, but they were far behind the Allied powers in one
area - aircraft carriers. Hitler wanted to expand Germany’s naval power far beyond
Europe and to do that they’d need much more capacity. So they commissioned the
Graf Zeppelin, a massive carrier that could have carried over forty fighter planes and
dive bombers. It was one of the earliest Wunderwaffe projects, beginning construction
in 1936 - and was still under construction in 1945. With Germany’s defeat imminent,
the ship was deliberately sunk to avoid it falling into enemy hands. It was later salvaged and used
for weapons tests by the Soviets - a far cry from the powerhouse it was intended to be.
But it wasn’t the most impressive aircraft carrier in the Nazis’ plans.
The German ocean liner Europa was an impressive ship, one of the largest of the era. After losing
a key battleship in 1941, the German Navy needed an aircraft carrier they could use
quickly. So they came up with the idea - why not turn a cruise ship into a carrier? The largest
of the vessels chosen for conversion, the Europa was redesignated the German Aircraft Carrier I,
and big plans were developed to convert it. And that’s all they became - plans. Soon after the
process began, it became clear there were serious structural weaknesses and the ship wasn’t meant to
carry airplanes. It wound up carrying troops - after it was seized by the United States.
If there was one thing the Wunderwaffe program loved, it was large ships.
It was called Plan Z - the plan to expand and enhance the German navy starting in 1939.
The plans were always ambitious, but never quite panned out - and that included the
H-class battleships. Never heard of an H-class battleship? That’s because they were designed
to be by far the largest the German Navy had ever seen, with six ships loaded with massive
guns and reinforced deck armor. Ironically, what spelled their end was the very thing they
were designed for - World War II. The Navy’s focus went to retrofitting existing ships,
and the H-class battleships faded off into the seas of fantasy.
But one section of the German navy got much more attention.
The U-Boat was the terror of the seas, as the German submarines sank countless
Allied ships. But Hitler wanted them to be faster, stronger, and deadlier. Countless new
models were proposed - starting with the Rocket U-Boat. Most U-Boats used standard torpedoes,
but these blueprints intended to replace that with higher-powered rockets and missiles. This would
allow the Germans to not only sink enemy ships more effectively but potentially launch attacks on
Britain and even the United States from the sea. The first tests were promising, but the lack of a
guidance system made them ineffective. Ultimately, the Rocket U-Boat wasn’t ready for combat
by the time the war ended, but the scientists continued to refine them - for other countries.
There was a constant quest to upgrade the U-Boat - and some got closer than others.
The biggest challenge of using submarines in combat was that they weren’t meant to stay
underwater at length. They had to coast along the surface and could only submerge for short
periods at that time. The Type XXI submarines aimed to change that, being the first ships to
operate primarily underwater and only needing to resurface for charging. The prototypes worked and
they were put into production in a hurry. Over a hundred were completed and two were put into
service - but at that point, the sea war of the European front was all but over. Neither ship saw
combat, but the design was impressive enough that both the US and USSR built on it in the future.
But the designs meant for the surface were no less ambitious - or strange.
“Kugelblitz” might sound like a falling rain of noodle puddings,
but the World War II reality was much different. A planned anti-aircraft weapon,
it was a self-propelled gun that would be attached to tanks and had the ability to shoot down enemy
planes from the ground. It was the first model to have an enclosed rotating turret that would
give it far greater maneuverability. The plans were approved to move it to the prototype phase
but that’s where the project concluded as the war ended and only a few test vehicles
had been completed. The only surviving turret stands on display at a German army museum.
But to take down tanks, the German army would need some bigger guns - literally.
A rare example of a Wunderwaffe weapon that actually saw combat,
the “Sturer Emil” anti-tank gun was an impressive beast. A lengthy run mounted
on the hull of an armored tank, it could carry fifteen rounds and move enough to aim
effectively. The tank design was adjusted from standard heavy tanks to balance the huge barrel,
and two models were completed and sent into the field. Named after Max and Moritz,
a pair of German storybook characters, they both fell in combat - with Max being destroyed
and Moritz being captured by the Soviets and placed on display in the Kubinka tank museum.
And to carry a heavy gun, you’ll need a heavy tank.
The German heavy tank programs cranked out powerful weapons - but they wanted to go
bigger. The largest tank at the time, the Panzer VII Maus, was under 200 tons. However,
the planned Landkreuzer Ratte was going to weigh a whopping one thousand tons! Its armor would be
almost ten inches thick and be covered with anti-aircraft guns along with a gun turret
harvested from a battleship. Hitler was impressed with the wild ambition of the project and greenlit
it - always being a fan of showy weapons. However, Minister of Armaments Albert Speer
saw it for what it was - a massive money pit - and canceled the project in 1943 before it was built.
Other tanks were less ambitious - but no more effective.
Although the Landkreuzer Ratte was never completed, its smaller cousin the famous
Panzer VIII Maus was. This behemoth of a tank still holds the record of the heaviest fully
enclosed armored vehicle ever created. Over thirty feet long and almost twelve feet high,
weighing just under 200 metric tons, it’s armed with a powerful anti-tank gun. The problem was,
at that size and weight, it took a lot of power to run. It could reach a top speed
of up to 14 miles an hour, but it was too heavy to even cross most bridges.
The tank had to ford the river using a snorkel. It was designed for power and spectacle,
not maneuverability, which no doubt led to its eventual capture by Soviet forces.
But it wasn’t the most bizarre tank in the Nazi’s plans.
You’ve probably seen a tumbleweed rolling down the plains - but what if that tumbleweed was made
of metal instead? The Nazis designed a bizarre rolling tank known as the
Kugelpanzer as part of the Wunderwaffe program, but the incomplete model recovered
from the field left more questions than it answered. It didn’t have any weapons
attached and seemed to be more of a mobile bunker than a tank. While it didn’t seem to
have much combat use, it’s certainly become a star exhibit in the Kubina Tank Museum.
And their plans for the air were no less ambitious.
Military gliders are one of the most important parts of warfare,
getting troops and supplies to where they’re needed most. The Junkers Ju 332 Mammut was
the largest glider the Germans tried to build, but there was a hitch in the plan.
It was supposed to be built out of non-strategic material to aid the war effort - so the German
Luftwaffe tried to build the entire thing out of wood! It was planned to carry up to 44,000
pounds of cargo. Early tests showed the vehicle was incredibly unstable. It landed well before
its planned destination and had to be towed back. Its eventual fate? Being cut up for fuel.
One area of the German weapons program got more attention than any other.
It was a constant frustration for Hitler - for all the German army’s strength, he was sorely lacking
in air power. Germany hadn’t been involved in long-range wars before the last few decades, and
their air force was dwarfed by those of the United States and Japan. They were engaged in aerial
combat against Great Britain, but their planes weren’t capable of striking further-off targets
or getting involved in the Pacific theater. The Wunderwaffe program was designed to change that.
And their program had an in-your-face name.
Amerikabomber. Doesn’t leave much doubt about what this is intended to do, does it?
Germany wanted a long-range bomber that would be capable of delivering a Pearl
Harbor-like attack against east-coast American cities - especially New York,
which Hitler fantasized about destroying. The German air ministry gathered several
of the country’s best aircraft designers to submit their own candidates for the
plane that could deliver a shocking punch to the United States on their home front.
Results were…mixed.
Ultimately, two designs stood out from the crowd and were destined for production. The first,
the Messerschmitt Me 264, was a long-range strategic bomber for the Luftwaffe. It was
an all-metal heavy bomber similar in design to the B-52 and had relatively little in the
way of armor and guns - so it could carry more bombs. Three prototypes were built and overall
impressed the brass, but Messerschmidt was already under a lot of demand for their fighter planes,
and so the project was abandoned and their competitor was chosen.
And that competitor packed its own impressive payload.
Junkers may have had a flop with its massive wooden glider, but their other models were
anything but. The Junkers Ju 390 was the model ultimately chosen for the Amerikabomber project
for one main reason - it could be adapted from some of their existing planes. Extra inner-wing
segments were added to the classic Junkers Ju 90 and 290 models, and they quickly went into
testing. But how successful they were is a subject of ongoing debate. Some say the test plane made
secret flights to South Africa, Japan, and even New York, but there is no concrete proof of this.
What is clear is that work on them continued into 1944 until their contracts were canceled,
and the planes were eventually stripped for parts and destroyed.
But the Nazis may have been more interested in one specific device.
The future of warfare was rockets - powerful devices that could provide fast launches from
the ground and deliver massive payloads, or even take a man to the moon one day.
Wernher von Braun was known as the master of rockets, and many of his innovations
were rocket-powered. Hundreds of designs were built for jet fighters, rocket-powered planes,
bombers, ramming interceptors, and tactical bombers. But the jet fuel needed to power
rockets was expensive, the technology was new, and most of the Nazi rocket projects wound up as
little more than expensive proof-of-concept displays for von Braun’s future career.
Although Hitler liked rockets one thing’s for sure - he liked heavy artillery more,
and the Wunderwaffe program was happy to deliver.
Why launch a hundred mortars when you can launch one with ten times the power? That was
what the Karl-Gerät tried to answer. This massive siege mortar fired the largest self-propelled
ammunition ever deployed, and six of the massive guns were built. The destination? The eastern
front, where Russia had a massive terrain and manpower advantage over the invading Germans.
The gun was even powerful enough to destroy bridges when deployed, but they were slow-moving
and expensive to build. They delivered a powerful punch, but ultimately all but one were destroyed,
and the remainder found its final destination at…you guessed it, the Kubina Tank Museum.
But bigger isn’t always better.
The Schwerer Gustav was one of the most impressive guns ever built, weighing almost fifteen hundred
short tons and able to fire shells close to thirty miles. It was less a gun than a massive
tank-like railway weapon that turned out to be the largest gun ever fired in combat. The problem is,
massive guns don’t just wind up where you’d like them to be without help. Getting the Schwerer
Gustaf to where it was supposed to be took a lot of time and manpower - which gave the enemy a lot
of time to surround the German position and attack. It was a powerful weapon - but not a
practical one and was eventually destroyed to keep it from falling into enemy hands.
But was there one gun that would have been even more powerful?
Many of the Wunderwaffe projects never left the drawing board due to a lack of money or
time. That was the case for the Landkreuzer P 1500 Monster, a super-heavy self-propelled
gun that would have roamed the battlefield on a pair of treads. Weighing around 1500 tonnes,
it would allow a massive gun like the Gustav to travel without being assembled by a team of
soldiers. The problem was…well, the Nazis’ tank development wasn’t exactly going well.
Vehicles like the Maus turned out to be a disaster. So rolling a giant gun around on two
of those wasn’t likely to go smoothly. It would also be an inviting target for air attacks. The
Monster was canceled before it ever got off the ground, and little documentation of it exists.
Some Wunderwaffe projects were a little more practical.
It was the early days of air warfare, and planes were expensive to make. So why not make them
harder to shoot down? That was the goal of the Jagdfaust, an experimental anti-bomber
rifle that would be equipped for German rocket planes. The Komet, the Luftwaffe’s fastest plane,
moved so fast that it made using typical cannon rounds much harder, making accuracy a real problem
for its pilots. The Jagdfaust eliminated that problem by eliminating the recoil and allowing
it to be fired much faster. And unlike many German engineering projects, it worked! The
gun got its first kill...in April 1945. Too little, too late as the war came to an end.
The only thing more valuable than a new weapon was preserving existing ones.
Losing expensive hardware was a common problem - especially when it was tanks,
which the Nazis were constantly trying to upgrade. The massive weapons were especially vulnerable
at night when they could be ambushed from the dark - which was why the German optics company
Carl Zeiss AG developed a surprising project for the military in 1941. The FG 1250 was one of the
first night-vision devices ever built, working through infrared and designed to be mounted on
tanks. It was one of their more effective devices - maybe proving that larger isn’t always better.
For many weapons, the key wasn’t going bigger, but smarter.
It was the precursor in many ways to modern drone
warfare - a weapon that wouldn’t need to be aimed directly at the target but could be
guided to it. The Fritz X was a powerful bomb designed to take out heavily armed targets,
but what made it unique was that it was the first precision-guided weapon ever used in combat.
The bomb would be guided by a radio-control link that affected movable parts in the tail fins,
and was intended to sink ships. It successfully achieved that goal in 1943, but it wouldn’t be
long before the allies developed countermeasures that could interfere with the delicate radio link.
Some Wunderwaffe projects, though, were distinctly closer to science fiction.
It was 1929 when German physicist Hermann Oberth came up with a mad proposal - a massive space
station that would use a concave mirror to concentrate sunlight and refract it back at
a specific point of the earth with devastating results. Germany was not at war at this point,
so maybe he just wanted to be a supervillain. But during the Second World War, German scientists
began to build on this concept. They wanted to design a massive sun gun that would generate an
immense amount of energy - enough to destroy a city with a single blast. The only problem was,
Germany didn’t have a space program. No one did. When asked how long it would take to
build their sun gun, they estimated between fifty and a hundred years.
Which, when you consider Hitler’s plans for a thousand-year Reich, may have sounded reasonable.
But how bizarre were the projects of the Wunderwaffe - truly?
What was Die Glocke? This mysterious, bell-shaped superweapon was one of the most mysterious
supposed projects of the Wunderwaffe. It was exposed by Polish journalist Igor Witkowski in
the year 2000, as he claimed he had uncovered a secret device that never saw the light of day.
Some claimed the glowing contraption was an antigravity device, with some even saying it
could be related to time travel. But in reality, all evidence is that Die Glocke was…nothing.
There is no evidence that Witkowski was exposing a true project instead of creating a clever tale.
Other devices never got close to reality.
The Wunderwaffe teams repeatedly came back to the idea of a directed-energy weapon.
Who wouldn’t like a gun that never ran out of ammo - just needing to be recharged? The
technology for Star Trek phasers wasn’t there yet, but that didn’t stop them from trying.
The first attempt was a sonic cannon that could kill via high-intensity vibrations.
It worked - but was too expensive and vulnerable to enemy fire to become a mainstay of combat.
Undeterred, Hitler’s mad scientists explored x-ray beams that could take down aircraft,
but the electron accelerator they built as a test was eventually captured by the Americans.
But one question has puzzled people for decades - how close
did the Wunderwaffe get to the ultimate weapon?
Nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 - and only four months later, Hitler already had scientists
working on a short-lived nuclear bomb project. While it was shut down shortly before the Nazi
invasion of Poland, a new project would soon begin as the Nazis started producing nuclear reactors,
uranium, and heavy water in earnest. The project continued to be funded until the
very end of the war, but contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t a tight race for which side
got to the finish line first. While the Manhattan Project was full steam ahead,
the German nuclear bomb project was understaffed and many of the scientists left to pursue more
short-term war projects. It didn’t help that many of Germany’s top scientists had fled the
Nazi regime. In the end, the Nazi nuclear bomb project met the fate of many other
super-weapons - being harvested for parts by the Allies as they took over after the war.
So what went wrong with the Wunderwaffe? Why did a project that created so many fantastical
weapons ultimately deliver so many duds - and completely fail to help the country win the war?
For one thing, the scientists involved had to split their focus between so many projects that
few got the opportunity to develop and be refined. Many were scrapped after one failed test. Torn
between Hitler’s mad ambition and Albert Speer’s penny-pinching, the scientists were often between
a rock and a hard place. While many did change the future of warfare, few were around long enough
to deliver in combat - and those that were often were rolled out right before the close of the war.
But one place is no doubt thankful for the Wunderwaffe - the Kubina Tank Museum,
which thanks them for many of their top exhibits.
For more on the secrets of Nazi technology, check out “Modern
Companies That Collaborated With Nazis During World War 2”, or watch this video instead.