10 Stupendous Nazi Superweapons You’ll Be Glad Were Never Used
Throughout the Second World War, Nazi Germany’s diverse collective of scientists and engineers devised many creative, destructive and sometimes downright wacky superweapons — wunderwaffen, or wonder weapons — they believed would tip the tide of the war into their favour. Unfortunately for the Nazis, few of these weapons were put to use. They have since been relegated to fictional universes like the Wolfenstein video games.
If the insidious creators of these monstrous engines of war had had their way, however, we Brits might well end up having sausage and sauerkraut instead of fish and chips for tea. Along with much of the rest of the world, for that matter…
1 — The Landkreuzer Tanks
Any war historian who believed that German tanks were disadvantaged by their over-engineering (and there’s a great many of them) might find themselves spitting out their coffee when presented with the mother of all tanks — the Landkreuzer. The bright idea of eccentric war industrialist Edward Grotte, the Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte (Land Cruiser, “Rat”) was a project for a colossal 1,000-tonne mega tank.
Armed with a modified naval gun turret containing two 280mm cannons, plus a battery of 20mm anti-aircraft guns and a single 128mm anti-tank gun, this oversized rodent could have crushed almost anything in its path into paste. The only possible way to stop these behemoths was to bombard them from the air … and try to drive it on any road narrower than the Brandenburg Gate. Bridges are out of the question too, as is pretty much any kind of terrain softer than solid rock.
Nonetheless, Grotte’s pet project gained the blessing of Adolf Hitler himself (“Hitler’s fantasies sometimes shift into the gigantic”, according to Heinz Guderian, who was far more qualified in tank warfare than Grotte ever was). Emboldened by said blessing, Grotte put forward a proposal for a second Landkreuzer — the even bigger P. 1500, armed with a massive 800mm siege gun (it was rather aptly named the Monster).
Come 1943, Guderian wasn’t the only one who deemed the Landkreuzers too silly even by Nazi standards. The project was scrapped that year by Reich Minister of Armaments Albert Speer.
2 — The V-3 Supergun
The V-3 was an ultra long-range siege cannon, twenty-five of which were planned to be built at Mimoyecques, Normandy in 1944 and used to shell London. Firing a fin-stabilised 150mm artillery shell propelled by rocket boosters rather than explosive charges, the V-3 was supposed to have possessed a far greater range and degree of accuracy than any siege gun built before it. It is hypothesised that, if the battery at Mimoyecques were to have become operational, it could potentially have fired 15,000 shells every hour. Great for the Nazis — not so good for London.
That battery was destroyed when the RAF sent the famous Dambusters to demolish the fortress where it was being assembled in July 1944. Other V-3s, however, did eventually get to be used, with a smaller battery being fired at Luxembourg in early 1945 before the Allied ground offensive put the superguns out of commission for good.
This wasn’t the last the world would hear of the V-3, though. It would eventually inspire Project Babylon, an attempt by Canadian artillerist Gerald Bull to build several giant guns for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from 1988 to 1990. (He ended up being assassinated — probably by the Israelis, who can’t have been too keen on letting yet another raging anti-Semite get superweapons.)
3 — The H-44 Battleship
As Nazi Germany prepared for war, Adolf Hitler ordered the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, to launch Plan Z in 1939. The purpose of Plan Z was to construct ten new H-class battleships and four aircraft carriers (more on those in a moment) to battle the almighty Royal Navy on Germany’s own terms by 1948.
Of the various battleship designs proposed, the H-44 was the biggest and beefiest. The H-44 would have been armed with four turrets armed with two 20-inch guns each, along with twelve 150mm guns, sixteen 105mm guns, 28 37mm anti-aircraft guns, 40 20mm anti-aircraft guns and six torpedoes. If it had ever been built, it would have been bigger than the giant Yamato-class battleships built by the Japanese Navy, and could have easily stomped on any contemporary Royal Navy vessel.
Fortunately for those who believed just bringing down the Bismarck and Tirpitz battleships was a nightmarish prospect (which for the Brits, it was), the H-44 never set sail. Plan Z was never put into effect, as the Kriegsmarine’s High Command ordered resources to be allocated for other purposes. The war breaking out nine years before the deadline for completion probably didn’t help either.
4 — The Horten Ho 229 Stealth Fighter
In 1943, Hermann Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe, sent out a contest for a bomber aircraft able to meet the so-called 3x1000 requirement. In other words, an aircraft that could carry a 1,000kg bomb load out to 1,000 kilometres with an airspeed of 1,000 kilometres per hour. The only possible way to meet this target was with a jet-powered aircraft.
Enter brothers Walter and Reimar Horten, two of the most revolutionary German aerospace engineers of their time. For Goering’s contest, they submitted the Ho 229, a jet-propelled flying wing. Its greatest aspect, Reimar would ardently promote, was that its distinctive boomerang shape would have made it difficult to detect using contemporary radar.
The next fighter aircraft to possess this characteristic was Have Blue, the US technology demonstrator that spawned the iconic F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter in 1981. Basically, the Horten brothers built a stealth fighter long before the Nighthawks terrorised Saddam’s armies. (No telling how the Nazis would have dealt with Zoltán Dani.)
5 — The Natter Rocket Plane
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It IS a plane … sort of. Created by Bachem Werke GmbH, the Ba 349 Natter, or Viper, was a rocket-powered interceptor. In other words, it was a manned surface-to-air missile. Designed in response to increasingly effective Allied bombing campaigns in the latter half of the war, the Natter was propelled by a rocket to near supersonic speed and guided to its target by an autopilot. Once in range of its target, the pilot would unleash a barrage of unguided rockets, tearing enemy bomber formations to shreds before ejecting to safety. Or at least, that was the theory.
Only 36 Natters were ever built, and only one flew a test flight. Sadly, its pilot, Private Lothar Sieber, would never get to voice his opinion of being stuffed into what was basically a rocket with a cockpit. He was killed when his Natter crashed during its maiden voyage.
6 — The Wasserfall Surface-to-Air Missile
A much more successful development of the SAM concept than the Natter, the Wasserfall (Waterfall) was designed and produced in 1943 by Flak-Versuchskommando Nord at the notorious Peenemünde missile base in Nazi-occupied Norway.
For all intents and purposes a heavily-modified, miniaturised V-2 ballistic missile, the Wasserfall was intended to be launched from a stationary position and guided to its target by a manual command to line-of-sight (MCLOS) system. A more sophisticated radar-based guidance system was developed for a variant of Wasserfall, codenamed Rheinland. Carrying a 306kg warhead, the missile would have exploded in the middle of bomber formations, gutting them with a powerful blast of shrapnel.
Ultimately it was never deployed, even after 35 test firings, before the Nazis evacuated Peenemünde in February 1945. Albert Speer would lament in his memoirs that the Wasserfall could have devastated Allied bomber fleets if deployed in conjunction with new fighter jets like the Messerschmitt Me 262.
7 — The Horten H.XVIII Stealth Bomber
Another flying wedge of pain designed by the Horten brothers, the H.XVIII was conceived as a long-range strategic bomber, able to carry 4,000kg of bombs from airbases in Germany to bombard key Allied sites such as factories, airfields and cities. As with the Ho 229, the H.XVIII’s unique shape would have made it hard for radar to detect, and as it was jet-powered with a cruise speed of 750kph, it would be impossible for most Allied fighters to intercept. In other words, the H.XVIII would have been all but invincible.
More importantly, the H.XVIII was also able to carry enough fuel for transatlantic flights. As a result, it became one of the designs considered for the Amerikabomber mission, conceived by the Luftwaffe in 1942 to launch bombing raids on the continental United States. And while we’re on that topic…
8 — The Silbervogel Rocket Bomber
Orbital bombers frequently find themselves nestled within the confines of science fiction. Indeed, if you were to tell any New Yorker that Germany was planning to drop a nuclear warhead from the fringes of outer space, you would probably get the same look as the centrepiece of a Coney Island freak show.
Enter the Silbervogel (Silverbird), a concept rocket-propelled spaceplane designed by aerospace engineers Eugen Sänger and Irene Bredt in the late 1930s. It was one of several aircraft models considered for the Amerikabomber mission alongside more conventional piston and jet-powered strategic bomber designs. After being launched via rocket sled from a site in Germany, the Silbervogel would have been able to drop four tonnes worth of payload anywhere on the continental United States with complete impunity, before proceeding to a Japanese airbase in the Pacific.
The Silbervogel only ever existed as a mock-up, but one of its innovations remains a staple of modern rocket science: the Sänger-Bredt engine design. In such a contraption, liquid fuel and/or oxidiser is piped around the engine bell to cool it and pressurise the fuel.
9 — The Entwicklung Standardpanzers
The Entwicklung series of armoured fighting vehicles was a complete reversal of the previous German doctrine of making tanks as outlandishly complicated as possible. This late-war project, intended to standardise the Wehrmacht’s tank fleet, might actually have won Germany the ground war — had it been fully implemented.
Categorised into weight classes, ranging from the lightweight air-droppable E-10 to the herculean E-100, the Entwicklung tanks were to have shared components with each other, similarly to Allied T-34s and M4 Sherman tanks. Most notable of these was the same road-wheel as was used by the Tiger II heavy tank, and the Belleville washer, which would next appear on the Swiss Panzer 61. If the Entwicklung project had come to fruition, German war factories would have been able to manufacture E-50 Standardpanzers — effectively main battle tanks — more cheaply and in greater quantities than the extant Tiger and Panther tanks while maintaining similar battlefield performance.
Beyond a single chassis created for the E-100, which was later captured by the British, the Entwicklung tanks never reached the production phase.
10 — The Graf Zeppelin Aircraft Carrier
Like the H-class battleships mentioned earlier on, the Graf Zeppelin-class aircraft carrier was conceived as a result of Plan Z. Based upon extensive German studies of Japanese aircraft carriers, the Graf Zeppelin would have carried a complement of 43 aircraft, including fighters and dive bombers. If it had been built, the carriers would have granted the Kriegsmarine massive power-projection capabilities that had not been accessible beforehand, and could quite possibly have turned the war at sea into their favour.
The carriers were never finished, though. An unpleasant cocktail of German inexperience with naval aviation, bickering between the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe, and Hitler’s dissatisfaction with the performance of the German surface fleet led to the ultimate demise of the project. After the war, the half-finished Graf Zeppelin was captured by the Soviet Union, used as a target ship and sunk in 1947.
So there we have it. But the question remains — even if they had deployed these unique and often frighteningly powerful death machines, could Nazi Germany have ever won the war?
The answer is: probably not, or at least not through weapons alone. The arms race has been a game of counters throughout history — a weapon to counter a defence, and a new defence to counter that weapon, and so forth ad infinitum. As we can see through the Cold War and beyond, the power of main battle tanks has been counterbalanced by the anti-tank missile, and hypersonic missiles are estimated to become a golden bullet against once-dominant carrier groups.
If nothing else, this list should be an insight into the minds of war scientists and the oft-insane lengths they would have gone to in order to ensure victory for their nation.
Thank you all for reading, and I shall see you next time.
~ Harry