Nazi Megastructures "Series 1" (4/6) : Super Tanks
For educational purposes
The story of Nazi engineers tasked with fulfilling Hitler's megalomaniac demand for the construction of a land battleship weighing 1,000 tons.
The story of Nazi engineers tasked with fulfilling Hitler's megalomaniac demand for the construction of a land battleship weighing 1,000 tons.
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00:01Hidden in an abandoned Nazi army base.
00:05Big is good when it comes to armor.
00:07The relics of an astonishing secret weapons project.
00:11Just the sheer size of where they park these tanks is really impressive.
00:15Not just a tank, a mega tank.
00:18The height of this tank would be 11 meters. That's roughly the size of a four-story house.
00:22Fire!
00:24Inspired by the Führer himself.
00:26This is it! This is what I want!
00:29Hitler absolutely buys into the idea that big is better.
00:33Designed to crush the enemies of the Third Reich.
00:36It must be horrifying and terrifying to the enemy to face this.
00:40This is the incredible story of Hitler's super tanks.
00:44The engineers who built them.
00:46It's a masterpiece.
00:47And the aces who rode them into battle.
00:49Kill ratios were very high.
00:52Attacker!
00:55In the space of 15 minutes, Michael Wittmann destroyed 13 tanks.
00:59Fire!
01:02The biggest construction projects of World War II.
01:06Ordered by Hitler to secure world domination.
01:12Now they survive as dark reminders of the Führer's fanatical military ambitions.
01:19These are the secrets of the Nazi megastructures.
01:29The Eastern Front.
01:33SS Commander Michael Wittmann is riding into the largest tank fight in history.
01:40The Battle of Kursk.
01:45.228.6!
01:49Attack! Attack! Attack!
01:53Tanks dominate land warfare in World War II.
01:57And Wittmann commands the biggest yet built.
02:00The Tiger.
02:03It's an awesome machine.
02:05And Wittmann will use it to become Germany's most celebrated and deadly tank ace.
02:12Aim at 2 o'clock!
02:15Load high explosives!
02:18High explosives loaded!
02:21Fire!
02:31Today, only a priceless handful of Hitler's huge Tiger tanks remain.
02:39And just one reveals how they were put together.
02:45It's the only occasion you can see this tank and its pieces like a gigantic puzzle.
02:52Tank historian Ralf Raths is exploring Nazi Germany's entire supertanks programme.
02:59Because, thanks to Hitler, the awesome Tiger was just the beginning.
03:04Hitler himself was fascinated with big tanks and he was the driving force behind them getting bigger and bigger.
03:11Hitler's obsession with giant tanks and big guns begins in World War I.
03:16As a corporal on the front line, he witnesses the power of heavy artillery first hand.
03:23Hitler would have experienced this massive weight of firepower, this incessant shelling.
03:28This would have been something that would have been burned into his memory from his years as an infantryman.
03:35People tend to view the First World War as the war of the machine gun,
03:39but really more than anything else it was the war of the artillery piece.
03:43Guns get bigger, they get heavier, they get longer range, throwing bigger and heavier projectiles further distances.
03:51In World War I, Hitler doesn't just watch artillery getting bigger, he sees it becoming more mobile.
03:59With the arrival of the first tank, Britain's Mark I.
04:08Here you are, a German infantryman in 1917, and over your trench looms this giant metal box,
04:14which is impervious to the light small arms that you've got with you.
04:19It must have been an extremely frightening experience the first time one of those tanks crossed over a trench.
04:26Fifteen years on, Hitler rises to power, promising to avenge the losses of World War I.
04:36But peace treaties ban Germany from building tanks, a must-have weapon for modern armies.
04:43So Hitler approves their development in secret.
04:54Today, hidden in thick pine forest, lies an abandoned Nazi military complex
05:00that once led the world in weapons development.
05:06This is the former HQ for Nazi black ops.
05:13Over 25 square kilometers of high-tech weapons labs and firing ranges, tank works and fuel dumps.
05:22Here, Nazi scientists created the world's first ballistic missiles.
05:29And it's also here that revolutionary tank legends will be born.
05:35Colonel Chris Wilbeck is a veteran of tank warfare in Iraq, and a tank historian.
05:42This is where they conducted tests on their tanks.
05:45But it certainly has run down now. It's seen its better days.
05:50Tests performed here would transform Hitler's idea of how to fight a mobile ground war.
05:59It'd be scary to get inside the mind of Hitler, but he had to have been influenced by World War I,
06:05he was a corporal that fought on the front lines and saw the horrors of that static, linear warfare.
06:12No one wanted to have another war like World War I.
06:17So everyone was thinking about what can the tank do to restore mobility to the battlefield,
06:22so that you avoid that long, drawn-out, costly war.
06:28At Kummersdorf in early 1935, Hitler is shown the first Nazi tank, the Panzer I.
06:39It can move at 39 kilometers per hour, eight times faster than the tanks Hitler saw in World War I.
06:50When he was presented with a display of what tanks could do,
06:54here at Kummersdorf, he had to be impressed.
06:58This is it! This is what I want!
07:05Hitler's new Panzers promise unprecedented mobility on the battlefield.
07:10But there's a problem.
07:13The Panzers that so impressed Hitler are really tiny.
07:15They're six foot high, they're only armed with machine guns, there's two men in them,
07:19but very quickly they realize that these tanks are just not going to cut it in a modern war.
07:26Between 1934 and 1939, Nazi Germany produces a series of bigger Panzers, with bigger guns.
07:35The Panzer II gets a cannon, and then the Panzer III gets a slightly bigger cannon,
07:39and the Panzer IV gets a bigger cannon than that.
07:41So they go from, say, 5.8 tons, which is the size of the Panzer I,
07:45to 20 tons, which is the size of the Panzer IV.
07:50In just five years, Hitler's Panzers quadruple in size.
07:56No longer a secret, the Panzers are about to go into action for the first time.
08:03In September 1939, these tanks smash into Poland, kick-starting World War II.
08:14The unprecedented speed and power of Panzer warfare spawns a new word.
08:19Blitzkrieg. Lightning war.
08:23The unprecedented speed and power of Panzer warfare spawns a new word.
08:28Blitzkrieg. Lightning war.
08:38The genius behind the Nazis' successful Blitzkrieg tactics is General Heinz Guderian.
08:45This landscape is perfect.
08:47Yes, sir!
08:48Panzer in the middle. Grenadiers, left and right.
08:51Yes, sir!
08:54Guderian's success is about far more than cutting-edge machinery.
08:59The point about the Panzer arm is it's not just the tank.
09:03The tank is the visual expression of that.
09:07When you see the film footage, what you see is a tank.
09:11But actually what makes it effective is the whole package.
09:15It's the communication ability.
09:17It's the cooperation with the air forces, with artillery, with infantry.
09:21That's what makes the Panzer arm effective, not the individual tanks on their own.
09:29Guderian's Blitzkrieg tactics are successful pretty much from the beginning of the Second World War.
09:36They punch big holes into the Polish lines.
09:41They punch big holes into the French lines.
09:46The French are simply not capable of keeping up with the fast-moving German way of warfare.
09:52Part of this seemingly unstoppable force is 27-year-old Michael Wittmann.
09:58A farmer's son who has risen through the ranks of the SS.
10:02He's forging a reputation as a commander with an uncanny knack for killing the enemy.
10:07Fire!
10:13In 1941, he's part of an unstoppable German army
10:17that conquers all of Poland.
10:20In 1941, he's part of an unstoppable German army
10:24that conquers huge swathes of Europe.
10:29Now Hitler turns his tanks east for the invasion of the Soviet Union.
10:34Operation Barbarossa.
10:37When Barbarossa commences, the world will hold its breath and make no comment.
10:42When Barbarossa commences, the world will hold its breath and make no comment.
10:46We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.
10:54The Fuhrer amasses the largest invasion force in history on the Soviet frontier.
10:593,600 tanks and 4 million men.
11:04Confluence among the panzer army is enormous.
11:07And who are they up against?
11:08They're up against the Red Army who propaganda has portrayed for years,
11:13ever since the Nazis took power,
11:15as being a bunch of sort of redneck peasants, Bolsheviks who know nothing.
11:20And it's going to be a walk in the park.
11:25On the 22nd of June, 1941, Germany invades.
11:39Within hours, they make a shocking discovery.
11:45The Soviets have a much better tank.
11:52The T-34.
11:59In previous battles across Europe, Hitler's armoured units have destroyed everything in their path.
12:08But the T-34 is heavier, faster, with better armour,
12:13and packs a bigger punch than the latest panzers.
12:17Hitler is going to need some bigger tanks.
12:24German engineers are searching for a weapon that can eliminate the threat posed by Soviet T-34 tanks.
12:31And they find it.
12:32In the form of a gun called the Flak 88.
12:36Originally designed to shoot down planes,
12:39this weapon will one day sit on the first Nazi super tank.
12:44We need a bigger gun.
12:46I've said this before.
12:48Do not try to trick me.
12:51We need a tank with an 88.
12:59If the Germans mount the Flak 88 on a panzer,
13:02it'll be the biggest gun ever put on a tank.
13:06But adding a gun this size will add huge amounts of weight.
13:11Deciding for an 8.8cm gun was also deciding for a heavy tank,
13:16because you need a big heavy tank to transport this gun.
13:20This new super tank will be very different from the panzers that came before.
13:24It'll be given a name.
13:26The Tiger.
13:28The development of the Tiger is a major turning point,
13:30because it marks the point where the German suddenly go,
13:33yes, big is good when it comes to armour.
13:38Hitler's new monster will be the biggest tank the war has seen.
13:44Now he needs someone to design it.
13:48His first choice is a 66-year-old car designer,
13:51named Ferdinand Porsche.
13:55Porsche has never built a tank before,
13:57and is best known for something rather smaller.
14:01The Volkswagen Beetle.
14:04Hitler admired Porsche because he thought that he was a technical genius.
14:09Maybe the biggest technical genius of the time.
14:13Shortly after Hitler came to power,
14:15Porsche and Hitler met,
14:17and Porsche introduced his ideas of a sports car.
14:23That car was very successful at the time,
14:26and it raced around here.
14:29This is the former AVUS racetrack, Berlin.
14:34Here in the 1930s,
14:36Porsche's sports cars showcased German engineering excellence,
14:41and delighted Hitler.
14:43That led to a commission to build the Beetle.
14:47Nazi Germany's people's car.
14:51Creating the biggest tank of the war is a very different challenge.
14:56Of course, looking at these two vehicles,
14:59the difference couldn't be bigger.
15:02This Volkswagen here was designed to serve the people,
15:06the simple people, if you will,
15:08and the other one was designed to kill the simple people.
15:15Porsche must go from making family cars to a killing machine.
15:21Hitler and the Nazis said,
15:23go ahead, let's make a real monster of a tank.
15:26Porsche said, OK, let's do it.
15:31But even for can-do Dr. Porsche,
15:33putting together a monster tank won't be easy.
15:44Today, at an old flour warehouse in Switzerland,
15:47an exceptionally rare Tiger II tank is being rebuilt from scratch.
15:54For tank historian Ralf Raths,
15:56it offers an unprecedented chance to see first-hand
16:00the challenges facing Porsche.
16:03That's a very impressive sight.
16:06Porsche's Tiger will have thousands of precision parts,
16:10many hand-tooled.
16:13The main cause for its size and complexity is the gun.
16:18If you build a big gun,
16:20and it shoots, it will go back through the recoil.
16:23So if the gun goes back into the turret, it needs space.
16:26So you have to make the turret bigger
16:29so that the gun has the room to go back.
16:33So if you start to make the gun bigger,
16:36everything else will get bigger accordingly.
16:42To carry the 88-millimeter gun,
16:45the Tiger II will need a lot of space.
16:48With the 88-millimeter gun,
16:50the Tiger will be more than twice the size of any previous Panzer
16:54and weigh 60 tons.
16:59The pressure on Porsche is compounded by the announcement
17:02that a rival German engineering giant, Henschel,
17:06will also make a prototype.
17:09The successful model will result in a massive contract
17:12for the winning designer.
17:15The Henschel engineers took the classical path.
17:17They put an engine in the back of the tank,
17:19a transmission through the whole tank,
17:21and then generating power on the axle of the tank
17:25via torque on the tracks.
17:27That's the classical way to power a German tank.
17:31Porsche, on the other hand,
17:33used a combined diesel-electro engine,
17:36meaning that he had a diesel engine
17:39powering two electro motors on each track separately,
17:42which had the great advantage
17:44that there was no transmission needed at all.
17:48Porsche's system does away with mechanical gears,
17:51which are heavy and take up valuable space.
17:55It's a bold, visionary idea
17:57that won't be adopted for mass-produced cars until the 1990s.
18:02But will it work on a revolutionary new tank?
18:08Hitler's 53rd birthday.
18:12His treat?
18:13To watch demonstrations of the two rival Tiger prototypes.
18:18Porsche's so confident his version will get the Führer's approval
18:22that he's already building 100 chassis.
18:27When Porsche and Henschel presented their prototypes
18:30on Hitler's birthday in 1942,
18:32the classical conservative design of Henschel
18:35proved very well on the testing fields.
18:37They drove around, they did everything they were asked for.
18:39The machine worked.
18:43It's just the electrics.
18:45It is not a problem.
18:47The Porsche Tiger, on the other hand,
18:49went up in flames internally
18:51and didn't accomplish anything on the testing field.
18:54So the decision was quite clear.
18:57Porsche's innovative tank is a failure.
19:00His engine is too complicated and suffers repeated fires.
19:05Porsche's idea were intelligent and clever
19:09Porsche's idea were intelligent and clever and interesting,
19:13but the Henschel design, on the other hand, worked.
19:17It is Henschel's Tiger that will go into production.
19:21The Tiger is more than twice the size of the main Soviet tank,
19:25the T-34.
19:29It's also precision-engineered by hand
19:31and even comes with its own operator's manual.
19:35They produced this richly illustrated
19:37and very well-written manual for the Tiger crews
19:41so that each and every man on the Tiger
19:44knew what he had to do in his function on the Tiger.
19:47To grab attention,
19:49the Tiger manual includes pictures of scantily clad women
19:54and armaments minister Albert Speer
19:57telling gunners not to waste ammunition.
20:01It also features clever tips
20:03on how to deal with the tank's exceptional weight.
20:06It says, if you're not sure
20:08if your Tiger is too heavy for the ground,
20:10take a comrade, put him on your back,
20:13go to the place you're unsure about and stand on one leg.
20:16If you don't sink into the ground,
20:18the ground pressure of your Tiger is OK with that ground.
20:21If you sink in, your Tiger is too heavy.
20:23So the heaviness is a problem,
20:25but they also provide the solutions
20:27for the simple man at the front
20:29how to decide what to do.
20:33The Tiger is an expensive sledgehammer
20:36built to smash Soviet lines.
20:40Now Hitler will test it in combat
20:42at the largest tank battle in history.
20:50But will his decision to go big pay off?
21:00Spring, 1943.
21:04The Russian front.
21:08The German forces are preparing to attack
21:11a 200km bulge around the city of Kursk.
21:16The reason the Germans want to do this, to attack here,
21:19is twofold.
21:21First, because they want to reduce the front by 170 miles.
21:25The main reason is to take on
21:27the biggest concentration of Soviet forces head on
21:30and hopefully defeat them.
21:37Everyone knows that this is a pivotal moment in the war.
21:44If the Germans lost at Kursk,
21:46their ambitions on the eastern front were over.
21:50But Hitler is wracked with doubt.
21:53Does he have enough Tigers?
21:57He delays for two months so more can be made,
22:00allowing huge Soviet defences to gather.
22:07The scene is set for the biggest tank battle in history.
22:14Leading the charge will be 29-year-old Michael Wittmann.
22:19This dedicated commander has spent three months
22:21training with his new Tiger.
22:23He knows that its armour gives him a huge advantage
22:26over T-34s half the size.
22:31They can't pierce our armour unless they get within 600m.
22:34Should we keep our distance from the enemy tanks?
22:37No. Give it the gas and let them have it.
22:40But that means...
22:42Give it the gas and let them have it.
22:53On the 5th of July, 1943,
22:55Hitler finally gives the order to attack.
23:01It's the moment of truth for the Tigers.
23:04That concludes Point 228.6.
23:15Attack!
23:20Target at 2 o'clock.
23:24100m distance.
23:26Aim at 2 o'clock.
23:28Don't housebust it.
23:32Tiger's not emloaded.
23:34Stop! Stop!
23:44Fire!
23:52Three tanks dead ahead.
23:57Fire!
24:02By the end of day one,
24:05Wittmann has destroyed 15 enemy tanks and anti-tank guns.
24:15Hitler's Tiger is a deadly success.
24:20They meet us! He's turning to fire!
24:24In terms of effectiveness of killing enemy tanks,
24:28of destroying enemy tanks, the Tiger was very effective.
24:31The kill ratios were very high.
24:37After five days fighting,
24:39the Tiger helps German forces advance up to 30km.
24:44But despite the carnage,
24:46the Soviet T-34s keep coming.
24:49The problems the Germans have on the Eastern Front
24:52is just the vast numbers they come up against.
24:58It seems to be never-ending.
25:00It's sort of a bit like the Hydra's head.
25:02You chop one off and six more appear.
25:11Lieutenant, there are thousands of them.
25:14Listen to my order.
25:16There are thousands of them.
25:18Listen to my orders. Repeat them. Otherwise stay silent.
25:22Concentrate. That way you might stay alive.
25:29While Germany is creating their hand-built masterpiece,
25:33Soviet tractor factories have been churning out thousands of T-34s.
25:42The high-tech Tiger is massively outnumbered.
25:46It's also worryingly high-maintenance.
25:49It was very mechanically complex.
25:51It was also very heavy,
25:53which meant that it had problems with its engine,
25:55transmission and suspension,
25:57which caused it to have lots of breakdowns.
25:59Like many of the Tigers sent to Kursk,
26:02Wittmann's tank is not being defeated by the enemy,
26:05but by its own complex engineering.
26:08German records indicate that about as many tanks
26:11were destroyed by their own crews to avoid capture
26:14after they'd broken down or been damaged
26:16than were engaged and destroyed by enemy fire.
26:22Germany has too few Tigers
26:24to break through Soviet lines 100 kilometres deep.
26:30After losing 54,000 men and over 250 armoured vehicles,
26:36Hitler abandons the Kursk offensive.
26:45Kursk is the last time the Germans go forward on the Eastern Front.
26:52It's the last time they go forward in Soviet territory.
26:58From then on, they're always on the back foot.
27:03Building the biggest tank of the war
27:05has not brought Hitler victory on the battlefield.
27:08Yet Nazi Germany celebrates the achievements of their new supertank
27:13and its heroic commanders like Michael Wittmann.
27:17Nazi Germany is a highly militarised society
27:19and individuals are fated in a way that they're not really in America
27:25and certainly not in Britain, for example.
27:27So the cult of the ace is a big thing.
27:31So how is it possible for one man to destroy 117 tanks?
27:36What is your secret?
27:40Concentration, my Fuhrer.
27:42And the hunter's instinct, I suspect.
27:45So, how are things at the front?
27:48Are the Tigers everything you had hoped for?
27:51The Tiger is the very best tank in the world.
27:54In open country, the enemy flees as soon as he sees us.
28:00Despite losing the Battle of Kursk,
28:02the successes of individual Tigers convince Hitler that big is better.
28:08To him, the next step is logical.
28:11Germany will build the first true megatank.
28:16The idea of a megatank ranging somewhere between 100 and 250 tons
28:21was circulating in the whole continent of Europe for about 30 years.
28:25Nearly every major land had one or two designs of this in their drawers.
28:33Now, designers bombard the Fuhrer with rival plans,
28:37including a jaw-dropping design.
28:39Ten times larger than any tank in existence.
28:44The largest Nazi tank design, known as the Landkreuzer,
28:48is dreamt up by a submarine designer at Krupp Steel.
28:52Krupp has suggested to me a magnificent tank,
28:55a thousand-ton monster with a battleship gun.
28:59We can use it to replace destroyed defense bunkers.
29:02Get Herr Rothe at Krupp on the telephone.
29:06This is the only plan that exists of this vehicle.
29:10If you look at this design and consider all dimensions,
29:13it's basically a ship on land.
29:15The height of this tank would be 11 meters.
29:18That's roughly the size of a four-story house.
29:21And the overall length of the whole design would be up to 39 meters.
29:29The Landkreuzer is a tank supersized beyond practical use.
29:35Realizing this, Armaments Minister Albert Speer shuts the project down.
29:43But Hitler's desire to build a megatank is unstoppable.
29:47He turns to Dr Porsche.
29:49This legendary car designer failed in his bid to build the Tiger.
29:54But now he has a shot at redemption.
29:58He still believed that Porsche was basically a genius,
30:01and maybe this time something very good, something very new,
30:04with more battlefield power than the other classical designs.
30:09What would be the purpose of such a tank?
30:12Nothing could stop a land battleship of this size.
30:16Of course, it would not travel alone, but with an escort of smaller armored vehicles.
30:21It also seems to me we could use some steel bunkers.
30:25Suppose one of our concrete bunkers was knocked out.
30:28This steel monster could quickly plug the gap again and again.
30:34This new steel monster will be called the Maus.
30:40It's a monumental engineering challenge,
30:43and Porsche cannot afford to let his Fuhrer down again.
30:48Everything Porsche had to build into this tank according to the demands of Hitler
30:52was a problem on a much, much bigger scale than before.
30:55This is the first design Porsche proposed in June 1942.
30:59It's the classical German tank on a new scale.
31:02The whole thing was roughly double the size of a Tiger,
31:05but it still wasn't enough for Hitler.
31:09With Porsche failing to deliver the colossal scale he wants,
31:13Hitler gets even more hands-on.
31:16He specifies the exact length and diameter of the gun,
31:20and the thickness of the armor for his dream tank.
31:24So this is the final Maus,
31:26and this design now, with the demands Hitler made over the time,
31:29weighs in at 188 tons.
31:32This means the first Maus was as heavy as two Tigers,
31:35and they added just a third Tiger.
31:40On the 14th of May 1943,
31:42Hitler and Porsche gather at the Wolf's Lair to view a wooden model Maus.
31:48After disappointing Hitler with his Tiger prototype,
31:51Porsche knows another failure could be disastrous.
31:56So, can we build such tanks?
31:58Of course, mein Führer, we can build such tanks.
32:03We must now plan ahead for achieving superiority in 1944.
32:08This year, the Tiger and the Panther are the best.
32:12Next year, the Maus and the Tiger too must be the best.
32:17This is fantastic.
32:20The giant Maus is irresistible to Hitler.
32:23Porsche's super tank will be built.
32:26Everything he does leads towards vastness.
32:31Vast underground bunkers.
32:33Vast guns.
32:36Vast tanks.
32:39Hitler absolutely buys into the idea that big is better.
32:45But creating this giant tank presents Porsche with huge technical challenges.
32:50The Germans had tried building a massive mobile gun several years earlier.
32:56A weapon called the Schwerer Gustav,
32:59which dwarfed Porsche's vision for the Maus.
33:03It's a valuable lesson in the pitfalls of building big.
33:08A piece of this gun still survives.
33:12One of its shells.
33:14What strikes me first when I look at this grenade is the enormous size of it.
33:18Almost four meters long.
33:20It weighs about 5,000 kilograms.
33:22It could inflict enormous damage.
33:25It could penetrate 10 meters concrete.
33:28It could penetrate a steel plate of a meter thick.
33:32When this thing fired, you got firepower in need.
33:37Completed in 1944, the Maus is ready to go.
33:42Completed in 1942, the Gustav weighed over 1,300 tons.
33:49The gun was so big that the only way to move it was on its own dedicated railway.
33:56And transporting it to the battlefront was a mammoth undertaking.
34:01It took 25 trains to bring all the equipment, all the installations of the Schwerer Gustav.
34:08It took about two to three months before it was ready to fire in June 1942.
34:14There were 2,500 people needed to build the tracks for the gun,
34:17to assemble the gun and to fire the gun.
34:21Once in position, the Gustav required vast amounts of manpower and resources to operate.
34:28The giant gun couldn't swivel, so new railway tracks were laid to point it in the right direction.
34:35In all, it took 90 days to prepare the gun for firing.
34:42And it was only used once, against the Soviet city of Sevastopol.
34:48It was able to destroy some heavy fortifications, but at a price.
34:54It could fire 48 shots and then its barrel was worn out, worn out completely.
34:59Propelling its five ton shells at supersonic speeds had wrecked the barrel.
35:06It needs enormous maintenance to keep it in working order.
35:11And because of its dimensions, of course, it's very vulnerable to air attacks.
35:16Was the Schwerer Gustav a successful weapon? In the end, you have to answer no.
35:22When building the Maus, Porsche has to mount a large gun on the biggest tank ever built.
35:29Unlike the Gustav, though, it has to be practical and manoeuvrable.
35:35And, crucially, it must deliver Hitler the lethal killing power he craves.
35:44The Führer desperately needs weapons that can reverse the crushing losses in Russia.
35:49Weapons capable of striking fear into his enemies.
35:55Most Germans know that the war is not going to be won from 1943 onwards.
36:01But Hitler is still clinging on to this thousand year Reich concept.
36:07And because he's always been such a technology buff,
36:11he starts to put increased amount of faith in wonder weapons.
36:15You know, whether they be rockets, or jet aircraft, or even, you know, Maus tanks.
36:27Kummersdorf, Germany.
36:30It's here that Hitler's giant Maus prototypes will be stored.
36:35In 1935, at this top secret base, Hitler had been wowed by Panzer Ones weighing six tons.
36:43This is it! This is what I want!
36:48Now, Kummersdorf will house a tank 36 times bigger.
36:55This building is the building that housed the two German Panzer 7s, the Maus.
37:12This was where all of their new weapons were tested and made sure that they met the specifications.
37:20But just the sheer size of where they parked these tanks is really impressive to see.
37:28Hitler and the Nazis have high hopes for the Maus tanks stored here.
37:34They were hoping that this would be a wonder weapon,
37:37that this would be of such, you know, a large moving fortress that could defeat anything in its path.
37:45But before Hitler can use the Maus in combat, its inventor Dr. Porsche must get it mobile.
37:52Despite his disaster with the Tiger tank, he still has faith in his pioneering diesel-electric engine.
37:58Tests could prove him right.
38:00The pressure on the tracks was so good, so well distributed on the ground,
38:05that the tank actually was able to reach 15 to 20 kilometers per hour on the open terrain.
38:13Porsche managed to design the interior of the Maus so that this humongous, cumbersome, real, real big tank moves like a normal car, basically.
38:24And everybody who could drive a car could basically drive a Maus.
38:27From an engineering point of view, regarding the steering of the Maus, it's a masterpiece.
38:32Porsche's Maus is a technical triumph.
38:36But possibly not the most practical combat vehicle.
38:41Every bridge the Maus would have tried to go over would have been broken down by it.
38:46So the Maus had to go through rivers.
38:50For that, you had to build a snorkel on the Maus, keep every hole in the Maus shut,
38:54and connect it to another Maus.
38:56Because a Maus had this typical Porsche diesel electric motor, which wasn't able to function underwater.
39:04The Maus would go through the water, and then the Maus on the other side would give her energy to the second Maus, which go through the water then.
39:13On dry land, the Maus proves an astonishing gas guzzler.
39:17It burns a litre of diesel every 30 metres, at a time when fuel is increasingly scarce.
39:26The Nazi high command are divided about whether to go into full production.
39:31But the war won't wait.
39:34In June 1944, the Allies invade Normandy.
39:41Within a week, they've already taken over the city.
39:45Within a week, they've advanced deep inland.
39:50To fight back, the Nazis must rely on their original super-tank, the Tiger,
39:56and aces like Michael Wittmann.
40:01Near a village called Villers-Bocage, Wittmann is sent to observe Allied tank movements.
40:07They think they have won the war already.
40:10Let's prove them wrong.
40:12Wittmann has found an entire tank formation napping.
40:17He decides to attack with just one Tiger.
40:30So he just goes down on a parallel road, and just goes boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
40:40Taking out one after another, and the space of 15 minutes in his own tank has destroyed,
40:46has taken out between 12 and 13 British tanks, and the same number again of vehicles.
40:53It's one of the most devastating single-handed attacks of the war,
40:58and earns ice-cold tank ace Wittmann even greater fame in Nazi Germany.
41:04People like Wittmann did something good for their army concerning morale.
41:09But then again, they actually distracted from the truth of the industrial warfare.
41:14Germany simply hasn't built enough tanks.
41:18In World War II, they produced over 1,300 Tigers,
41:22compared to 50,000 Shermans built by the United States.
41:272,000 of these Shermans are given extra big guns to destroy Tigers.
41:33They are called Sherman Fireflies.
41:36The genius idea about the Firefly is you're using the same tank that's already in mass production.
41:42So to support it, you don't need any new spare parts,
41:46because it's using two things that are already in existence.
41:49A 17-pounder gun, which the artillery have, and a Sherman tank.
41:55The Firefly will prove Wittmann's nemesis.
41:59On the 8th of August, 1944, a Firefly gunner spots Wittmann's distant Tiger.
42:06Just one shot penetrates the Tiger's armour, ignites its ammo,
42:12and incinerates Wittmann and his crew.
42:21What Wittmann's death tells us is that this idea of building super-heavy,
42:26super-complicated wonder-weapon tanks didn't work out,
42:31because the Americans just took their normal mass-produced medium tank,
42:35improved it, and killed Wittmann and his Tiger.
42:40As the Allies close in from east and west, defeat for Nazi Germany creeps nearer.
42:48At Kummersdorf, Ferdinand Porsche continues to test his Maus.
42:53But only two prototypes are ever made, and the Maus hauls are never finished.
43:01The Maus was a marketing trick.
43:03It was to keep people believing in this silly war, in this vicious war,
43:10even when everything was lost.
43:13And it was obvious to everybody that things are lost.
43:16In March 1945, the Soviets reach Germany and discover two abandoned Maus tanks close to Kummersdorf.
43:25They would go on to test the Maus, but concluded that it had little practical use.
43:32No tank this big would ever be built again.
43:36I would say that the Maus was an evolutionary dead-end in terms of tank development,
43:40because it didn't have the mobility necessary to accomplish really anything practical on the modern battlefield.
43:48The Maus, like the Gustav Gunn, was a weapon supersized far beyond the practical.
43:55The result of Hitler's love of the very, very big.