Original subtitles

[suspenseful music playing]

[narrator] For Hitler, more often than not,

it was a case of style over substance.

Hitler's fantasies lead him into the realm of the gigantic.

[narrator] But when it comes to arming yourself

in major world conflict,

that might not be the way to go.

Suddenly, there was a sparkle in his eyes

that seen its potential.

It was also quite useless.

[narrator] So when it comes to weapons of war,

it pays to choose wisely.

What the Germans needed was more of what they had

rather than a few shiny new toys.

[woman] If you can be the aircraft manufacturer

that wins the war for the Fuhrer, you know, you're immortal.

[eerie music playing]

[narrator] Everyone makes mistakes,

but when you're running the biggest war in history

against the formidable and resolute enemy,

you better not make too many.

But that's exactly what Nazi Germany did,

one mistake after the other,

some small, some monumental.

But they all added up in the end

to abject defeat at the hands of the Allies.

In the First World War, in which Hitler fought,

Germany made catastrophic mistakes,

sacrificing thousands of men

and ceding territory

due to inadequate machinery and supply lines.

So why didn't Hitler take hard learned lessons

from Germany's decimation in World War I

and apply them to the new war?

[Clark] Hitler recognized that Germany was a small state

with limited resources, so he needed short sharp war,

he needed what was to become known as blitzkrieg,

he needed new weapons,

particularly fast-moving tanks,

aircraft, airborne forces.

These are weapons that could be packaged together

to create a psychological shock to an enemy

and hopefully win a campaign

far more quickly than had ever been seen before.

[narrator] Hitler had been fatally seduced

by the brilliance of the technology he witnessed

being developed by the Allies during the Great War,

including the ever larger artillery guns

and the advent of tank warfare.

He wrongly assumed that it was this heavy armor

above all else that had produced victory for the western forces.

To Hitler, size mattered.

Giant tanks, huge battleships,

and massive guns were his thing.

In his mind, imposing and indestructible,

these mind-blowing machines with their devastating capabilities

and firepower were destined to carry Germany

to a world-crushing victory,

a natural product of Aryan ingenuity

unmatched in history.

[Clark] We see Hitler trying to take shortcut

rather than growing the economy,

an industrial economy that could feed the war,

expanding his army with,

um, more tanks, more aircraft

that were easy to manufacture,

we see him putting a great deal of emphasis upon wonder weapons.

Heavier tanks with new technology

that took up huge war resources

and industrial processes that were very complicated,

the V-weapons, great deal of intellectual,

uh, firepower went into developing them,

as well as the jet engine for example.

But all of these weapons

were no match for the mass and the simplicity

of the military machine of the United Kingdom,

the United States of America, and the Soviet Union.

[Dr. Stahel] The one thing we have to remember here

is technology doesn't make war simpler,

it makes it exponentially more complicated,

and therefore the technology are just objects.

The only way to marshal this into something

that's really going to constitute a war-winning advantage

is to be able to integrate that with doctrine,

with training and with application.

That requires real skills at the human level,

everything from the people who operate those machines

to the people who are commanding all of this together.

And that is extremely complicated.

[man] And as the armor divisions thunder by, the world...

[narrator] Forget reality,

for the Nazis, it was all about appearances,

and so the idea of the Wunderwaffe

or Wonder Weapon was born.

Colorfully named by the Joseph Goebbels Nazi

propaganda ministry,

these wonder weapons were trumpeted as shocked

and awe super weapons

that would turn the tide of the war and save the Reich.

[man] But Goebbels' promises new Vengeance Weapons to his people,

huge new rocket bombs to follow V-2.

[narrator] Their propaganda was so effective,

they even managed to convince themselves

of their capacity to win Germany ultimate victory.

Continuing faith that these super weapons

were actual magic bullets

was a sign of the deluded Nazi leadership

especially Hitler himself.

And I think this is very important

partly because they don't see another option.

So this becomes very much a clutching at straws

but there is a degree of belief in this,

it is also extremely effective at the propaganda level.

I mean, if there's one thing that Germans have seen time and again

in the Third Reich

is seemingly brilliant victories being won,

especially in the early periods,

when people didn't believe this was possible,

and this is what--uh, this is what Goebbels is gonna rely on

in trying to sustain public support for the war effort.

[narrator] Some weapons were rushed into service

before they were ready with lukewarm results,

but most were so advanced or absurd

that they never made it past the drawing board

or prototype phase.

[Dr. Stahel] But the question we always have to remember

when we're talking about new weaponry and new technology

is not how good is the end product

but rather how much does the R&D cost,

how much is the unit production cost

of any one of these weapons, platforms,

and what is the ultimate utility

on the battlefield that they're going to have to find.

[Clark] There was an increasing draw

on these wonder weapons to provide a solution

that couldn't be found in

if you like more conventional

and traditional weapons,

and that was a drain on Germany.

It was a misdirection.

Certainly the commanders at the front

would just have liked more of the traditional tanks,

more of the traditional aircraft, more ammunition.

They weren't perfect by any stretch

but then nor were the Shermans or the T-34s,

but what the Germans needed was more of what they had

rather than a few shiny new toys

that were unreliable and took up

a huge amount of industrial war resources

and manpower to develop and build.

[dramatic music playing]

[narrator] Before hubris,

incompetence and overreach eventually kicked in.

The Germans enjoyed a flying start to the war

and it was largely thanks to the brilliant armored strategist,

Heinz Guderian,

who had studied tank tactics

and laid down strong blitzkrieg principle

long before 1939.

The idea was that highly mobile tanks

would rush in with the infantry

while combined with sufficient air cover

overwhelming the enemy with speed,

force, and advance communications,

and it worked.

Light tanks such as the Panzer I and Panzer II

helped to make short work of Poland and France

as they forged ahead,

supported by infantry as well as Stuka dive bombers

and Bf 109 fighters overhead.

Hitler and his gang were elated

as these early successes and superior tactics

surprised everyone

and saw them overcome most of Central and Western Europe

in a devastatingly short time.

It seemed European domination for the Reich

was just over the next battle-scarred rise.

But soon, Britain awoke from its slumber

and the Allies dug in and fought back.

As pressure increased,

it wasn't long before Hitler and his generals

began drifting from Guderian's core teachings.

Bogged down on two fronts,

they were relying more and more on the promise

of their beloved Wunderwaffe.

Their obsession with flashy, complicated,

and unreliable tanks would eventually lead them

to being outnumbered and outmaneuvered.

The first of these tanks was the famous Tiger.

And she came fully optioned,

but she was quickly followed by the King Tiger,

and then the Panther,

and then the Elefant.

And once you have an Elefant,

naturally you need a Maus.

[Colin] The ultimate example of the failed Wunderwaffe

in terms of tanks for the Nazi military

was a project called The Maus,

which was a gigantic tank

that was supposed to be the largest and most impressive

armored weapon ever seen.

Unfortunately, it was also quite useless.

[narrator] As the father of blitzkrieg,

Heinz Guderian wrote in his memoirs,

"Hitler's fantasy led him into the realm of the gigantic."

It was so big and heavy that it could not fit on any rail car,

it could not cross any bridge in Europe,

and was extremely vulnerable to air attack

where its thinner armor would allow bombs

to easily penetrate its massive hull.

It was so heavy that in order to cross rivers,

it had to have a snorkel attached to it

and it would drive across the bottom of the river

and emerge on the other side.

[narrator] As with most weaponry spat out

by an increasingly desperate Nazi war machine,

it was all way too rushed.

[Dr. Stahel] One would think that in a rational state,

you would streamline the production of vehicles

and you would have one way of producing them,

but actually the truth is there were multiple different series

within any one of these named tanks

and the series are constantly being changed.

They're only producing a few hundred at a time before they say,

"Hey, we could graft on new changes,

halt the production lines, retool,

now we'll produce the new series,

and it's still called a Panther, it's still called a Mark IV,

but it's a different slightly tank."

[narrator] And if you thought the Germans had a problem with tanks,

what about trucks?

[Dr. Stahel] To give you an example of how absurd that becomes,

the German army is fighting with something

like a hundred and fifty different models of truck.

Now trucks seems the most people are like,

"Well, that's the most important piece of technology,"

but it absolutely is given how fundamental movement is.

And every time you have a truck that breaks down,

which spare part do you have?

The German army has to have a list

of something like a million spare parts just for its trucks

because there are so many different varieties.

Now, part of that is the different number of German development programs

that they have over the years,

part of that is the fact that they are accessing

all of European truck resources,

so they got Swiss trucks, they got French trucks,

but the problem remains,

Germany is dealing with a system

that is in no way rationalized and thereby so inefficient.

[narrator] On the other side,

the Allies had turned mid-war development

into getting serious numbers of tested weapons

through their munitions factories

and interservice as a result of tough and bloody battle lessons.

The German trouble with tanks

was never more exposed

than at the Battle of Kursk in 1943.

It was the last great blitzkrieg offensive

and the biggest tank battle of World War II.

Hitler even postponed the attack

until he had all his new and improved Panther tanks available.

[Clark] The trouble is that although the Panther

was a very good medium-cum-heavy tank,

it was not worth Hitler postponing

his offensive for

because when it eventually got to the fighting front,

it was there in few numbers,

it was unreliable,

the troops weren't trained

in its use in a way that it really,

um, required those troops to be trained,

and they couldn't get the Panthers

where they needed in time for the beginning of the offensive.

And in a sense therefore,

he was putting the cart before the horse,

he was putting the technology

to the front of his campaign

thinking when in fact there were many other priorities

that should've driven him to an earlier attack phase.

[narrator] The smaller Russian T-34s

literally ran rings around the German behemoths.

Engaged in mass tank assaults and using their superior mobility,

the T-34s swarmed all over the cumbersome Panthers,

Elefants, and Ferdinands

knocking them off easily at close range,

wrote one German officer,

"About 150 to 200 meters in front of me

appeared 15, then 30, then 40 tanks.

Finally, there were too many to count."

The amount of emphasis that Germany

put on the development and construction

of the Tiger I, the Tiger II, the Panther

was out of all proportion

to what Germany really needed

its tank production to be processing.

It needed more tanks,

perhaps of the lighter grade

that could actually do damage

and take on the mass of the T-34s,

but Germany's economy just couldn't produce

the number of tanks that were required,

went up against the industrial might of the Soviet Union.

[narrator] Defeat at the Battle of Kursk

meant the end of Hitler's dream to control Russia

while providing stark proof

that bigger was not necessarily better.

[dramatic music playing]

[narrator] Above all in World War II,

there was one indisputable fact

when it came to the critical conflict,

air cover was everything.

And because the Allies maintained their superiority throughout,

no Wunderwaffe jet, tank, gun, or ship,

no matter how ultrahigh tech

was every free from relentless air assault

as well as constant observation of their every move,

and it was driving Hitler crazy.

To try and appease the Fuhrer, the Luftwaffe

was developing and introducing a vast array

of different groundbreaking flying weapon

but this was the problem.

[Dr. David] You need to have a rationalization

not just in terms of how you organize spare parts

but you need to have a rationalization

in what production lines you pursue.

I mean, ultimately if you're interested in efficiency,

you choose a select number of, uh, models that you wanna produce

and then invest everything in producing as many of these as possible.

And that's not necessarily the way Germany works.

They are in competition

so they were competing models and competing planes

which means that even pilot schools are not necessarily transferable,

you learn on one plane, uh, and that means you only fly those planes.

And how many other planes can you fly

or have you got expertise in?

[narrator] And the battle between the aircraft manufacturers

to secure defense contracts

was almost as intense and bloody

as what was happening in the skies above Europe.

Just like the various branches, the military subscribed

to the Wunderwaffe idea

in order to gain political favor and industrial allocation,

so did the various manufacturers of these weapons

such as the aircraft manufacturers Messerschmitt and Focke-Wulf

were constantly fighting with each other

in order to get allocation for their weapons.

And undoubtedly, this competition

between the different aircraft manufacturers

for the Nazi Germany in order to secure the Fuhrer's favor

and his funding,

um, surely paved the way towards Wunderwaffe as well

because they were needing to come up with these more unique designs,

with these radical designs,

and if you can be the aircraft manufacturer

that wins the war for the Fuhrer,

you know, you're immortal.

[narrator] This talented industrial hothouse

worked feverishly to impress the Fuhrer

and head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goring

They emerged with incredible cutting-edge concept such as

rocket propulsion and even gigantic high-tech gliders.

A sensible leadership would have concentrated

on economical but conventional designs

that could be mass-produced with the resources at hand.

In fact, due to a lack of fuel,

many of these shiny new flying marvels

never made it into the air.

They were destroyed while sitting at airfields

waiting for fuel that never came.

In 1944, too late to make much difference

an incredible little machine bursts out of the clouds,

the Messerschmitt 163 Komet.

It was designed as a rocket-powered interceptor

aimed at disrupting and destroying enemy bombing raids.

In reality, it was a rocket with a pilot seat.

The idea was for the Komet to sit on the tarmac

like a spider in its web

waiting for the drone of an Allied bomber formation above.

It had this amazing capacity for speed.

It was relatively agile

but it came with an awful lot of bugs and a lot of danger.

So it had the issue with the fact that it needed to land

in its early prototype days on a skid,

which of course was incredibly precarious.

The fact that its fuel were so corrosive

that it could burn through human flesh

was of course a catastrophe.

And ultimately it sort of had potential

that really couldn't be realized

because of the pressures that were mounting

on the National Socialist regime.

[Colin] It was so fast and so powerful that Nazi pilots only had

about one or two seconds of firing time

as they approached the Allied bombers.

The tremendous speed of the Komet also came at a cost of fuel.

It could only stay in the air for about seven minutes.

Afterwards, it had to glide back to base

and perform a belly landing,

as the Komet did not have any undercarriage.

It lost its wheels as soon as it took off in the air.

[narrator] Brilliant it may have been,

but despite all the engineering and technical breakthroughs,

the Komet finished up shooting down

a mere 16 Allied bombers,

a massive failure for such a pioneering aircraft.

If it had come earlier,

another fantastic jet fighter

that had the potential to change the course of the air war

was the Messerschmitt 262 Swallow jet fighter.

How could such a cutting-edge aircraft,

possibly the best fighter to ever enter the war

and one that ultimately shot down

over 500 enemy aircraft

still end up on the long list of Wunderwaffe blunders?

Contrary to popular belief,

the jet engine was actually available

before the outbreak of World War II.

The Germans had a working prototype

in 1938 and 1939.

However, these engines are tremendously unreliable

and at times provided not enough thrust

to even get the airframe off the ground.

The initial BMW engines could only last about five to six hours

before they had to be torn down.

Despite these weaknesses, this was a propulsion system

that was deemed the future for fighter aircraft

and hence the Germans developed the Me 262 Swallow.

The Me 262 was a little bit held back by the fact that

Hitler didn't fully commit to its development until 1942,

when he'd seen it in its second demonstration

and its second test flight,

and suddenly there was a sparkle in his eyes that seen its potential.

But the problem is, is that Hitler saw it differently to the Luftwaffe.

[Colin] He deemed that the Me 262 should be a bomber

as there was a need currently for a fast tactical bomber

to support the Wehrmacht forces in Europe

Unfortunately, the design of the 262

up to that point was for a high performance,

high altitude fighter,

and it thus had to be completely redesigned

in order to be a bomber aircraft or a strike aircraft.

[narrator] Added to that, it was also vulnerable on landing,

as it had to slow right down on a very long approach.

If the Allied Mosquito and Typhoon fighters

didn't pick it off then,

they attacked it on the ground where most Swallows were destroyed.

So the Me 262 could have changed the tide of the Second World War

but it was simply held back far too often by, you know,

delays in its production, in delivering engines,

in making all the necessary modifications

in order to make it operational,

and it simply appeared far too late in the war

in order to make the sizeable impact

that it could have been capable of making.

[narrator] Once again,

even though it was flawed,

so many things were right about this wonder weapon,

but there was never enough time to properly test them to find it,

and the Swallow ultimately proved next to useless.

New technology needs time to develop,

to trial, to bed in,

and then to have a doctrine built around it for its use.

It needs to be bought into by the military.

The Germans rushed through their technology.

A lot of their weapons that they eventually used

were still developmental pieces.

Had they started this process

of developing their technology earlier,

then the scenario could have changed.

[narrator] In 1943,

a rather desperate Hermann Goring

presented to the German aviation industry

a novel challenge.

[Victoria] Goring envisioned this sort of three times a thousand goal

so that his bombers would be able to

carry a payload of a thousand kilograms

that they would be able to travel a thousand kilometers

and that they would be able to fly at a thousand kilometers per hour.

[Colin] This was, to traditional prop aircraft, impossible.

And the only airframe that was able to do it was jet-propelled.

This leads to the development, the lengthy development

of the Horten 229,

which was to be a high altitude strike aircraft

that was able to fulfill this requirement of the three by 1000.

The Horten 229 was revolutionary

in the fact that it was a flying wing design,

it did not have any rudders,

was very, very fast, extremely maneuverable

but it took forever to develop.

[narrator] Development was cut short when during flight,

one of the engines caught fire.

The test pilot was killed as the plane burst into flames

and spiraled into the ground,

as ultimately did the entire project.

But the Wunderwaffe that struck most fear

into the British people

were the infamous V-1 and V-2 rockets.

These were quintessential terror weapons

or revenge weapons as German propaganda liked to call them.

[Prof. Lloyd] I wanna say German fighting methods

were always about having a psychological impact on the enemy.

So if one looks at blitzkrieg,

the speed of the tanks was very, very important.

The same is true of the V weapons,

not so much in their precision but in their randomness.

The doodlebug could fall pretty much anywhere.

The V-2 rocket was quite unreliable.

They were great psychological weapons

but probably at the wrong time.

By the time the doodlebug and the V-2 were being used,

we're seeing that the British people

had made such a sacrifice

that they weren't going to be cowered

and demoralized fundamentally

by these wonder weapons flying over

Southern England.

They would see the war through.

And so in a sense, these wonder weapons came too late

to have the psychological impact

that Hitler desired them to have.

[narrator] The V-1 was in essence

an early cruise missile.

Hitler turned to these flying bombs

as retaliation for the massive German loses,

inflicted by Allied bombing raids in cities such Hamburg.

The V-1, however, was very unreliable

and remained wildly inaccurate

throughout its deployment.

[man] It was powered by a ramjet engine

burning ordinary low grade petrol.

Across the engine air intake was an array of small flaps.

Air was forced these flaps by the forward speed of the machine.

A fuel was injected and the mixture ignited by a simple sparkplug.

It sounded nearly like a car engine

with a fractured silencer.

[narrator] Without adequate launch capabilities,

the V-1 rockets had to be launched

by catapults and ramps from the French Coast

towards targets in England and Belgium.

The rocket featured a rudimentary guidance system onboard

to carry its warhead to the target.

Though these flying bombs were fast,

many of the Allied fighters like the Mustangs,

updated Spitfires and Tempests

could just about keep up with them.

[explosion]

[narrator] Providing opportunities for it to be shot down

or for it to be wing tipped off course.

[explosion]

[narrator] But despite so many missing the target,

the weapon caused fear and mayhem in Britain

with children evacuated from the cities to the countryside.

But there was no defense against the more advanced version, the V-2.

An early ballistic missile,

it smashed into cities with a ton of explosives onboard.

It was the most powerful weapon ever deployed until the atomic bomb.

[Dr. Stahel] There's absolutely no question that the V-2 rocket probably bes

among all of them is a remarkable scientific achievement.

But the real question is, what does it cost to develop a V-2 rocket?

And what is its real military utility?

[man] The V-2 uses over 12,000 pounds of liquid oxygen and alcohol.

Though it has no explosive head, the fuel renders it highly lethal.

[Colin] These incredibly advanced weapons

that took immense resources and manpower

and scientific knowhow to create

were in a sense ineffectual in any way in affecting the war.

They were perhaps the best example of the failed Wunderwaffe

and how they did not save Germany from defeat.

[narrator] The stark truth is that more force laborers died

building and testing Germany's secret weapon

than were killed from its deployment and impacts in Britain.

[Dr. Stahel] Postwar, the United States Air Force

does a study of these V weapons

to try and work out well how much was invested in them,

and the conclusion it comes to

is that if the Germans hadn't pursued the V weapons

and instead invested all of that financin

and industrial resource into just producing fighters,

they calculated Germany would have been able to produce another 25,000 fighters.

And the disparity there is huge

and it reflects the choices that are being made

in the Third Reich

and that grasping at straws that wonder weapons

might in fact actually turn the war,

when in fact that wasn't gonna happen.

[narrator] Apart from the famous V rockets,

the Nazis wasted their time on a number of other futile

wonder weapon missiles and projectiles,

even air-to-air missiles, none of which ever reached combat.

Ultimately, Goring's Luftwaffe failed to own the skies over Europe.

And without winning in the air,

the Nazis were always staring the barrel of defeat.

A lack of decent frontline fighters, bombers,

and attack aircraft to replace obsolete machines proved telling.

As historian Gerhard Weinberg put it,

the Germans would have been better off in World War II

if they had not built a navy at all

and devoted those resources to the army and Luftwaffe.

From the beginning, the Kriegsmarine

was no match for the British and United States navies,

both in strength and numbers,

at least as far as the surface fleet went

On February the 14th, 1939,

the 823-foot Bismarck was launched at Hamburg.

For Hitler, the state of the art battleship

heralded the rebirth of the German surface fleet.

In 1941, she was ordered to break out into the Atlantic

where she began a brief raiding spree.

But her movement in being detected

and almost the entire British fleet was hot on her tail.

She was intercepted near Iceland

by two British battleships where after an intense battle,

the British HMS Hood,

one of the most advanced of the Royal Navy's battlecruisers

exploded and sank with over 2,000 crew lost.

It was a serious and bitter blow for the Royal Navy.

Two days later, the Bismarck was sighted and attacked

by British aircraft again and again

until she was reduced to a smoking wreck.

The pride of the German fleet sank with almost all-hands.

After the sinking of the Bismarck in 1941,

Hitler was afraid to use the rest of his surface fleet.

He had powerful surface vessels such as the Bismarck sister ship,

the Tirpitz or battlecruisers

such as the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.

But he did not readily commit them to frontline battle.

The sinking of the Bismarck was a serious blow to his pride

and he did not wanna suffer that again.

So therefore, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau

spent most of the war in berth, in port, in dock,

or in secondary conflicts.

The Tirpitz itself constantly was in dock, being shuffled around.

Despite the fact that he didn't commit them to frontline battle,

Hitler lost all three of those vessels.

The Scharnhorst was sunk by the HMS Howe

and other cruisers off the coast to Russia.

The Gneisenau was constantly a target for Allied vessels,

so much so that Hitler got fed up and sank it as a block vessel

and took its cannons off to form a defensive armament at the Atlantic Wall.

And the Tirpitz was constantly bombed and being refitted

until the end of the war.

[narrator] As the war years went on,

Hitler became increasingly disillusioned with his surface fleet.

There's no question that the German Navy should have been

configured entirely differently than it was under Adolf Hitler.

Uh... But, you know, like his predecessor Kaiser Wilhelm II,

Adolf Hitler was a very weak

and insecure and vainglorious figure

who saw his status reflected in the size of warships.

So he wanted big battleships, you know,

big showy battleships, like the Tirpitz,

like the Bismarck to show, you know, Nazi progress

and Nazi might and Nazi power.

But these things were useless against,

you know, better armed and better equipped navies and air forces

like the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force,

which could strike these things from the air or from--

by submarines or surface fleets and destroy them.

He would have been far better off investing his money in submarines.

[narrator] From 1943, the focus of the Kriegsmarine

was directed beneath the waves,

into the feared wolf packs

patrolling the Atlantic and the seas around Britain.

The fact that Hitler viewed his attack submarines as shining lights

on his marine forces was made crystal clear

when the head of the U-boat fleet Karl Donitz

replaced Admiral Raeder as commander of the Kriegsmarine.

Donitz had previously said

if he had 300 U-boats or Unterseeboot,

he could strangle Britain and win the war

No wonder these were the weapons

that could have proved decisive against the Allies.

[Colin] The Kriegsmarine were constantly trying to perfect

the designs of the U-boats.

The first Type VII was more of a coastal going U-boat,

it had limited armament, limited range.

The Type IX was a much larger ocean going U-boat

that could actually reach the North American shores.

And these designs were constantly being revised throughout the war.

[narrator] U-boats were fitted with special tiles

to mask the sub's acoustic signature.

Snorkels were developed to allow the U-boats to recharge

their batteries underwater

without revealing their position on the surface.

But even though Hitler was a fan of the U-boats,

the sneaky subs weren't exactly the type of weapon

that reflected the glamorous showy image of the Nazi machine.

The more exotic and high visibility aircraft Goring was pushing,

though far less affective,

were a much glamorous propaganda proposition.

So that's where the funding went,

money that Donitz so desperately needed

to keep his U-boats competitive.

Another example of how the three arms of the German forces

fought and undermined each other,

critically hollowing out the entire war effort.

They all produced more fanciful and exciting weapons

to show Hitler in order to gain that favor.

New jets, new aircraft, new tanks,

all these very exciting

and technologically advanced weapons were produced

mainly to gain his favor and gain military allocation.

[narrator] But if you can't have massive and showy, how about tiny?

The Germans even managed to waste time in mini-subs,

not one but several varieties,

Neger, Seehund, Biber.

Some were inhuman deathtraps where the submariners

needed to be administered drugs to even get them to go onboard.

[Norman] These mini submarines were manned by one or two sailors,

they would go down in those mini-subs.

And the plan which was executed worse

that they would spend five days

to a week in those mini-subs,

travel all the way to the Thames Estuary,

even to travel to United States and torpedo American ships

or launch bombs against Manhattan for example.

Problem was that if you are alone

in one of these mini submarines for a week,

you basically die as soon as you fall asleep

because you cannot operate your vehicle anymore.

So they had to stay awake for extremely long periods of time,

longer than even methamphetamine allows.

[suspenseful music playing]

[narrator] In 1937,

Hitler met with industrialist Gustav Krupp.

He liked what he heard.

He was spooking the design of the 80-centimeter railway gun

known as the Schwerer Gustav

or Heavy Gustav, named after Gustav Krupp himself.

It was to be the world's biggest gun.

It's not known how Gustav felt about the moniker

but he shouldn't have worried

because construction workers nicknamed the monster gun Dora and it stuck.

Predictably, the construction deadline of 1940 was missed.

[Colin] The Gustav or Dora as it was affectionately

called by the troops that used it

was a gigantic 80-centimeter railway gun.

This was an antiquated idea for a modern problem

to deliver high ordinance on an enemy target.

It was used a few times on the Eastern Front

until it warped its barrel,

it was rebuilt and never deployed again.

[narrator] Accounts vary as to whether there were actually two guns built,

the Gustav and the Dora

or was it just the one gun with two names

As far as the Wehrmacht was concerned, one was probably enough.

[Dr. Stahel] More and more Goebbels talks about these illusive wonder weapons,

more and more he frames them in the terms of Endsieg,

the idea of final victory.

And more people don't really know what they are,

he can show small snippets of rockets being launched and people think,

"Wow. Okay. So these are a real thing, we are going to get the wonder weapons,"

and in spite of everything that they're seeing, the reality of the war,

the closing in of the borders, there's always this reservoir of hope.

At some point, we're gonna get these

magical weapons that are gonna turn the tide.

And have we seen this before in the war? We have.

[narrator] In the end, the Wunderwaffe

did achieve a critical and lasting legacy

But not the glorious version Hitler had been counting on.

Instead, they became a byword for false hope,

unrealistic expectation, and wasted money

They were ridiculed by western satirists and became a feature

of the whispered gallows humor among the defeated German populist.

So how did it all go so wrong for the Germans

from a position of superior technology,

a subservient population,

a highly motivated warrior ethos,

and early tactical brilliance,

a blind belief in technology as the ultimate savior of the Reich

became a critical drag on the Nazi war effort.

The Wunderwaffe was by and large

a massive marketing or propaganda ploy,

they were the weapons that were gonna win the war for Germany

when other weapons were seemed to be failing.

Unfortunately, this really was not the case.

What Germany needed was sufficient number of good enough weapons,

not the best but good enough

in order to produce in sufficient numbers

and have them be effective and reliable on a large scale,

so they can fight their multiple opponents that they had.

[narrator] This premise may seem obvious enough

but the logic somehow eluded the Nazis,

at least it eluded Hitler.

They've made a fetish out of military technology,

that's why the Wochenschau--

When we see these propaganda films that Goebbels has been showing,

in the early part of the war, it always emphasized technology.

The idea of the resurgent Luftwaffe coming in and winning campaigns,

he has the idea to fit cameras onto the front of the plane

so you get this magnificent footage

of them conducting these bombings and these Stuka raids and so on.

Well, they're doing the same thing again.

And when people are questioning at the most basic level,

where are we going with the war?

The two answers you get are,

"Well, we still have Adolf Hitler

and there is the potential for these wonder weapons."

Who knows what they are?

[narrator] The truth was that the Nazi war room

was a spiraling echo chamber of illusion and vanity,

a place where Hitler and his crazed visions

were fed by sycophants and yes men.

The engineers and industrialists often found themselves

in an impossible situation,

forced to pander with positive reports and predictions

just to keep a contract, keep favor,

and even just to stay alive.

From a brilliant start to the war, within a few years,

through courageous resistance at home and aboard,

the Allies had ground the Germans down.

By 1943, all Germany had left in their arsenal was the stoked fears

about the coming wonder weapons with wild claims of mass destruction,

vengeance, and ultimate victory for Germany.

When what they needed were designs that were simple and cost-effective

and advanced enough to be reliably

deployed in combat in large enough numbers.

If they had done this, things might have turned out differently.

Fortunately for us, the Nazis failed to do any of it.

[explosions]

[closing theme music playing]