- 7/10/2025
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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.
00:20That's roughly the size of a four-story house.
00:23Inspired by the Fuhrer 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 supertanks.
00:43The engineers who built them.
00:45It's a masterpiece.
00:46And the aces who rode them into battle.
00:49Kill ratios were very high.
00:52Attackers!
00:54In the space of 15 minutes, Michael Wittman destroyed 13 tanks.
00:59Fire!
01:01The biggest construction projects of World War II.
01:06Ordered by Hitler to secure world domination.
01:11Now they survive as dark reminders of the Fuhrer's fanatical military ambitions.
01:17These are the secrets of the Nazi megastructures.
01:29The Eastern Front.
01:32SS Commander Michael Wittman is riding into the largest tank fight in history.
01:38The Battle of Kursk.
01:44Rappetut!
01:450.228.
01:470.6.
01:48Attack!
01:49Attack!
01:50Attack!
01:51Attack!
01:53Tanks dominate land warfare in World War II.
01:56And Wittmann commands the biggest yet built, the Tiger.
02:02It's an awesome machine.
02:05And Wittmann will use it to become Germany's most celebrated and deadly tank ace.
02:11A-Max, do a club!
02:15No fire exploded!
02:18Fire exploded!
02:21Fire!
02:26Fire!
02:31Today, only a priceless handful of Hitler's huge Tiger tanks remain.
02:38And just one reveals how they were put together.
02:44It's the only occasion you can see this tank and its pieces like a gigantic puzzle.
02:50Tank historian Ralf Raths is exploring Nazi Germany's entire supertanks program.
02:58Because, 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.
03:09Hitler'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.
03:27This would have been something that would have been burned into his memory from his years as an infantryman.
03:34People tend to view the First World War as the war of the machine gun, but 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.
03:49In World War I, Hitler doesn't just watch artillery getting bigger, he sees it becoming more mobile.
04:01With the arrival of the first tank, Britain's Mark I.
04:09Here you are, a German infantryman in 1917, and over your trench looms this giant metal box,
04:15which is impervious to the light, small arms that you've got with you.
04:21It must have been an extremely frightening experience the first time one of those tanks crossed over a trench.
04:29Fifteen years on, Hitler rises to power, promising to avenge the losses of World War I.
04:38But peace treaties ban Germany from building tanks, a must-have weapon for modern armies.
04:45So Hitler approves their development in secret.
04:57Today, hidden in thick pine forest, lies an abandoned Nazi military complex that once led the world in weapons development.
05:08This is the former HQ for Nazi black ops.
05:11Over 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.
05:26And 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.
05:40This is where they conducted tests on their tanks.
05:45But it certainly has run down now, seen its better days.
05:50Tests performed here would transform Hitler's idea of how to fight a mobile ground war.
05:56It would be scary to get inside the mind of Hitler, but he had to have been influenced by World War I,
06:04where he was a corporal that fought on the front lines and saw the horrors of that static linear warfare.
06:10No one wanted to have another war like World War I, so everyone was thinking about what can the tank do
06:20to restore mobility to the battlefield so that you avoid that long, drawn-out, costly war.
06:26At Kummersdorf in early 1935, Hitler is shown the first Nazi tank, the Panzer I.
06:42It can move at 39 kilometers per hour, eight times faster than the tanks Hitler saw in World War I.
06:49When he was presented with a display of what tanks could do here at Kummersdorf, he had to be impressed.
07:01This is it. This is what I want.
07:08Hitler's new panzers promise unprecedented mobility on the battlefield.
07:13But there's a problem.
07:15The panzers that so impressed Hitler are really tiny.
07:18They're six foot high, they're only armed with machine guns, there's two men in them,
07:22but very quickly they realize that these tanks are just not going to cut it in a modern war.
07:30Between 1934 and 1939, Nazi Germany produces a series of bigger panzers with bigger guns.
07:39The panzer II gets a cannon, and then the panzer III gets a slightly bigger cannon,
07:43and the panzer IV is a yet bigger cannon than that.
07:46So they go from, say, 5.8 tons, which is the size of the panzer I, to 20 tons, which is the size of the panzer IV.
07:56In just five years, Hitler's panzers quadruple in size.
08:00No longer a secret, the panzers are about to go into action for the first time.
08:12In September 1939, these tanks smash into Poland, kick-starting World War II.
08:18The unprecedented speed and power of panzer warfare spawns a new word.
08:28Blitzkrieg. Lightning War.
08:30The genius behind the Nazis' successful blitzkrieg tactics is General Heinz Guderian.
08:44This landscape is perfect.
08:46Yes, sir.
08:47Yes, sir.
08:47The panzer in the middle.
08:48Grenadiers left and right.
08:50Yes, sir.
08:53Guderian's success is about far more than cutting-edge machinery.
08:57The point about the panzer arm is it's not just the tank.
09:02The tank is the visual expression of that.
09:06You know, when you see the film footage, what you see is the tanks.
09:12But actually, what makes them effective is the whole package.
09:15It's the communication ability.
09:17It's the cooperation with the air forces, with artillery, with infantry.
09:22That'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 Vidman.
10:06A farmer's son who has risen through the ranks of the SS.
10:10He's forging a reputation as a commander with an uncanny knack for killing the enemy.
10:16Fire!
10:22In 1941, he's part of an unstoppable German army that conquers huge swathes of Europe.
10:30Now Hitler turns his tanks east for the invasion of the Soviet Union.
10:36Operation Barbarossa.
10:38When Barbarossa commences, the world will hold its breath and make no comment.
10:45We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.
10:50The Führer masses the largest invasion force in history on the Soviet frontier.
10:593,600 tanks and 4 million men.
11:02The confidence 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, ever since the Nazis took power,
11:14as being a bunch 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.
11:29Within hours, they make a shocking discovery.
11:45The Soviets have a much better tank.
11:47The T-34.
11:59In previous battles across Europe, Hitler's armored units have destroyed everything in their path.
12:08But the T-34 is heavier, faster, with better armor, and packs a bigger punch than the latest panzers.
12:15Hitler is going to need some bigger tanks.
12:23German engineers are searching for a weapon that can eliminate the threat posed by Soviet T-34 tanks.
12:30And they find it in the form of a gun called the Flak 88.
12:36Originally designed to shoot down planes, this weapon will one day sit on the first Nazi supertank.
12:43We need a bigger gun.
12:45I've said this before.
12:48Do not try to trick me.
12:51We need a tank with an 88.
12:58If the Germans mount the Flak 88 on a panzer, it'll be the biggest gun ever put on a tank.
13:06But adding a gun this size will add huge amounts of weight.
13:09Deciding for an 8.8 centimeter gun was also deciding for a heavy tank because you need a big heavy tank to transport this gun.
13:19This new supertank will be very different from the panzers that came before.
13:23It'll be given a name, the Tiger.
13:27The development of the Tiger is a major turning point because it marks the point where the Germans suddenly go,
13:32yes, big is good when it comes to armor.
13:36Hitler's new monster will be the biggest tank the war has seen.
13:41Now, he needs someone to design it.
13:45His first choice is a 66-year-old car designer named Ferdinand Porsche.
13:54Porsche has never built a tank before and is best known for something rather smaller, the Volkswagen Beetle.
14:02Hitler admired Porsche because he thought that he was a technical genius.
14:08Maybe the biggest technical genius of the time.
14:12Shortly after Hitler came to power, Porsche and Hitler met and Porsche introduced his ideas of a sports car.
14:23That car was very successful at the time and it raced around here.
14:28This is the former Avis racetrack, Berlin.
14:32Here in the 1930s, Porsche's sports cars showcased German engineering excellence and delighted Hitler.
14:42That led to a commission to build the Beetle, Nazi 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, the difference couldn't be bigger.
15:02This Volkswagen here was designed to serve the people, the 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.
15:19Hitler and the Nazis said, go ahead, let's make a real monster of a tank.
15:26Porsche said, okay, let's do it.
15:28But even for can-do Dr. Porsche, putting together a monster tank won't be easy.
15:36Today, at an old flower warehouse in Switzerland, an exceptionally rare Tiger II tank is being rebuilt from scratch.
15:52For tank historian Ralph Raths, it offers an unprecedented chance to see first-hand the challenges facing Porsche.
16:05That's a very impressive sight.
16:10Porsche's Tiger will have thousands of precision parts, many hand-tooled.
16:17The main cause for its size and complexity is the gun.
16:20If you build a big gun and it shoots, it will go back through the recoil.
16:26So if the gun goes back into the turret, it needs space.
16:29So you have to make the turret bigger so that the gun has the room to go back.
16:34So if you start to make the gun bigger, everything else will get bigger accordingly.
16:46To carry the 88-millimeter gun, the Tiger will be more than twice the size of any previous panzer and weigh 60 tons.
16:55The pressure on Porsche is compounded by the announcement that a rival German engineering giant, Henschel, will also make a prototype.
17:08The successful model will result in a massive contract for the winning designer.
17:15The Henschel engineers took the classical path.
17:17They put an engine in the back of the tank, a transmission through the whole tank,
17:21and then generating power on the axle of the tank via torque on the tracks.
17:26That's the classical way to power a German tank.
17:31Porsche, on the other hand, used a combined diesel-electro engine, meaning that he had a diesel engine powering two electromotors on each track separately,
17:42which had the great advantage that there was no transmission needed at all.
17:46Porsche's system does away with mechanical gears, which are heavy and take up valuable space.
17:55It's a bold, visionary idea that won't be adopted for mass-produced cars until the 1990s.
18:02But will it work on a revolutionary new tank?
18:05Hitler's 53rd birthday.
18:11His treat? To watch demonstrations of the two rival Tiger prototypes.
18:18Porsche's so confident his version will get the Führer's approval that he's already building 100 chassis.
18:24When Porsche and Henschel presented their prototypes on Hitler's birthday in 1942,
18:32the classical conservative design of Henschel proved very well on the testing fields.
18:36They drove around, they did everything they were asked for, the machine worked.
18:39It's just the electrics. It is not a problem.
18:51The Porsche Tiger, on the other hand, went up in flames internally and didn't accomplish anything on the testing field.
18:58So the decision was quite clear.
19:01Porsche's innovative tank is a failure.
19:04His engine is too complicated and suffers repeated fires.
19:07Porsche's idea were intelligent and clever and interesting, but 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, the T-34.
19:28It's also precision engineered by hand and even comes with its own operator's manual.
19:34They produced this richly illustrated and very well-written manual for the Tiger crew,
19:41so that each and every man on the Tiger knew what he had to do in his function on the Tiger.
19:47To grab attention, the Tiger manual includes pictures of scantily clad women
19:52and armaments minister, Albert Speer, telling gunners not to waste ammunition.
20:02It also features clever tips on how to deal with the tank's exceptional weight.
20:06It says if you're not sure if your Tiger is too heavy for the ground, take a comrade,
20:12put him on your back, go to the place you're unsure about, and stand on one leg.
20:17If you don't sink into the ground, the ground pressure of your Tiger is okay with that ground.
20:22If you sink in, your Tiger's too heavy. So the heaviness is a problem,
20:26but they also provide the solutions for the simple man at the front how to decide what to do.
20:30The Tiger is an expensive sledgehammer built to smash Soviet lines.
20:40Now, Hitler will test it in combat at the largest tank battle in history.
20:44But will his decision to go big pay off?
21:00Spring 1943.
21:04The Russian Front.
21:08The German forces are preparing to attack a 200-kilometre bulge around the city of Kursk.
21:14The reason the Germans want to do this, to attack here, is twofold.
21:20First, because they want to reduce the front by 170 miles.
21:25The main reason is to take on the biggest concentration of Soviet forces head on,
21:30and hopefully defeat them.
21:37Everyone knows that this is a pivotal moment in the war.
21:40If the Germans lost at Kursk, their ambitions on the Eastern Front were over.
21:50But Hitler is racked with doubt.
21:53Does he have enough Tigers?
21:55He delays for two months so more can be made, allowing huge Soviet defenses to gather.
22:07The scene is set for the biggest tank battle in history.
22:11The army is set for three months.
22:14Leading the charge will be 29-year-old Michael Wittmann.
22:18This dedicated commander has spent three months training with his new Tiger.
22:22He knows that its armor gives him a huge advantage of a T-34's half the size.
22:32They can't pierce our armor unless they get within 600 meters.
22:36Should we keep our distance from the enemy tanks?
22:39No.
22:39Give it the gas and let them have it.
22:41On the 5th of July 1943, Hitler finally gives the order to attack.
23:00It's the moment of truth for the Tigers.
23:03That concludes 0.228.6.
23:15Attack!
23:20Target at 2 o'clock!
23:24100 meters distance!
23:26I'm at 2 o'clock!
23:28No high explosives!
23:30I'm at 2 o'clock!
23:31I'm at 2 o'clock!
23:32I'm at 2 o'clock!
23:32I'm at 2 o'clock!
23:33I'm at 2 o'clock!
23:33Stop!
23:34Stop!
23:34Stop!
23:34Stop!
23:35Stop!
23:43Fire!
23:52Three tanks step ahead!
23:57Fire!
24:00Fire!
24:03By the end of day one, Wittmann has destroyed 15 enemy tanks and anti-tank guns.
24:16Hitler's Tiger is a deadly success.
24:20They need us!
24:22He's turning to fire!
24:28In terms of effectiveness of killing enemy tanks, of destroying enemy tanks, the Tiger was very effective.
24:34The kill ratios were very high.
24:37After five days fighting, the Tiger helps German forces advance up to 30 kilometers.
24:47But despite the carnage, the Soviet T-34s keep coming.
24:52The problems the Germans have on the Eastern Front is just the vast numbers they come up against.
25:02It seems to be never-ending.
25:04It's sort of a bit like the Hydra's head.
25:05You chop one off and six more appear.
25:15Lieutenant, there are thousands of them.
25:17Listen to my orders.
25:19Repeat them.
25:19Otherwise, stay silent.
25:22Concentrate.
25:22That way you might stay alive.
25:24While Germany is creating their hand-built masterpiece, Soviet 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, which meant that it had problems with its engine, transmission, and suspension,
25:57which caused it to have lots of breakdowns.
25:59Like many of the Tigers sent to Kursk, Wittmann'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 were destroyed by their own crews to avoid capture
26:14after they'd broken down or been damaged than were engaged and destroyed by enemy fire.
26:22Germany has too few Tigers to break through Soviet lines 100 kilometers deep.
26:30After losing 54,000 men and over 250 armored vehicles, Hitler abandons the Kursk offensive.
26:38Kursk is the last time the Germans go forward at 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 has not bought Hitler victory on the battlefield.
27:08Yet Nazi Germany celebrates the achievements of their new supertank
27:13and its heroic commanders like Michael Wittmann.
27:16Nazi Germany is a highly militarized society and individuals are faked in a way that they're not
27:22really in America and certainly not in Britain, for example. So the cult of the ace is a big thing.
27:31So how is it possible for one man to destroy 117 tanks? What is your secret?
27:37Such a bravour. Concentration, my Führer.
27:42The hunter's instinct, I suspect.
27:45So, how are things at the front? Are 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.
27:57Despite losing the battle of Kursk, the 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 mega tank.
28:14The idea of a mega tank ranging somewhere between 100 and 250 tons was circulating in the whole
28:23continent of Europe for about 30 years. Nearly every major land had one or two designs of this in their drawers.
28:31Now, designers bombard the Führer with rival plans, including a jaw-dropping design,
28:39ten times larger than any tank in existence.
28:44The largest Nazi tank design, known as the Landkreuzer, is dreamt up by a submarine designer at Krupp Steel.
28:51Krupp has suggested to me a magnificent tank, a thousand-ton monster with a battleship gun.
28:59We can use it to replace destroyed defense bunkers.
29:02Get Herr Grote 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, it's basically a ship on land.
29:15The height of this tank would be 11 meters. That's roughly the size of a four-story house.
29:20And 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.
29:42But Hitler's desire to build a mega tank is unstoppable.
29:46He turns to Dr. Porsche.
29:49This legendary car designer failed in his bid to build the Tiger.
29:53But now, he has a shot at redemption.
29:57He still believed that Porsche was basically a genius, and maybe this time something very good,
30:02something very new would come out with far more battlefield power than the other classical designs.
30:08And what would be the purpose of such a tank?
30:11Nothing could stop a land battleship of this size.
30:15Of course, it would not travel alone, but with an escort of smaller armored vehicles.
30:20It also seems to me we could use some steel bunkers.
30:24Suppose one of our concrete bunkers was knocked out.
30:27This 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, and Porsche cannot afford to let his Fuhrer down again.
30:46Everything 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, but it still wasn't enough for Hitler.
31:07With Porsche failing to deliver the colossal scale he wants, Hitler gets even more hands-on.
31:16He specifies the exact length and diameter of the gun, and the thickness of the armor for his dream tank.
31:24So this is the final Maus, and this design now, with the demands Hitler made over the time,
31:30weighs in at 188 tons.
31:33This means the first Maus was as heavy as two Tigers, and they added just a third Tiger.
31:40On the 14th of May 1943, Hitler and Porsche gather at the Wolf's Lair to view a wooden model Maus.
31:48After disappointing Hitler with his Tiger prototype, Porsche knows another failure could be disastrous.
31:57So, can we build such tanks?
31:59Of course, mein Fuhrer, we can build such tanks.
32:03We must now plan ahead for achieving superiority in 1944.
32:09This year, the Tiger and the Panther are the best.
32:13Next year, the Maus and the Tiger too must be the best.
32:18This is fantastic.
32:21The giant Maus is irresistible to Hitler.
32:25Porsche's supertank will be built.
32:28Everything he does leads towards vastness, vast underground bunkers, vast guns, vast tanks.
32:41Hitler absolutely buys into the idea that big is better.
32:44But creating this giant tank presents Porsche with huge technical challenges.
32:54The Germans have tried building a massive mobile gun several years earlier.
32:58A weapon called the Schwer Gustav, which dwarfed Porsche's vision for the Maus.
33:07It's a valuable lesson in the pitfalls of building big.
33:10A piece of this gun still survives.
33:16One of its shells.
33:17What strikes me first when I look at this grenade is the enormous size of it.
33:24Almost four meters long.
33:26It weighs about 5,000 kilograms.
33:28It could inflict enormous damage.
33:31It could penetrate 10 meters concrete.
33:34It could penetrate a steel plate of a meter thick.
33:38When this thing fired, you got firepower in need.
33:43Completed 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.
33:54And transporting it to the battlefront was a mammoth undertaking.
34:01It took 25 trains to bring all the equipment, all the installations of the Schwer Gustav.
34:07It took about two to three months before it was ready to fire in June 1942.
34:13There were 2,500 people needed to build the tracks for the gun, to assemble the gun, and to fire the gun.
34:19Once in position, the Gustav required vast amounts of manpower and resources to operate.
34:27The 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.
34:41And it was only used once, against the Soviet city of Sevastopol.
34:46It was able to destroy some heavy fortifications, both at a price.
34:53It 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.
35:10And because of its dimensions, of course, it's very vulnerable to air attacks.
35:16Was the Schwerer Gustav a successful weapon?
35:19In the end, you have to answer no.
35:23When building the Maus, Porsche has to mount a large gun on the biggest tank ever built.
35:30Unlike the Gustav, though, it has to be practical and maneuverable.
35:35And, crucially, it must deliver Hitler the lethal killing power he craves.
35:44The Fuhrer desperately needs weapons that can reverse the crushing losses in Russia.
35:50Weapons capable of striking fear into his enemies.
35:53Most 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.
36:06And because he's always been such a technology buff, he starts to put an increased amount of faith in wonder weapons.
36:15You know, whether they be rockets, or jet aircraft, or even, you know, mouse tanks.
36:23It's here that Hitler's giant mouse prototypes will be stored.
36:35In 1935, at this top-secret base, Hitler had been wowed by Panzer 1s 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, uh, is the building that housed the two German Panzer 7s, the Maus.
37:04This was where all of their new weapons were tested and, uh, and, uh, made sure that they met the specifications.
37:20Uh, but just the sheer size of, uh, where they parked these tanks is, is really impressive to see.
37:28Hitler and the Nazis have high hopes for the Maus tanks stored here.
37:34They were hoping that, uh, this would be a wonder weapon.
37:37That this would be a such, you know, a large moving fortress that could, uh, defeat anything in its path.
37:45But before Hitler can use the Maus in combat, its inventor, Dr. Porsche, must get it mobile.
37:51Despite 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, so well distributed on the ground,
38:07that the tank actually was able to reach 15 to 20 kilometers per hour on the, on the open terrain.
38:15Porsche managed to design the interior of the Maus so that this humongous, cumbersome,
38:20real, real big tank moves like a normal car, basically.
38:25And everybody who could drive a car could basically drive a Maus.
38:29From an engineering point of view, regarding the steering of the Maus, it's a masterpiece.
38:34Porsche's Maus is a technical triumph.
38:38But 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.
38:47So the Maus had to go through rivers.
38:52For that, you had to build a snorkel on the Maus, keep every hole in the Maus shut,
38:56and connect it to another Maus.
38:57Because a Maus had this typical Porsche diesel electromotor, which wasn't able to function underwater.
39:05The Maus would go through the water, and then the Maus on the other side would give her energy to the second Maus,
39:12which go through the water then.
39:15On dry land, the Maus proves an astonishing gas guzzler.
39:21It burns a liter of diesel every 30 meters, at a time when fuel is increasingly scarce.
39:31The Nazi High Command are divided about whether to go into full production.
39:36But the war won't wait.
39:39In June 1944, the Allies invade Normandy.
39:45Within a week, they've advanced deep inland.
39:49To fight back, the Nazis must rely on their original supertank, the Tiger.
39:56And aces like Michael Wittmann.
40:00Near a village called Villersbockage,
40:03Wittmann is sent to observe Allied tank movements.
40:06They think they have won the war already.
40:09Let's prove them wrong.
40:12Wittmann has found an entire tank formation napping.
40:16He decides to attack with just one Tiger.
40:19He goes down on a parallel road and just goes, boom.
40:32Fire!
40:33Boom.
40:34Boom.
40:35Boom.
40:36Taking out one after the other.
40:41And the space of 15 minutes in his own tank has destroyed, has taken out between 12 and 13 British
40:49tanks and the same number again of vehicles.
40:52It's one of the most devastating single-handed attacks of the war.
40:57And earns ice-cold tank ace Wittmann even greater fame in Nazi Germany.
41:02People like Wittmann did something good for their army concerning morale.
41:09But then again, they're actually distracted from the truth of the industrial warfare.
41:13Germany simply hasn't built enough tanks.
41:17In World War II, they produced over 1,300 Tigers compared to 50,000 Shermans built by the United States.
41:242,000 of these Shermans are given extra big guns to destroy Tigers.
41:32They 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 because 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.
42:00On the 8th of August 1944, a Firefly gunner spots Wittmann's distant Tiger.
42:08Just one shot penetrates the Tiger's armor, ignites its ammo, and incinerates Wittmann and his crew.
42:16What Wittmann's desk tells us is that this idea of building super heavy, super complicated wonder weapon tanks didn't work out because the Americans just took their normal mass-produced medium tank, improved it, and killed Wittmann and his Tiger.
42:37As the Allies close in from east and west, defeat for Nazi Germany creeps nearer.
42:48At Kummersdorf, Ferdinand Porsche continues to test his mouse.
42:52But only two prototypes are ever made, and the mouse hauls are never finished.
42:59The mouse was a marketing trick.
43:02It was to keep people believing in this silly war, in this vicious war, even when everything was lost.
43:12And it was obvious to everybody that things are lost.
43:16In March 1945, the Soviets reached Germany and discovered two abandoned mouse tanks close to Kummersdorf.
43:25They would go on to test the mouse, but concluded that it had little practical use.
43:32No tank this big would ever be built again.
43:37I would say the mouse was an evolutionary dead end in terms of tank development, because it didn't have the mobility necessary to accomplish really anything practical on the modern battlefield.
43:47The mouse, like the Gustav gun, was a weapon super-sized far beyond the practical.
43:55The result of Hitler's love of the very, very big.
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