nazi superweapons

7:40 Palantir, among the worst things named after a LoTR thing.

Sorry, guys, but the Maginot Line was a complete success. If you think it failed, it's because you don't understand its purpose. The French knew they would be inferior to the Germans in manpower in a future war and that they would not be able to field an army large enough to successfully cover the entire French frontier. That includes the border with Belgium because the French hadn't forgotten WW1. The idea of the Maginot Line was to economize on manpower over most of the frontier. With fortifications, lower quality troops - lower trainng standards and lower equipment standards - could hold most of the line leaving the higher quality mobile troops of the French army to deal with the Germans on a restricted front. It was essentially producing a Spartans at Thermopylae situation. Reckoning the Belgians would stick to being neutrals and, not cooperating with the French, get run over anyway, the French planned to fight the Germans on their soil instead of French soil. The Maginot Line was successful. The Germans never seriously considered attacking through the Maginot line and had to go around it. Unfortunately, like Thermopylae, there was a largely unprotected route around the ML, through the Belgian Ardennes. The Belgians wouldn't tell the French their plans, though, and the French had unwisely assumed the Belgians would at least fight a delaying action in the Ardennes where the poor terrain itself would probably rule out a major thrust there. Didn't work out that way, but that was not a fault that can be laid at the foot of the Maginot Line.

Great example of Allied soldiers being gullible and spreading rumours: Americans are convinced they fought against Tiger tanks in Normandy, as in Saving Private Ryan. The Germans never deployed Tigers against the Americans. They were sent to the east end of the Normandy front because that was the more critical area and where the Germans faced the British and Canadians. Part of it is the desire to explain away how tough things got on the basis of facing superweapons.

I think Drachninifel covers this quite well in his videos, but I would have been interested to hear about some of the naval contraptions, like the Bismarck, whose guns were so big that the concussion damaged equipment and who it was so big that it had trouble steering which would lead to its eventual sinking. Not even to mention that it was too big to fit into most German dry docks.

Oh no, a second Blimp has hit the World Trade Centers! *insert balloon pop*

An S.S. Panzer Division themed Hess truck is the most cursed thing I’ve ever thought of. You’re all very funny

appreciate the advanced wars reference

I love this episode so much!

I know I'm kinda late to the party, but spoilers around 11:30 in this video.

Fun fact: a bunch of Polish nazis were documented by a journalist (who infiltrated them) celebrating hitler's birthday, and the cake they got had a swastika made of chocolate covered waffle sticks. They called them "wunderwaffle", and it became a national laughing stock... ... and then cathofascist came to power and nazis were elected to the parliament, so nobody's really laughing now.

I patron this now but cant find if there's a premium RSS feed. Anyone know where that would be?

tangent: this is why the death star had an exposed exhaust port, it was built by the same type of "bigger is better" chucklefucks that thought the maus was in any way viable. tangent over.

These projects were all successful in their primary purpose: keeping their design teams from being sent to the eastern front

You guys gotta do an episode on the history of Shamokin, PA

The concept of the wunderwaffen is made infinitely funnier when you consider that the Soviets won the war (in part) due to just printing T34s

One more allied super weapon: US built and tested 36-inch siege mortar "Little David", but it was not deployed.

great video podcast, one note; the mistel was piloted from the fighter, the bomber was the bomb

If you wanted to pad out the naval section you could throw in the Hunley. It fits in on all but a small technicality.

Farterland,

Can't wait for the episode on lord mountbatten's ice ship

Can’t wait for the episode on Churchill’s trenching tank.

26:45 Fun fact: the Kugelpanzer is actually featured in The New Order: Last Days of Europe, an alt-history Axis victory HoI IV mod I work on.

Hey Team, can you upload bonus audio to an working RSS feed. I like to listen while I work and I’m not getting YT premium. Please and thank you

hey, wanna allow clips on your regular non-bonus videos? i wanna share the bit about being a job creator from episode 2 and timestamped links suck

Struts on struts on struts. Reminds me of the new GBRS Group optic riser

schnabel means beak

Honestly project and operation codenames could be an episode in and off itself

Oh, I am SO here for this!

Great episode - I absolutely lost it at the Fart Cannon @7:02 - The Nazis drawing project codenames from German mythology ended up biting them in the ass on at least one occasion - calling the Y-Gerät bomber guidance system "Wotan" led British intelligence to correctly guess that it was based on a single radio beam, letting them develop countermeasures which made "Wotan" useless from day one (Source: R.V. Jones' "Most Secret War")

This may legit be my favorite episode. Absolutely hilarious.

Mia made a classic swedish assumption when she assumed that Schnabel means (elephants) trunk, rather than beak, because snabel means trunk swedish, it's one of the many swedish-german "false friends". The german word for trunk would be Rüssel... But since similar sounding words in german and swedish mean the same thing like 90% of the time it's a reasonable guess to make.

Love mia

incredibly hyped for the future Vasa episode

(insert sad wojack meme) RSS feed pls

Took me an embarrassing few to get the joke there

kind of sad you didn't put any wundertrains on here

By complete coincidence I was listening to the lions led by donkeys episode on the Nazi rocket plane that melts people when this dropped

The funny reason why the Germans had so many late war crazy designs is because the engineers didn't want to be sent to die under the treads of soviet tanks, so they pretended they were still useful to the war effort through making crackpot designs.

I have no interest in any wars or machinery but I love your podcasts and I laughed so hard through all of this. Thanks guys!

As a fellow connoisseur of potentially crypto-fascist military documentaries, I can not help but point out that the Maus was not the biggest tank to be built, that honor goes to Nikki's war tricycle from when the germans were first on demon time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Tank

The Homer car energy but nazi

What was Hitler, if not a disruptor?

Oh hell yes

Came for the weird Nazi ball, stayed for the Gravity’s Rainbow references

the combination submarine/torpedo is named the N-Word because the naval guy in charges last name was "Mohr" which is also an 1880s ass slur for black people in addition to just a name

Something to watch instead of crying about the bears

Thanks for reminding me that I gotta take my estrogen, Mia

KJB Season 3: Mia shows the KJB crew the Beck and Hamilton movies

This this not a dig on the video (or Mia, who is amazing as always), but nonetheless it seems like a missed opportunity to bring on Quinton Reviews, considering his left-ish series on the History Channel, which includes, for example, this video about bad Nazi documentaries: https://youtube.com/watch?v=maeO6Isb_So Maybe you could bring him on if you ever do a video about Ancient Aliens? (His response to Ancient Aliens was to make a tshirt reading “Aliens Didn’t Like White People”.)

Just had the mental image of one of those surviving nazi mini-sub guys stealing valour after the war. "What did you do during the war, Oppa?" "Ah, I was a U-boat commander. I don't like to talk about it though, maybe some day."

Tank is stored in the ball

secretly jumps into my kaiten and dolphin dives away.

Puhlease! Give Premium RSS! I will change your diapers and eat their contents

Now I want to invent a "backronym" for Blimp... Big Long Inflatable Mobile Palace

Only the Me 163 can reduce a Nazi to a soup like homogenate.

Actually the Maus still exists and can be viewed in Kubinka.

Is the PO box still open? I sent something about a month ago and it got returned to sender "PO Box Closed".

I don't want to be a jerk, but there were several mistakes in this episode. - Several of the weapons shown were not "wonder weapons", but rather crank experiments that got nowhere (the air cannon), all WWII factions had them and it would be great and really funny to have an episode dedicated to those. - The navy section was both wrong with the manned torpedo (it wasn't a "wonder weapon" but one of desperation, also it didn't work because it was very slow, cumbersome and, lacking all the important equipment a normal submarine has, near-impossible to aim properly or even just spot an enemy) and also severely lacking with surface ships (though the Bismarck class of battleships weren't wonder weapons, rather poorly designed, excessively heavy conventional battleships, the following H-Class designs got into insane territory, including several far larger than the Yamato) and submarines (late in the war, Germany designed several highly advanced "super submarines" that became the basis of early-cold war soviet and allied submarine technology, as well as highly advanced coastal defense mini-submarines). - The air force section had several mistakes: The Mistel in particular was almost completely wrong. First, no, the top aircraft wasn't the drone, the bottom one was. A fighter was strapped to an automated bomber loaded with explosives, the pilot drove both planes as one to the target, separated them, radio-guided the bomber to the target like a missile (it didn't "glide") then flew back home with the fighter. Though they weren't highly effective, they were used and did work as intended, destroying several bridges to cover Germany's retreat from the USSR, it had nothing to do with hitting soviet factories. The Natter was part of the already-used rocket interceptor programe (the Komet you showed later was the original rocket interceptor), but by the time it was developed Germany lacked access to metal alloys so it was mostly made of wood, which is why it flew itself apart in testing. And the helicopters weren't "wonder weapons", they were conventional military vehicles used for transport but produced in extremely limited numbers (only 20 units of the Focke-Achgelis Fa 223 Drache you showed were made during the war, with several others manufactured afterwards by France as the SE.3000). They also worked quite well. - You also ignored the plethora of missiles and guided bombs that ranged from the actually practical (Fritz-X and Hs-293) to the feasible but militarily useless (V-2) to "never beyond prototype stage" (all the surface-to-air missiles) and finally the downright insane (can't remember names but if you're accepting myths, there are several about german moon rockets, etc.) - Finally, there were several "wonder weapon" ideas that used conventional weapons in insane ways, like the german Sonderkommando Elbe, AKA using german fighters with reinforced bladed wings to crash into american bombers and cut them apart. - Also, since you started talking about architecture one of the largest-scale "wonder weapon" concepts was Fortress Europa, the insanely vast system of fortifications that included the Atlantic Wall and was supposed to make Nazi Europe impossible to invade, which clearly didn't work. EDIT: So the hosts replied on Twitter with a TL;DR joke and all I can say is motherfuckers this was your chance to tear the nazis a new one and you barely even tried. Your episode on bullshit petrostate projects was close to 4 hours long and an absolute riot, you did an entire episode on imperial Germany's main wonder weapon of the Great War, the zeppelin, that was both insanely funny and informative, you dedicated another bonus episode to armored trains that also covered nazi superheavy rail guns, and this is the best you got for nazi bullshit wonder weapons? The entire evolution of Nazi Germany's tank development is a fall from common sense into absolute insanity and all you guys could say was "lol maus slow big heavy tank". And how the fuck do you guys dare say "there isn't much to say about the navy" when Hitler's plans for the Kriegsmarine were the peak of his derangement??? We're talking battleships the size of a modern supercarrier with eight 48cm guns, escorted by the stupidest collection of vessels ever conceived. Battlecruisers and cruisers so thinly armored even light destroyers could penetrate them, destroyers so heavy and overarmed they lost most of their speed and maneuverability, aircraft carriers with so many cannons they could barely carry any aircraft... How is it that you made a better, funnier episode on a single, forgettable british assault rifle than the Mother Of All Military Engineering Failures. You guys dropped the ball all the way down to hell. Alice, if all you have to say about the nazis is that they designed stupidly massive tanks but never built them, then all I have to say to you is "Habakkuk".

Justin doing the Messiah any% speedrun.

To be fair to the V3, London is pretty much uninhabitable, it just took longer than the Nazis scheduled.

Now that Roz has risen from the grave, is he going to declare himself a diety/demigod/start an antipapacy?

I do not envy Alice's suggested purchases for the next several months after researching this topic.

Hey its not Verteidungswaffe its Vergeltungswaffe so its a Retributionweapon

Roz is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PRESENTER!!

He is risen

It's so *easy* to make fun of nazis because so many of them were so comically stupid, like designing tanks that could only move at the speed of hermann goring running a fucking marathon (or himmler out for a nice stroll in the cannes)

scully you're not gonna believe this

I have fond memories of my grandfather (the colonel who thought everything could be solved with artillery) teaching me about the Paris gun while I was in like the 4th grade.

Zombie dudes rock!

*laughs in ME163*

He is risen

I will not stand for Foo Fighters slander.

Glad to hear the Necromancy courses paid off.

I still mean to share the pictures of the local train derailment

I miss Kermit Roz and just want him back.

Even in death does he pod

Glad to hear Roz is undead.

hell yes my tank is fight

Rabbi Roz

I haven't listened but this is already the best episode

Get well Roz!! Usually we focus on American and USSR superweapons,.

The king is dead long live the king get well Roz