Editing Nazi Equipment (section)

===Wunderwaffen===
{{Topquote|He [Wernher von Braun] aimed for the stars, but kept hitting London.|Unknown, but often attributed to American satirist Tom Lehrer}}

Of all the technology the Nazis used, the Wunderwaffen are the thing that caught the imagination of the world and started the "Superior German Engineering" meme. As a preface, civilian engineering is great in Germany. Military? Well... you'll see in a bit. This is the place any of the "Nazi Super Science" stuff goes. You want lightning guns? Wunderwaffen. Super tanks? Wunderwaffen. Moon rockets? Wunderwaffen. [[Wolfenstein|Hitler in a giant robot spider powered by the souls of the damned?]] Wunderwaffen.

A lot of people argue that things like the Wunderwaffen and to a lesser degree the Gen 3 heavy tanks like the Tiger and Panther were wastes of time, money and resources at a point where the Nazis desperately could not afford to spend all three. These same people argue that it would have been preferable to produce more Panzer IVs and StuGs then produce expensive Tigers or Wunderwaffen. The truth is, as usual, a lot more nuanced. Take a quick look at even a modern map of Europe and you will quickly see the same hard truth that has confronted generations of Holy Roman/Prussian/German/Nazi/NATO strategists: Germany is small. It simply doesn't have the same kind of territory and resources at its disposal that Russia or America have. They could ''maybe'' match England or France one-on-one, but both had global empires that when factored in meant that Germany was dwarfed in the resource game (hence why trying to blockade England into submission was such a critical part of their strategy during both world wars). There is, frankly, no way Germany could ever have produced enough tanks to match the hordes of Shermans or onslaught of T-34s that the Americans and Soviets produced, and there was also no way for them to keep all those tanks fueled. It is with this mindset that one can understand the reason for the Wunderwaffen and Gen 3 heavy tanks. If there is no way to produce as many tanks as your enemy, your only option is to pack so much power into each individual war machine that they can achieve favorable kill/death ratios to make up the difference. At the core, it's Space Marine logic, a few stronger units outfighting many times their number. (This was also the idea Japan had, since they faced the same problem as Germany; unfortunately for them, their industrial infrastructure was even more gimped and dysfunctional than Nazi Germany's, and the result was that while they produced some absolute units like the Mitsubishi Zero, the Long Lance torpedo, and the ''Yamato'' and ''Musashi'', they could never hope to match America's productive capacity when it got going.)

When put that way, it makes the Wunderwaffe sounds like a good idea in theory. In practice they turned out not to be, due to many different factors, including technical limitations that could not be overcome with the available equipment of the time and sheer nepotism and human stupidity (more on this below). It is indeed true that the different wonder weapon projects were on the bleeding edge of their epoch's technology when envisioned, next generation devices which most of the scientists of other nations had been thinking about/started to toy with, but had yet to reach the prototype stage, much less mass production. Yes, the Germans pioneered a lot of things that were afterwards [[Blood Ravens|acquired and adapted]] by the Allies and the Soviet Union. The problem was, at the start of the war, the technology to make said Wunderwaffen '''efficient''' weapons (a real guidance system for the V1 and V2, for instance, and a decent fuel valve for V-1s to avoid engine death after a hundred turns) simply wasn't there yet, and once the war got into full-swing and the attendant drain on fighting a multi-front war along with the effects of Allied strategic bombing became dominant, the Germans never managed to close the gap. All that the Wunderwaffen '''could''' have been agreed upon having accomplished is the initial psychological shock upon deployment (such as the unstoppable V-2 launches), which wasn't much of a big deal after the human mind would adapt to the new threat.

On the negative side, while the German quest for military innovation lead to a number of advances and efficient war machines that did have everyone else scrambling to catch up, most were nothing more than a drain on Germany's already limited resources. Hitler had a documented fascination with anything that screamed "German Supremacy" and was willing to throw money at any such proposal. Thus, for every successful development that led to something like the Messerschmitt Bf 109 (which was a very good plane and a potential game changer); you had more half-successes like the Tiger/VK3X.XX series/Ferdinand-Elefant/... (which were decent enough machines in the field but were horribly costly and maintenance-intensive) and all the associated waste of time and resources that went into completely hare-brained projects like the ''Ratte''.  Later on, once the multi-front war turned against Germany, it turned into an arguable desperation for something, anything to one-shot win-the-war. As you can imagine with four hands strangling Germany, one smelling of vodka, one of bourbon and apple pie, one of tea and gin and the last of white bread and frog legs, these weapons were developed and produced with a shortage of resources and time and the lack of quality only exacerbated their various shortcomings and strained an already breaking economy. They were rather dismissively called "voo-vah" by Allied troops, and they allegedly thanked Hitler for ultimately shortening the war by authorizing their construction and wasting Germany's precious time and resources. Perhaps ironically, the Wunderwaffen did help to shorten the war, since those resources may have been better used on propping up a failing wartime economy, or building "boring but effective" war materiel. As with anything on this wiki, YMMV and you're encouraged to do your own research (and find a lot of really interesting stories in the process; did you know that at point-blank range, the standard 88mm AP round could rip a furrow through the entire length of the roof of a M4 turret, peeling open the steel like a centre-parting in hair? SCIENCE!)

It's worth noting here that the Germans and the Allies (particularly the Americans) devoted equally insane amounts of resources to developing crazy sci-fi weapons during the war; the course of post-war history shows which side bet on the winning horses. While the Germans farted around with jets and giant cannons, the Americans were conducting the Manhattan Project and creating nuclear weapons, (and building the B-29 Superfortress, a plane so advanced that it cost just as much as the bombs it would deliver to Japan). Ultimately, the Germans' wide-reaching experimentation was a classic example of crippling overspecialization, developing dozens of potentially war-winning technologies and giving none of them the attention they needed.

* '''V1 flying bomb:''' The V1 is considered as an early version of the cruise missile and was used in the bombing of England, since a city was pretty much all they COULD accurately hit (and even then). The V1's used an early version of a pulse jet and they were quickly called "buzz bombs," "doodlebugs," or "farting furies" to discourage people from calling them "robot bombs," which gives the impression that they were unstoppable. Fun fact about the V1: it uses the same fuel as a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardier_beetle type of beetle] uses to defend itself. It was infamously known for cutting its engine as it dived (due to a fuel flow error), leading to it suddenly becoming silent just before it smashed into the ground. Its entire "guidance computer" was nothing more than a simple gyroscope system to keep it level and flying, plus a small spinning propeller in the nose that would set the flaps to dive the V1 into the ground once it revolved a certain amount of times (calculated to have covered the distance to the target city). Far too inaccurate to be used against a military target, the V1 was ultimately a gigantic waste. After the war though, with American and Soviet resources and improved controls, it founded the basis of modern tactical bombardment. Strategic? See right below.
*'''V2 rocket:''' The V2 was the world's first ballistic missile and spacefaring craft. The scientists that developed it, including Wernher von Braun, went on to work for NASA and developed the booster rockets on the Saturn V launch vehicle (so Nazi science really did put a man on the moon in the end). Unlike its brother the V1, it was utterly unstoppable by AA; not a single inbound V-2 was ever shot down by antiaircraft fire, owing to it moving at 3 times the speed of sound. As detailed in Thomas Pynchon's novel ''Gravity's Rainbow'' (the book's name referring to the ballistic trajectory of the rockets), the V-2 brought a new terror to late-war London: as the rockets impacted well beyond the speed of sound, the first sign of an attack was an explosion on the ground, ''followed'' by "a screaming across the sky." It was the first vehicle to ever reach space (but not the first object, that honor falls to Imperial German artillery in WW1, specifically the Paris Gun), from a vertical test launch in 1943, and after the war it was very frequently reused by the Americans (with extra shit often strapped on top) as an early spacecraft, with grainy images returned from suborbital flights in space as early as 1946. Less of a waste than the V-1 but even so, without a decent guidance system it had a hard time hitting England as well as the dubious distinction of being the only weapon which killed more people in its manufacture than it did enemies. (It achieved this distinction by being constructed in concentration camps, where prisoners' lives were freely exchanged for productivity. It's worth remembering that many of the "good" Germans that came to the US and NASA had to ''literally'' step over corpses to get to their Nazi rocket factories during the war.) By some measures the V2 cost as much for the Germans as the American Manhattan project: we leave it the reader to speculate who got the better deal.
*''' Ruhrstahl X-4  and Panzerabwehrrakete X-7 Rotkäppchen rocket:''' The X-4 and X-7 were the first wire-guided missiles (by which they were guided by electrical signals sent down guidance wires spooled out behind the rocket in flight) to be developed, and an example that in some cases Wunderwaffen really did point the way to the future.
* '''Horten 229 and Horten 18:''' Commonly known as the "Nazi stealth fighter," this twin-turbojet flying-wing fighter was found in a secret workshop hangar by invading American forces. Nobody knows for certain if the Horten 229 was originally built for stealth, but its all-wood construction and smooth radar-fouling shape, coupled with what was claimed to be radar-absorbing paint on the outer shell, makes a fairly clear case for a stealth aircraft (Though [[Wikipedia:de Havilland Mosquito|the Allies had already been fielding wooden aircraft for years]] and the Germans knew radar worked poorly on them, as well as the "radar absorbing paint" being tested by Lockheed and being found to have no appreciable effect on radar returns). The concept that the 229 was build around was the "3x1000": 1000kph, 1000km range, 1000kg bomb payload. This, in 1943. During test flights, it outperformed the Me. 262 while using exactly the same engines. It was probably going to be used to fly through or knock out the British radar array in a second, never-realized "Battle of Britain 2: Electromagnetic Boogaloo." The Horten 18 was an even bigger flying wing, with a huge wingspan and 6 jet engines. This one was designed to be an intercontinental bomber, intending to hit American cities as the Western Front made Hitler [[rage|angrier and angrier]]. The Horten 18 was never built, but the 229 was rather successfully test flown. Both planes looked quite a bit like the modern B2 stealth bomber, which isn't much of a surprise considering the Americans hauled the Horten 229 prototype back home to be studied in a secret Air Force base (where it is today). 
**The reason the Horten's design belongs under the Wunderwaffen entry and not up in Aircraft is the following: it simply wouldn't have worked with 1940's technology. Even though tailless gliders weren't particularly harder to fly than 'regular' ones and the powered prototype was flown successfully a couple of times; testing after the war demonstrated that the time's stabilizing hard-/software was simply not up to the task of preventing fatal losses of control on tailless airframes (and especially within the context of a military operation). It took 50-odd years and ''a lot'' of technological improvements for its spiritual (hah!) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_B-2_Spirit successor] to be successfully fielded in operation. 
[[File:Maus_Trials_1944.png|350px|thumb|right|[[Approved_anime#Gaming_anime|Panzer vor]], motherfuckers.]]
* '''''Maus'':''' The ''Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus'' ("mouse") is the largest tank ever built. A 200 metric ton monster with a 128mm (5 inch) main gun and a 75mm co-axial gun in the turret, it crept along at a blistering 13 kph and sucked down liters of gas per kilometer. The most amazing thing is that (beyond not cancelling the project on sight like anyone withing hailing distance of sanity would) ''they actually managed to build this tank''. Five were ordered, but only two prototypes and one turret were built. It was originally going to be called the ''Mäuschen'' (Little Mouse), but because the Germans liked schadenfreude more than irony, just ''Maus'' stuck. Realistically, no Allied tank then in existence would have had the firepower to penetrate the Maus; only high-caliber antitank guns and artillery fire would have done the job. However, it was so big that there was no road or bridge sturdy enough to take it, so it had to have special snorkeling gear to get past rivers. Its sheer size and painfully slow top speed would have made it prime bait for bombers (which is one of the reasons why modern militaries don't use heavy tanks anymore). While neither side had antitank weapons strong enough to penetrate its armor, it's more then likely that it would never have gotten there even if it was built. It's not quite a [[Baneblade]], but they were getting there. The Nazis really didn't want anyone to get this monster, so they blew up the complete first model. The second Maus, armed with the first one's turret, was towed back to Russia by invading forces, and currently resides in the Kubinka Tank Museum for all to see.
* '''''Ratte'':''' The ''Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte'' ("Rat") was an even larger tank, or "land cruiser", since it was essentially the main turret of a naval warship on tracks. Never actually built, despite being ordered looked into by Hitler. How did this come about? Simple: when the battleship ''Gneisenau'' was retrofitted with [[DAKKA|even bigger guns]], the Germans were left with a set of nine 28-cm guns they didn't really know what to do with. So, after a couple rounds of schnaps, some madlad at Krupp wondered out loud: "They're there, they're still good; sure they weigh 50 ton apiece, but why not try to make them mobile?" The poor guy was probably thinking of a form of railway gun (who despite their shortcomings were effective weapons in their own right, and a 280mm gun-train was far from the biggest ever built). Then the mustachioed guy got wind of the idea and... [[derp|it sorta grew out of proportion.]] [[Wat|The Ratte was to be a 1000 metric ton tank, mounting a naval turret with two 280mm guns, a 128mm anti tank gun, eight 20mm FlaK cannons, and two 15mm aircraft cannons]], surpassing even the Eleven Barrels Of Hell of the Baneblade. It would have been so heavy that it would have destroyed every road it used, would have wrecked towns just by running through them, and it would have collapsed every bridge it crossed. It needed two U-BOAT motors to get around, or maybe EIGHT 20 CYLINDER ENGINES. Not surprisingly, Albert Speer canned the project (mostly because a single bomber dropping a 500kg bomb on top of the thing would fuck its day up immensely), which is a great shame because A. Building and maintaining such a monster would have posed a noticeable strain on Germany's logistics, thus accelerating their defeat (it would have required about six months worth of the Reich's ENTIRE STEEL PRODUCTION just to build the damm thing) and B. It would have made the most [[awesome]] museum piece in the known universe.
*'''''Karl-Gerät''''' The ''Karl-Gerät'' is one of the very few real world weapons ever built that is BIGGER then its 40K equivalent. Karl weighed 124 tons, was armed with a 60cm (24 inch) gun that fired a shell weighing more than a ton, and could hit a target between four and ten kilometers away depending on the size of its shell. This thing was the largest self-propelled gun ever made and it could give even a (admittedly small) Titan pause for thought. These things were actually used in combat to decent effect in Warsaw, but had mixed results in other deployments. It fucked up any target royally when it hit, most famously the Prudential in Warsaw, but the Gerät was so big and slow that it had to be disassembled and put on special tractor trailers to move around (one hell of a logistical operation) and and was moved any real distance by train. Its shells were carried by special turretless Panzer IIIs. Surprisingly one of these things survived the war and was captured by the Russians. It's currently in the Kubinka Tank Museum alongside the sole surviving Maus and assorted other war trophies.
[[File:Hitler-gustav-railway-gun.jpg|350px|thumb|right|If there was a fine line between [[Dakka]], [[Titan|massive overcompensation]], and [[Rape|"Holy shit, Greg! Is that a fucking landship on rails!?",]] then the Gustav sure hits the spot.]]
*'''''Schwerer Gustav'':''' An excellent example of the brilliance and impracticality of Wunderwaffen, ''Schwerer Gustav'' was a railway gun that resembled a cruiser fucking a freight train, built in the late 30s to defeat the Maginot Line. Two were built, the other called "Dora." It was a descendant of the German Empire's 1918 "Paris gun," a smaller gun ("only" 238mm) built in World War One to shell Paris from Germany, 120 kilometers away (a range so far they had to account for the curvature of the Earth when firing the damn thing). Gustav was designed to defeat any fortifications in existence; as such, it was the largest-calibre rifled weapon ever used in combat, the heaviest mobile artillery piece ever built in terms of overall weight, and fired the heaviest shells of any artillery piece. It fired 80cm (31 inch) shells, weighing 4,800kg to 7,100kg, up to 48km. The AP shells could penetrate 7 meters of reinforced concrete. It completely succeeded in its job of defeating any existing fortification, but at the same time was hilariously impractical. It required two specially-laid parallel railway tracks to move (yes, it was a railway gun too big for the railway), took 54 hours to set up for firing, and had a rate of fire of 14 rounds per day as charges had to be heated up in a special device for roughly 1 day before firing. Since building a gun that fired shells that wouldn't fit through the front door to your house wasn't excessive enough for the Nazis, plans were made to mount the Schwerer Gustav's 80cm gun on a 1,500-ton self propelled artillery platform (the ''Landkreuzer P.1500 Monster''), with two 15cm howitzers and multiple 15mm autocannons as secondary weapons. Unfortunately, both guns were scrapped near the end of the war. The Schwerer Gustav, overall, was the biggest (if the strange rocket exhaust powered V3 listed below is not counted) motherfucking gun on the planet. The weapon likely could have blown a Titan away if its shields were down, and much science-fiction set in WWII features the gun (notably, in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series, the gun is used to blow up two landed alien spacecraft from sixty kilometers away). There is no recorded case it of successfully hitting the target (and with the accuracy of that thing it's a miracle no German forces were harmed). There is an urban legend about one AP shot detonating an ammo dump through 15 meters of water and 7 meters of concrete during the Siege of Sevastopol, but no hard proof supports it.
*'''V3''': If you thought Gustav up there was nutty, wait until you hear about the V3, a gun that was as big as a 40k Titan. The V3 was an attempt to make a gun that could shoot across the English Channel. Now, there were a number of heavy guns that could do this, including railway guns and big bunkers built with battleship guns, but they could only shoot between the narrowest point between England and continental Europe. The V3 was built to shell London from France. I said earlier it was as big as a Titan, and I was not being sarcastic, (though it would only be as big as a knight, which despite being the smallest Titan is still bloody big). From breech to muzzle, the gun was 130 meters (430 feet) long, with a bore of 150mm or 5.9 inches across. Rather then use a single big explosion to propel the shells, the V3 used rocket motors mounted in pairs, set so their exhaust would thrust a 140kg shell out of the barrel like a reverse bolter. This setup allowed it to fire a shell out to 165km and put London well in range. Of course like all of the Nazi Wunderwaffen, in practice it sounded good but was actually kinda shit. The gun was so big that it had to be built in a hill, meaning it was impossible for it to change target after being built, and after all the time you spent building the damn thing, by the time you were done it might no longer be useful to have, such as what happened during Operation Nordwind. Further even if you ignore the logistical issues, compared to other period artillery the V3 was just plain shit. The 16"/50 caliber Mark 7 guns of the ''Iowa''-class battleship had a caliber of 16 inch or 406mm and fired a shell that weighed 1,225 kg, so over twice as big around and almost exactly nine times as heavy, and the ''Iowa'' had nine of them, and it could move. To put the cherry on this dipshit sundae, by the time the first five guns were finally built to shell London, the Royal Air Force had worked out where they were and immediately destroyed them with Tallboy Earthquake bombs. If anything proves how silly the idea of Nazi Super Science is, let the fate of the V3 super gun stand testament to how many times Hitler's scientists, and Hitler himself, had been hit with the stupid stick growing up. Hitler in particular, [[Meme|who was punished by his enraged father severely]].
*'''''[https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-you-time N-Stoff]:''''' Someday, somewhere in the  ''Kaiser Wilhelm Institute'' there was an Evil Overlord that was unhappy about the quantity of flammen his flammenwerfer could werf - so he went around and took two guys named Ruff and Krug to play around with some fluorine and some chlorine. Now, if you studied chemistry, you may realize that using "fluorine" and "chlorine" in the same sentence does not spell good news for anybody, but you know, ''Nazi Evil Overlords''. What they discovered made their commissioners - yes, the same ol' boys who thought gassing millions was cool - go '''NOPE!''', and when you discover something that's too crazy even for Crazy Nazi Science standards you know you're in for a treat. Indeed, Chlorine Trifluoride (as the compound is called) proved to be pretty good in burning bunkers to the ground - and by "burning bunkers" we mean the ''whole'' bunker, as in ''it reacts with the motherfucking concrete'' - plus it doubled as a chemical warfare agent, giving off corrosive and toxic fumes. N-Stoff (translating to Substance-N; yeah, they kinda failed the naming here) burns at a raging 2400 degrees Celsius - twice the temperature of lava and almost enough to BOIL steel - and can set fire to things that shouldn't burn, like glass, wet sand (or asbestos, a.k.a. the same substance that they used to make fireproof stuff out of) and things that have already been burnt. In fact fighting the fire with water is counterproductive, the water is just more fuel and it reacts to create deadly acids and gasses. In the 1950s a ton of the stuff was spilled in a warehouse. The chemical promptly burned through a foot of concrete and three feet of gravel while releasing a deadly gas that corroded everything it came into contact with. If there ever was something like [[Dakka|Enuff Dakka]] for flamethrowers, Substance N came close to delivering it. The Nazis planned to use it in war, but were never able to produce enough of it (only a few dozen kilograms total), presumably because it kept incinerating everyone who tried to make it. It later found its use in the semiconductor and nuclear industry - after being dubbed a bit too violent to use as rocket fuel, one rocket scientist famously said that the best way to deal with a Chlorine Trifluoride accident was "a good pair of running shoes". Also, [[Sly Marbo]] uses Substance N to spice up his Catachan takeaway.
*'''E-Series''': A very obscure piece of German tank engineering history that was brought to mainstream attention by being featured in ''World of Tanks''. The ''Entwicklung'' series of tanks were pure design studies, never produced or even properly conceptualized. They were designed as an attempt to streamline tank production and as replacements for the entire tank pool of the Wehrmacht. It consisted of 5 tanks in total (E-10, E-25, E-50, E-75, E-100) with different purposes; their number corresponded with their weight class. By the time these design studies were made (around late '44 to early '45) producing an entirely new series of tanks was way beyond the capabilities of the rapidly disintegrating remains of Germany's heavy industry, so it's best not to read too much into these tanks other than them being interesting curiosities. From what was left of their reserve steel, the Germans managed to scramble together one incomplete E-100 chassis that was found by the Americans and handed over to the British, which used it for target practive and ultimately scrapped it in 1950. 
*'''''Uranprojekt''''': The Uranprojekt (Uranium Project is the most literal translation) was the attempt of German scientists to create a sustainable nuclear chain reaction. This project has since found its way into popular fiction as the German attempt to create an atomic bomb, often accompanied by claims that they almost had one, but when taking a closer look, this isn't exactly the truth. The project didn't exactly go all that well. Germany suffered a major brain drain when it expelled all its Jewish scientists in the 1930s, and it had next to no access to uranium ore or materials that could be used as a moderator (like highly pure graphite or heavy water). The material problems were sort of solved when France and Norway fell into their hands, but the problems only increased from then on. The scientists were unsure what to use as fuel for the bomb, as both proposed elements (Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239) are extremely rare and need to be created artificially in breeding reactors. To put it in perspective, plutonium wasn't believed to be a naturally occurring element ''at all'' until the 1990s, and common uranium ore contains usually 2% uranium in its most stable form (U-238) and generally only 0.7% of all uranium is of the 235 variety (U-238 is much more stable than U-235 and therefore harder to split). One must also take into consideration that nuclear technology in general was in its infancy and just at the very onset of leaving the purely theoretical stage, which adds to the problems in procuring enough viable fission material outlined above. The lead scientist of the project, Werner Heisenberg, (yes, that's where the name Heisenberg comes from) also had a crisis of conscience and reduced his work on the project significantly. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, the project was abandoned by the Wehrmacht and handed over to the civilian Reichsforschungsrat (Council of Science of the Reich) because of the material expenses and the lack of results. The project experienced a significant number of setbacks, the most important of which was an explosion of a globe filled with uranium powder in 1942, which destroyed a substantial amount of Germany's uranium reserves. (The accident in question actually bears a striking resemblance to what happened in Chernobyl in 1986, thankfully only on a much smaller scale). But it didn't stop there. The Allies caught wind of the project and feared that the Germans could succeed in developing a nuclear bomb and sent commandos to thoroughly sabotage the project in a series of daring operations that make for excellent reading material. In short, all German facilities that could produce materials, together with practically any uranium and heavy water for use in the Uranprojekt were destroyed by early 1944, either through sabotage or air raids, and the project worked off remaining reserves from then on. One last experiment in Haigerloch, South Germany was conducted in February 1945 and failed in producing a nuclear chain reaction. The leading scientists were taken into custody by the Americans, others from the rank-and-file by the Soviets, where they continued their work on the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons project. The effect the Uranprojekt was more to found in the looming paranoia of the Allies, particularly the Americans, about a possible German nuclear bomb that fueled the urgency behind the Manhattan Project, with the irony being that the Germans never even came close to creating a critical nuclear chain reaction, let alone a bomb. In hindsight, the project was in fact a complete failure. All that needs to be said is that around ten different organizations were all running their own programs, one of which was the German Postal Service. And finally the final nail in the German atomic bomb project was that they were competing against the United States: not only the one industrial power not being bombed at the time, the one all set to be a super power when the dust settled. To put in perspective just how out economically gunned the Germans were: in order to make a bomb you need enriched uranium, to make that you need electromagnetic mass spectroscopy, but to make those you need copper wire to use in the magnets and a lot of it, but copper was being used to make shells and other war material. So what did America do? instead of cutting into the war production of other items they went to the treasury and borrowed  14,000 '''tons''' of '''Silver'''. Against that kind of economic power, German had a snow balls chance in hell of making the bomb first even if they were not being bombed.
*'''Die Glocke (The Bell)''': Okay, so you know the Nazi zombie craze that got started back in 1941 (seriously the first Nazi zombie film was made during WWII), and the purported occult obsession several higher-ups in the party had? This is supposedly one of the end results of that branch of pseudoscience & conspiracy level crazy. Much like the "Philadelphia Experiment" or MK Ultra, Die Glocke was supposed to be "something" that would break the laws of reality, bring back the dead, power all the factories, and mind control the enemies of the Reich, etc etc. It's also complete horseshit, apparently made up by a Polish author/journalist named Igor Witkowski, and then later popularised by a British author/military journalist named Nick Cook. Still as it has helped shape the more fantastical view of the Nazi Wunderwaffen, especially in the realm of /v/idya, and the "factual" books are a good laugh, it is worth an honorable mention.
*'''Sonnengewehr (Sun Gun)''': Slightly less fantastical than the Bell above (as in theoretically feasible but just as impossible to realize with the tech available at the time) was the Sonnengewehr, or the Sun Gun. Originally proposed in 1929 by Hermann Oberth, the Sonnengewehr was a hypothesised space station that would orbit around the planet roughly five thousand miles up, and focus the sun's light into a death ray capable of burning down cities or boiling dry the oceans using a fuckhueg reflector made of metallic sodium. While the numbers involved are probably fairly woolly given just how batshit crazy the Nazi science machine was, the scientists involved claimed that the Sun Gun could be completed within 50 to 100 years, and if you consider that we landed on the moon roughly 40 years after the first proposal of the 'sun gun', that number does check out. The "designers" at least had some sense of reality when they realized that the platform could also make for a weather satellite since it might as well have such facilities on board due to size. On an amusing sidenote, the Russians eventually demonstrated the concept was sound (if stupidly impractical for any intended purpose) with their ''Znamaya'' solar mirror prototype in the nineties. Though of course in terms of a 'super weapon', any kind of 'sun gun' fails when compared to atomic weapons, which is why despite being sound in concept nobody has actually bothered to even consider such a weapon. (though as weather manipulator? that's a different kettle of fish)