(powerful instrumental music)
(explosions)
This V-2 ballistic rocket should have
enabled Hitler to avoid defeat.
It was designed by a brilliant 25-year old
engineer, Wernher von Braun.
As World War Two developed, the Nazi regime intended
to launch thousands of grounds-breaking arms programs.
This film recounts this little-known story,
revealing some of the miracle weapons Hitler hoped
would change the course of the war.
(singing and marching)
The people identified with their Fuhrer,
Germany is mobilized, and Hitler triumphs.
He wants war.
The Nazi regime seizes power.
(In French with translator)
In the eyes of the Germans in 1933,
Hitler embodies and escape route,
a way out of the crisis and of humiliation.
A role he would create and implement extremely effectively.
1936, and Hitler decides to abolish
the Treaty of Versailles.
The Reich represents 60 million Germans.
As of 1934, intensive research has been carried out
into new weapons.
Hitler mentions new weapons in a speech in 1939.
All new arms programs are by definition
secret to start with.
What they were doing was completely new.
It is certain that Nazi Germany pumped considerable
sums of money into new armaments programs from the outset.
Quite simply, the German army was very weak
when the Nazis gained power.
And all at once, the new regime invests money,
finds engineers, and manpower,
and launches widespread innovative research.
It is on the Baltic Coast in 1936
that Hitler decides to create a vast research center,
Peenemunde, in order to develop revolutionary weapons.
The army develops the V-2 missile, the Luftwaffe,
the V-1 flying bomb, such weapons were not even considered
by other nations.
At the time, it was the biggest laboratory in the world
devoted entirely to weapons.
These new weapons would only become operational
in the second part of the war, as of 1943.
(marching)
(using an English translator)
Hitler rearms Germany with a view to waging war.
He's always said this, it's no secret.
Rearmament involves what we could call classic weapons.
But they're extremely effective, as they're really the
state of the art in terms of what exists at the time.
The Messerschmitt 109 would be
a formidable killing machine.
Near Paris, we meet a former printer
reconstructing a replica.
The fighter was used for too long,
due to the lack of replacements.
And yet as early as 1940, Willy Messerschmitt
had proposed to Hitler a revolutionary twin-engined
interceptor that would have outclassed all Allied aircraft.
(Speaking in French with English translator)
When war broke out, they realized that the 109
was superior to all the other aircraft
that were on the market at the time,
be they British or Russian.
The 109 that I'm building is based on a shell
that I was able to recover in Spain in an exchange deal
with a museum in Madrid.
The plane was more or less in a junk yard state,
so I had to start from scratch.
I began building it in 1985,
and use every original piece I can find,
even from crashes.
There are parts that were handled by at least
four fliers in the cockpit.
When someone touches the controls,
they were handled by a pilot during the war.
That's the way I work.
In order to reach greater speeds,
fighters are tested using rocket motors.
Results are encouraging.
The Heinkel 178 would be the first jet
to fly anywhere in the world.
The Germans were the first to fly using this engine.
The question we can ask is why they were the first.
Are they better than the others?
I don't think so.
I think the answer's very different.
It's more political.
Heinkel wants to gain an advantage
over Mersserschmitt, so he builds this machine
and flies it.
And based on that, he hopes to gain favor with Hitler
to mass produce it, and obviously get rich.
But the fact is that he doesn't succeed.
The first jet engine planes built by Heinkel are far
from being in perfect working order.
There's still a great deal of work to be done.
The lack of an established strategy
leads the Nazis to stop the intensive development
of jet engines.
And yet, they represented a considerable
technological advance.
There was another twin-engined plane
designed by Ernst Heinkel , which had flown in 1939.
So why was this plane not mass produced?
There was a problem with the motor.
It wasn't powerful enough, and it worked badly.
There was a problem with the plane too,
which wasn't designed to fly at very high speeds,
it was too heavy.
So all this meant too much time was needed
to fine-tune the program, and that's why Hitler stopped it.
He wanted something that worked right away.
September 1939,
Germany crushes the Polish army.
Hitler has a vast stock of traditional weapons.
May 1940, the combination of armored divisions
and the airstrikes, devastates the French army.
The Fuhrer is convinced his lightening war
will soon lead to complete victory.
He was surprised by the swiftness of his victories.
But this would convince him that he would be able
to take over the western part of the U.S.S.R.
within three months.
And here, he commits a number of monumental errors.
He gives the order to his industries to stop working
on the development of any material which wouldn't
be ready within six months.
He stops work on developing long-range bombers,
four-engined planes, for example.
He would favor the twin-engined bombers,
judging that as long as he had the greater numbers,
which wasn't necessarily false, then that would suffice.
Goring is a very special case.
First of all, Goring is one of Hitler's first companions.
And he was the creator of a new weapon
in the military sense, which was the Luftwaffe,
the German Airforce.
He was a very powerful personality in the Nazi system,
politically and militarily.
But also economically, as he was responsible
for the Nazi war economy before Speer.
And so, on several occasions he made bad choices
in terms of technology, tactics, and strategy.
(French with English translator)
German companies fought a tough battle
for production contracts.
The political aspect came into play in a significant manner.
Practically, in the case of the Air Ministry,
when a specification was given, several companies
attempted to produce prototypes.
And quite often, it wasn't the best prototype
that would be retained, but rather that of the company
that was the most highly regarded politically.
That's how the Messerschmitt Company managed
to sideline their competitors, like Heinkel for example,
which also made very good aircraft,
but which didn't have Hitler's approval in the same way.
(plane soaring)
In 1940, the Battle of Britain
is at its height.
The German squadrons are decimated.
It's the Nazi's first defeat.
Since the beginning of the conflicts,
the British have managed to control the Atlantic zone,
and therefore secure their supply routes from the U.S.A.
The moment the Germans are incapable
of dominating the Atlantic,
then they lose the control of the seas across the world.
Very rapidly, as of September 1940, submarines dock
in the French Atlantic ports and begin operations
in the North Atlantic to counter the Allies convoys.
August 1940, Hitler orders
a blockade on Britain.
Admiral Donitz launches endless U-boat attacks.
For three years, they will sink hundreds of Allied ships.
The Nazi submarines rule over the Atlantic
until they're outclassed.
(explosions)
June 1941, the Wehrmacht invades the U.S.S.R.
in Operation Barbarossa.
Stalin is overrun, and a vast new territory is conquered.
The Red Army can only muster limited obsolete weaponry.
But after a blistering scorched earth attack,
the Russian winter provides a brutal contrast.
Over a thousand kilometers of highways are built
by Fritz Todt and his organization.
He was also Minister for Armaments.
Todt was entrusted with implementing the armaments
and munitions policy.
But he was also very knowledgeable about the United States.
In December 1941, he came to understand the importance
of two concurrent events.
The German Army's failure to take Moscow,
and the United States joining the war subsequent
to Pearl Harbor.
He realized that strategically,
Nazi Germany would lose the war.
So among Hitler's entourage, Todt was one of those
who advocated ending the war against the Western Allies
in order to concentrate the war effort against the U.S.S.R.
It is therefore quite likely,
despite the absence of formal proof,
that the plane crash in which he was killed
in February 1942 was not only due to technical reasons.
(plane crash)
June 1940, Hitler visits Paris.
To his right is 35-year old Albert Speer.
A close relationship would be established between the Fuhrer
and his favorite architect.
He was therefore replaced by Albert Speer.
And in fact, we can certainly wonder if Germany
didn't benefit from the change.
Speer, who was an architect perhaps had broader
and more open-minded ideas.
In any case, he succeeded in developing the German
armaments industry to quite an extraordinary level.
The Fuhrer appreciates Albert Speer,
a creative man, well organized, and psychologically astute.
The key date in the Battle of the Atlantic
is the month of May 1943.
In a single month, the Germans lost 41 submarines.
41 submarines were lost.
The English call it Black May, which is very telling.
In the weeks that followed,
Admiral Donitz was in a state of shock,
and he quite simply ordered the submarines
not to navigate anymore in the North Atlantic.
So what did he do?
He simply went to see Albert Speer.
And Albert Speer suggested to Admiral Donitz
that he take direct charge of the production of submarines
with new organizational resources.
In August 1943, the Germans began to set up
a special engineering studies bureau
which would bring together the best engineers
from each of the companies involved
in the submarine production.
In just a few months, they managed to draw up plans
for two new submarines which were
completely revolutionary for the period.
And these were the submarine types 21 and 23.
The type 21 is an ocean-going submarine of 1,600 tons.
In the end, they chose the most feasible elements
from each project, and transposed them
onto a single project, the type 21 submarine.
Its principle characteristic is that it's very hydrodynamic.
It's built to travel very quickly underwater.
There are no more heavy guns or artillery on deck,
just a few anti-aircraft guns and streamlined turrets.
It is supplied with high-capacity electric batteries
which enable it to sail and dive for much longer periods
than it's predecessors.
It travels and attacks underwater,
but it's also designed so it doesn't have to recharge
its batteries on the surface.
And to do this, it has a snorkel, a kind of tube
which enables the diesel motor to operate.
The submarine can remain underwater
with just its periscope out of the water
and charge its batteries without surfacing.
And this is important, as in this way the submarine
is no longer detectable by radar
and largely avoids the Allies counter-measures.
One of the submarine's more innovative elements
is that it's constructed in pre-fabricated sections.
So there are three shipyards assembling the sections
which were built at other German metalworking companies
along the river network.
The first vessel, the U-2501 was launched at a shipyard
in Bremen on Hitler's birthday.
But it should be said that the vessel was immediately moored
along the dockside afterwards, as it was unable to dive.
It would never be fit for navigation.
It was so far from being ready that it would require
many months to make it seaworthy.
And then it was only used for operational duties,
and never engaged in combat.
The 21 could stay submerged for 62 hours,
and would be the best U-boat.
Copied by the Soviet's,
NATO would commission several in the whiskey class.
Other projects arose,
notably concerning midget submarines.
Another development was a small vessel called
the Seeteufel, or sea devil,
which was essentially used to drop agents
or sabotage teams close to enemy coasts.
The Fuhrer and the fanatics around him
wanted the ultimate weapon, the atomic bomb.
In 1938, the German physicist, Otto Hahn,
had demonstrated atomic fission.
The Nazis had a certain advance.
In the race for the bomb, several German teams
were working intensively with the aim of destroying America.
Speer becomes Minister for Armaments in February 1942.
At that point, an initial meeting is convened
at the War Ministry, I think,
on the subject of nuclear energy.
Most of the German scientists took part.
And I believe it was Milsch who asked Heisenberg
what size an atomic bomb would be.
Heisenberg mimed a pineapple.
That represents about 15 kilos of uranium.
Speer subsequently asked Heisenberg how much money
would be required.
And Heisenberg replied with such a ridiculously low figure
that Speer said to Milsch,
well, I think the subject really
isn't sufficiently developed, so we can't continue with it.
And at the time, in 1942, the Americans
had already decided on the Manhattan Project.
But the Germans, who were perhaps still ahead
of the Americans abandoned the idea.
(gong)
For a long time, it was thought
that Nazism was as pyramid power structure.
But we know today from historical research
that it was really a competitive jungle
between different pressure groups,
between the Nazi party, the SS,
and between leading industrialists,
and the all-powerful armaments minister Albert Speer.
In a way, Hitler was the arbitrator who would
from time to time favor the one group or another.
The corporal of 1918 has become the Fuhrer.
A self-taught man, he has to choose among the new weapons.
His entourage manipulates him and lies to him.
(rockets firing)
1942, 1943, on the eastern front,
the Nazis are facing total defeat.
They attempt to reverse the trend
by using unprecedented weaponry.
Hitler was always attracted to rather feronic projects.
Anything that was grand and colossal appealed to him.
This was the case with architecture notably,
or the long-range cannons.
We could mention the 600 millimeter gun
for firing and sebastopol.
Hitler was always drawn to this type of feronic project.
For the Dora Siege Gun,
a thousand men were required to set it up.
It traveled on two parallel rail tracks.
At the beginning of World War Two,
the Germans had one strength that the others lacked.
They had considerable military transport capability.
Their planes were the Junker 52s,
a transport plane that dated from the 30s.
As of 1940, they lost substantial numbers of Junker 52s.
The army staff decided to find replacements.
Messserschmitt had the idea of building a glider,
a machine that could be towed to the battlefield,
and able to land in a very restricted area,
and almost be disposable.
Messerschmitt manufactured this huge glider,
a monster in which they could put a 105 millimeter cannon
and transport up to 60 men.
And it worked well.
The problem was that it required a big bomber to tow it.
As a solution, they decided to put engines on the glider.
France was still making motors at this time,
and so they used French engines.
It was the biggest transport plane in the Second World War.
The Germans are surrounded at Stalingrad.
Some of the 200 Messerschmitt Gigant 323's manage
to break the blockade,
but cannot transport enough arms and supplies.
The Dornier 335 is surprisingly modern,
with a speed of 750 kilometers an hour.
Its engines are supercharged with the injection
of water and methanol.
But only a few dozen see combat in October 1943.
The Treaty of Versailles had a dual effect
on German industry.
It obliged engineers to work with very small engines,
and so to develop highly effective aerodynamics.
And it delayed the development of more powerful motors.
As of 1943, it's clear to the Germans that they won't
be able to produce powerful engines
like the British and the Americans,
that is, engines between 1,600 and 1,700 horsepower.
The only way to counter the lack of power is aerodynamics.
So to reduce the drag, rather than put two engines
on each side of the fuselage,
Dornier decided to put one engine on the front
of the fuselage like a single engine fighter,
and a second engine on the rear.
The drag was considerably reduced
and they could go much faster.
They didn't wait for the prototypes to be perfected.
The pressure meant that 100 or so machines
were developed as they went along.
It was an extremely successful plane.
It was very, very quick.
Allied pilots who encountered it,
even though they had very fast planes themselves,
the Tempests or Mustangs, weren't able to catch it.
But it arrived too late.
Engineer Ferdinand Porsche
is a self-taught man.
Since 1934, he's been working on an affordable car,
a project supported by Hitler.
In 1938, the car is ready.
Ferdinand Porsche sits in the back, Hitler is in the front.
Next to the driver, Ferry, Porsche's son.
It's Hitler's 55th birthday.
The Austrian engineer is present.
He's a member of the inner circle.
In 1942, Porsche shows Hitler a model
of a future 188-ton monster,
with armor plating 60 to 240 millimeters thick.
Despite the drawback of a slow speed,
it should have been produced in greater numbers.
The Maus tank weighed in at 150 tons,
and I believe it was developed by the Porsche Company
using private funding with Hitler's approval,
but against the advice of the army,
which didn't want to develop this type of vehicle.
It took a number of years to develop the machine.
From '41 through '43 several prototypes were built
and tested on army test grounds.
At Kummersdorf for example.
It would appear that Hitler believed that vehicles,
such as the Maus, would turn military operations
in his favor.
Hitler sees the tank being used
like a bunker on caterpillar tracks,
The Maus is waterproof and can cross rivers,
avoiding unsafe bridges.
The Soviets captured several.
And one example can be seen in a museum near Moscow.
In the summer of 1943, Hitler loses
the Battle of Kursk in the U.S.S.R.
6,000 tanks faced off in a deadly dual.
The Nazis have virtually lost the war.
In reality, the state of mind of the Nazi leaders
at the end of 1943 is one of panic.
They have just understood they are going to lose the war
because they are confronted with a very powerful coalition.
This leads them to launch a great number
of new arms programs,
even if the programs are incomplete
or have never been technically proven.
They invest money and men often to a very stupid extent.
Germany finds itself in a very particular situation.
It lacks raw materials and has known this from the start.
But it's also beginning to lack manpower,
as the loses have been enormous.
Hitler thinks that through innovative technology
he can compensate for the insufficient numbers
with efficient equipment.
And so he encourages certain avant-garde programs,
and in particular, jet-propelled planes.
And also helicopters.
In Germany, there was a man called Heinrich Focke.
He had a passionate interest in helicopters
for personal reasons,
but also because it enabled him to step aside
from the Nazi regime which he didn't much like.
In the U.S.A. was a Russian immigrant called Igor Sekovski.
Focke managed to build a helicopter with two rotors
which simplified a lot of problems.
His little machine worked quite well.
So it was decided to build a much bigger one
with a motor of 1,000 horsepower.
It too appeared to work very well.
And as the German way of working at the time
was not to wait for prototypes to be perfected,
several hundred of them were ordered.
The helicopter was capable of lifting heavy loads
to high altitudes, and was theoretically a fine machine.
But it was never put into service due to a lack of time.
The war ended.
Anton Flettner's Hummingbird would be used on ships
for similar purposes.
It was easier to maneuver than a plane on a catapult,
very quick to prepare,
and it was capable of observation missions
far ahead of the ships.
But the project went no further.
The Deutsches Museum in Munich,
where curators have brought together a vast collection
of miracle weapons.
One of the most surprising, is the Natter, or snake.
This wooden rocket plane was built in late 1944
to intercept Allied flying fortresses at altitudes of
up to 12,000 meters.
the Voltaire rocket engine was recovered
after each launch.
(Using English translator)
Only twelve examples of the Natter were constructed.
And they were only used for testing.
The pilot was killed during the first test flight.
It was an interceptual rocket.
The front was composed of a concrete block
which held a dozen rockets to be fired in a group
to destroy enemy bombers.
After this desperate mission,
the rear of the plane was parachuted down to the ground.
The motor was reusable, and so it was marked,
a reward will be given to anyone finding this plane.
The pilot, too, was supposed to land by parachute.
In 1943, something happened that was very important
for the future of German aeronautics.
And that was the Allied air offensive over Germany.
The night attacks got worse.
There were daylight attacks, too.
And they caused considerable damage.
At this point, they looked at everything they had
in their laboratories to try and produce
something operational immediately.
One of the first things that was done, for example,
was to take rocket motors and put them on a glider
that Messerschmitt had studied.
And so they made the ME-163,
which is a veritable piloted missile.
This machine was able to climb to the altitude
of Flying Fortresses in one minute.
The speed at which it sliced through the Flying Fortresses
was mind-boggling.
And it wreaked havoc and panic among the American crews.
It was armed with heavy 30 millimeter guns,
and a single 30 millimeter shell against the Flying Fortress
would knock it out of the sky for sure.
The problem was that the plane only had a range
of 45 kilometers, so if it wasn't on the American plane's
flight path, it was useless, as the motor only worked
for about a minute.
After that, it becomes a glider.
A very fast glider, but only a glider.
So it had to land in a field.
And although it was designed for this,
it was very vulnerable.
Before the war, sailwing planes
had enabled the Nazis to train pilots.
The Horten brothers designed several
such remarkable machines.
In 1942, they built the HO 229 flying wing.
The wing surface was made of an almost
undetectable material.
It was the first stealth plane.
With the state of panic that dominated Germany
from 1944 on, they were trying to move as fast as possible.
Studies were carried out on the flying wing
because all aeronautical engineers know that a flying wing
is theoretically more efficient than a standard airplane.
There's no drag from the fuselage,
no drag from the empennage,
You can go much faster and much further.
The Horten brothers manufactured this flying wing.
And with the state of panic Germany was in then,
yes, the project was good to go.
They were provided with jet engines,
and they managed to fly two prototypes.
It was therefore known that these machines
could fly correctly, but there were
enormous stability problems.
The flying wing is very interesting.
So interesting, in fact, that work is still being done on it
in the 21st century.
Two billion dollars,
the cost of the American stealth plane, the B-2.
Dozens of studies into jet bombers were carried out, too.
Only the Arado 234 would carry out any missions.
The problem with these German planes
is that the turbo reactors were only first generation,
and they lacked power.
This meant they couldn't build planes capable
of carrying any great weight.
So they could only put one man on board.
Two jet planes were being prepared,
a Messerschmitt and an Arado.
And they would only be put into service
in the summer of 1944.
During tests, the landing gear was too heavy
and was replaced by a trolley system.
Reusable rockets were used to facilitate takeoff.
One version, with an additional fuel tank
shaped like a V-1 was studied.
Fourteen four-engine planes would be built in all.
The first mission the plane was given
was for reconnaissance, and it was quite astounding
because it could fly at an altitude of 10,000 meters
and a speed of 6,000 kilometers per hour,
and was completely invulnerable.
An Arado 264 that was based in Hans in June 1944
went every day to photograph the Normandy landing.
It brought back thousands of photographs
of the German defeat as it was actually happening.
The Arado was extremely effective, and Hitler was determined
to make a bomber out of it, which was done.
It was the famous attack by these planes
on the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen,
which were intercepted with great difficulty
by British planes.
In fact, they built a series of prototypes,
a series of demonstration models,
but they really weren't good combat aircraft.
The British and American general staffs would soon realize
that these machines had certain limits.
The ME-262, a twin-engine sweat wing fighter
could reach 850 kilometers per hour.
1,100 were constructed.
It was the most surprising fighter of the war.
Willy Messerschmitt in particular,
promised Hitler that he would give him an extremely
fast and capable jet plane with sufficient autonomy.
And this was the ME-262.
In his madness, Hitler saw war only as offensive.
And by definition, the offensive aircraft is the bomber.
So he wanted the plane to be a bomber.
Messerschmitt wasn't thinking about bombers,
he was thinking about a very fast plane, a fighter.
The priority for the general staff was fighters
to stop the enemy.
So what happened is that the general staff lied to Hitler.
The ME-262 was held up because of the engines.
The jet engines were very difficult to perfect.
Planes that arrived apparently finished,
broke down very frequently.
It's estimated that only 25% of the planes
were really available.
Another problem with the jet planes was that
they traveled too fast compared to the target.
And when you fly much faster than a target,
it only gives you maybe a second or half a second
to aim and fire.
On Hitler's orders, General Galland
organizes a special ME-262 squadron.
The volunteer pilots are all experienced.
Galland is impressed by the ME-262's potential,
attacking the Flying Fortresses at 850 kilometer per hour.
The Allies react quickly and attack the planes
during takeoff and landing.
The Anglo-American strategy concerning
aeronautical production is very different.
America becomes the Allies arsenal.
With mastery of disguise being imperative,
huge aircraft production plants are built.
12,700 B-17 Flying Fortresses, designed by Boeing
before the war were built under license
by four other constructors.
The Nazis produced new planes that were sophisticated,
but unfinished, and only in small numbers.
The Luftwaffe had constantly told Hitler
that it was capable of winning the conflict by itself.
But it soon found itself dominated by a British
and American aviation.
And so Goring was always looking for some new way
of gaining aerial supremacy, like with the V-1.
Because it was the Luftwaffe that launched the V-1 program.
= [Voiceover] The V-1 is intended to demoralize the British.
It carries 830 kilos of explosives,
and little more than the V-2 rocket,
but it cost a thousand times less.
V-1s were launched over a ten-month period
from 96 launch pads in France.
Nazi bombers having failed over London,
Goring proposes as solution, the V-1.
It's a flying bomb, a self-propelled weapon.
The V-1 has a small propeller at the end of the fuselage
connected to an anemometric counter.
which calculates the distance.
The counter is designed to cut off the fuel supply
and make the bomb fall on its target.
(explosion)
The bomb is difficult to counter by fighters
as they have to travel at maximum speeds.
But the V-1s biggest drawback is the noise from the motor.
They can be identified well before impact.
The V-1s are often intercepted by gunfire,
flack, and balloons.
More than 8,000 were launched from France.
It's estimated that almost 50% of them
reached their targets.
(sirens)
Goebbels was unfailingly loyal to Hitler,
but he was also sometimes a realistic man.
He understood quite quickly that the war
was turning against the Nazis.
In June 1944, when a new weapon came into service,
the V-1, the flying bomb, he invented a propaganda slogan
and called it the (German) or retaliation weapon number one.
And the word, retaliation, was intended to present the V-1
as a response to Allied bombing.
And to boost the morale of the German people.
(cheering and applause)
The V-2 was the Nazis
most sophisticated weapon,
achieving speeds of 5,600 kilometers per hour.
738 kilos of explosives were carried.
The first successful launch was on October 3, 1942.
Hitler congratulated Walter Dornberger and von Braun.
(rocket firing)
Why were the Germans interested in rockets
whereas no other country at the time was actively involved?
Because designing a rocket was a way around the Treaty.
At the meeting in August 1941, at his headquarters
with Dornberger and von Braun,
Hitler pronounced these words.
That propulsion by liquid fuel was a revolution
in the art of war.
And a modification in world strategy.
Everything changed on the night
of the 17th to 18th of August, 1943.
The English launched Operation Hydra with 593 bombers
attacking the secret Peenemunde base on the Baltic coast.
The next morning Himmler obtained an audience with Hilter,
and he explained that he had a solution for protecting
the rocket production.
He suggested using concentration camp labor
to construct a gigantic underground factory
which would be in the infamous Mittelbau-Dora camp.
Himmler would be given the go-ahead.
The SS were gradually taking over.
In the final part of the war, there was a new
essential player, and that was the SS.
Himmler, whose ambition was to create a veritable SS stint.
Within the German industrial system,
he wanted to take over the new technological developments.
He realized that the V-2s were essential for the future.
And so at the head of the missile programs,
he appointed an extremely complex man
by the name of Hans Kammler.
He was an SS general trained as an engineer.
But we mustn't forget that he was also the man
who designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Kammler played a key role in the final solution,
overseeing the construction of gas chambers.
With brutal efficiency, Kammler had 20 kilometers of tunnels
dug out of the rock at the Mittelwerk facility.
Not only did he take control of the manufacture
of the V-2 rockets, but also of all the underground
Mittelwerk factories in the Hans,
where they made V-2s, V-1s,
and the Rheintochter missiles,
as well as jet engines for the new jet planes.
Himmler employed concentration camp inmates
as slave labor to build the vast underground factory.
More than 60,000 workers were
the victims of barbaric brutality.
20,000 of them died.
The head of the SS made them build a camp complex
close to the factory.
The Americans would later discover
several thousand dead bodies,
The SS were responsible for more victims
than Hitler's miracle weapons themselves.
In 1943, the Nazi Reich decided to employ its new weapon,
the V-2 rocket.
To do so, they needed launch installations within range
of the target which means
around 200 kilometers from London.
This is why they chose Northern France
to build their installations.
Four giant 380 millimeter guns were also installed
in the Todt Artillery Factory at Cape Gris Nez,
to bombard the English coast and ships in the channel.
At first, the Germans built a classic blockhouse,
but this was soon destroyed by Allied planes.
The Bunker of Eperlecques was intended to launch
V-2 rockets and produce liquid oxygen.
It was the target of several air raids, severely damaged,
and finally abandoned.
Not a single V-2 would be launched from here.
And so it was decided at the end of August 1943,
to build an underground complex,
and to protect the complex
with a gigantic circular blockhouse, the Coupole.
The problem for the Germans was how to build
in just a few weeks this gigantic, reinforced,
concrete structure,
And to stop enemy bombing
from damaging the building site.
They therefore developed a new technique
which consisted of building a huge mold on top
of the plateau where we are now.
And then pouring onto the surface of the mold,
a mask composed of 55,000 tons of reinforced concrete.
And when the concrete solidified, they removed the mold.
And so the site was immediately protected,
a site which was essentially underground.
The mission here was to stock several hundred
V-2 rockets and to prepare them for launching.
The mechanism is very complex,
and uses liquid oxygen and alcohol,
which requires very precise handling.
The third mission was to launch the rockets against London,
which is about 190 kilometers from the site.
The new bunker would never be used.
The site was discovered by the Allies secret services
in the month of September 1944.
They were mistakenly overjoyed,
believing they had eliminated the danger.
But then, three days later on September eighth,
the first V-2s were launched.
The first against Paris, and the second against London
from Belgium and Holland.
So there was a shift from fixed launch sites
to mobile launch sites which would be the future tactic
for missiles in the late 20th century.
(explosions and sirens)
The V-2 is fundamentally a psychological weapon.
It's a terrorist weapon.
The Germans were hoping to destroy the Londoners' morale
by launching offensives day and night against the capital.
(rockets firing)
Aimed at London,
the V-3 cannon was supposed to fire 120 shells a day.
In the summer of 1943,
another new arms project was launched for a new cannon,
called a multi-charge gun with gigantic tubes of about
150 meters long.
The state of panic among the German leaders
led them at the same time to invest
in the manufacture of the gun,
and begin the construction of a firing site
near Calais in France.
But the problem was that this type of gun was second
to propellant charges are fired as the projectile passes
in the tube was not technically perfected in 1943, 1944.
It was only on the seventh of July, 1944
that a rage by 16 Lancaster bombers,
each carrying a six-ton bomb,
attacked the Mimoyecques site.
Two of the 16 bombs reached their targets.
By some extraordinary chance,
one of them landed in an opening.
It entered a tunnel and exploded below ground,
causing part of the lower level to collapse.
The multi-charge super gun site at Mimoyecques
near Calais, was never operational.
So the Germans were reduced to using a smaller version,
about 60 meters long which fired several dozen
lightweight shells on the city of Luxembourg.
(wind whistling through the trees)
In his headquarters in Eastern Germany,
Hitler has become an old man.
His health is failing, he has heart disease,
and he's showing the first signs of Parkinson's disease,
says General Heinz Guderian.
Hitler now wears gloves in order to hide
the worsening disease.
He salutes his officers with his left hand.
The Fuhrer is fading fast.
The SS has taken power, and the Reich is dying.
Among the two to three thousand different
weapons projects studied,
several types of innovative missiles were developed.
The aim being to intercept bombers and ships.
Here we have two missiles.
The biggest is the Henschel 293.
It was especially designed to be a radio-controlled bomb.
It was mainly to be used against naval targets,
but this happened only rarely.
2,000 of these Henschel missiles were built.
What's unusual about this bomb is that
it has a rocket motor beneath the fuselage
which can accelerate the device giving the crew the ability
to adjust its projectory and to increase the precision
of the impact.
It improved security for the crew as the bomb
glided towards its target.
During the Second World War, these missiles were equipped
with computers to calculate their trajectories.
They were the first computers,
although they weren't called that.
They were called (German).
Towards the end, in the final months of World War Two,
a great number of spectacular projects
were developed in Germany.
(phone ringing)
They weren't only motivated by military demands,
but also because the R and D institutes and companies
wanted to keep their people busy so they weren't
sent to the front.
That's why so many rather exotic
and unusual devices were built.
The heads of these programs sent glowing reports to Berlin,
whereas most of the projects were not completed.
The Nazi leaders in Berlin were desperate,
and so asked that the projects continue at any cost.
1944 and the Allies have complete control
over the skies.
Big week was a week in which American bombers
from the eighth Air Force concentrated
on the German aeronautics industry.
The bigger the sites were, the easier they were
to locate and destroy.
Under the Armaments Minister, Albert Speer,
there were no longer any major jet plane production sites.
There were a certain number of smaller sites.
And the Germans even developed a clever system
whereby a metal structure over a concrete base
would be covered with camouflage nets
and in the middle of a forest so it was totally invisible
to the Allied reconnaissance.
The Allies found hundreds of ME-262s in forests
in Austria and Germany.
Camouflaged workshops had been created.
So they found them there,
and all of them were missing something.
They were missing an engine part or an instrument,
or had no weapons or radios.
At the end of the war,
fighters can only take off from stretches of highway.
The Germans would carry out what the American historian
Michael Neufeld has called the move underground.
In practical terms, every tunnel, every salt mine
would be used for some production process or other.
For all manner of component manufacture and assembly.
And ultimately, Germany was transformed into
a gigantic decentralized workshop.
There were a few production sites based in Bavaria
with factories of various sizes.
But essentially, tunnels were used to produce wing parts
or jet engines, for example.
And then the assembly would take place on other sites.
But this system had dramatic consequences.
It made transportation longer.
And transport obviously means vulnerability
to Allied air attacks.
The Nazis final creation
is the Heinkel 162A-2 fighter.
In desperation, Speer, Milsch, and Himmler
decide to produce a fighter that will be easy to built.
The lack of strategic materials means the body
is basically made of plywood.
The design of the centrally positioned
jet engine is innovative.
It was designed for young pilots, but proved
to be very difficult to maneuver.
Almost everything is revolutionary with this plane.
It was designed in a very short time.
Heinkel won the project in September,
and the first prototype was built in November.
The first flight took place in November.
It was also revolutionary because it was the first
single-engine jet fighter to have an ejector seat.
200 of them were built, but only a squad
of 30 was deployed on the Danish front
just one month before capitulation.
There was almost no cooperation in the field
of weapons production between Germany,
which had a considerable advance,
and Italy or Japan, apart from certain trivial influences.
For example, the Russian Berg suicide fighter,
which came out of watching cinema newsreels
of the Japanese Kamikazes, who hurled themselves
onto American aircraft carriers in the Pacific.
At the end of 1944, a handful of SS leaders
who were trying everything possible to find a solution,
had a series of pilot controlled V-1s built and
tested by SS volunteers.
And so this pointless project disappeared
along with so many others in the collapse
of the Third Reich.
In the spring of 1945, no miracle has worked,
and Hitler commits suicide.
The Nazis defeat is total.
Berlin is devastated by Soviet bombs
and a new war is on the horizon, the Cold War.
Obviously, those who won the war realized the importance
of Peenemunde's legacy.
And in the last weeks of the war, they did their best
to enroll the teams of engineers who designed the V-2.
We know that both sides managed to recover
some of the Peenemunde engineers and technical plans,
with the big winners being the Americans
who managed to win over von Braun and his best engineers.
The Soviets, too, got their hands on several hundred
engineers who had worked on the V-2.
And we often forget France, who recovered
around 60 engineers from the Natter rocket program,
and who later worked for the French army
and ultimately the Aryan program.
(rocket exploding)
The secret weapons were finally only rarely used
byt the Germans.
But they did contribute to opening up a new era
in world strategy, which has given us 60 years of peace.
(powerful instrumental music)