3. The Fuhrer’s Really Big Tank
As seen above, Hitler was obsessed with the possession of absurdly big things, and if the Fuhrer had had his druthers, he would have built some mind-bogglingly giant tanks. One such was the Ratte, which would have weighed 1000 tons, and another was the even bigger – and aptly named – Monster tank, which would have clocked in at 1500 tons. Those behemoths never got off the drawing board, but the Third Reich did manage to manufacture history’s heaviest production tank, the Panzer VIII Maus.
The Maus was the biggest operational tank ever manufactured. It measured about 33 feet long, 12 feet wide, 12 feet high, and weighed almost 200 tons. While normal tanks usually use machine guns as secondary armament, Maus’ secondary armament was a 75 mm coaxial gun. Its main gun was a 128 mm monster that could destroy any Allied tank at ranges of up to 2.2 miles. Even that powerful gun failed to satisfy the Fuhrer, who thought that 128 mm looked like a pop gun on the massive Panzer VIII. So it was increased to a 150 mm cannon.
