by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a couple of episodes of
the TV series Nazi Mega Weapons, a
British production from 2014, on PBS — imdb.com lists three seasons for it
(2013, 2014 and 2015) but even on these shows, the second season, the producers
were obviously pumping up the project by covering aspects of the Nazi regime
and its military machine that were not really “mega weapons” in the sense of
the huge construction projects, many of them so big as to be impractical,
covered in the show’s first season. One episode, originally aired January 21,
2015, was called “The S.S.” — which wasn’t a mega-weapon at all but an elite
force, essentially the worst of the worst of Nazidom, who began before Hitler
took power as his personal bodyguards but soon expanded under its commander,
Heinrich Himmler, to run virtually the entire police force of Nazi Germany, to
control the concentration camps (which were originally built before World War
II as a place to imprison political enemies and turn them into slave laborers
before they were expanded into the territories Germany conquered in the early
years of the war — the most famous camp, Auschwitz, wasn’t in Germany but in
Poland — and converted from forced-labor camps into extermination facilities)
and in its later incarnation, the Waffen S.S. (which simply means “armed S.S.”), to fight alongside the
regular German military in operations for which the Nazis wanted a particularly
brutal and uncompromising force. The show contains at least one fortress the
S.S. built (with slave labor) in Poland, where they dug under no fewer than 36
mountains to build an underground facility called “The Giant” which would have
enabled the Nazis to maintain a government and continue a resistance movement
even if German lost the war above ground (which in fact was never used because
the Soviet troops advanced through that part of Poland and recaptured it before
“The Giant” was anywhere near completion).
When the show’s narrator (who in
some ways is its most risible feature; he sounds and looks all too much like
Eric Idle parodying British newscasters
on Monty Python’s Flying Circus)
descended into “The Giant,” some of the original caves had become so flooded he
had to go into them on a raft à la The Phantom of the Opera. The show also mentions the weird cult Himmler tried to
create to give the Nazis in general and the S.S. in particular a “spiritual”
basis, linking them to old Teutonic myths. The program didn’t describe
Himmler’s spiritual cult as a direct attack on Christianity, but Himmler
himself certainly did: he said, “We live in an era of the ultimate
conflict with Christianity. It is part of the mission of the S.S. to give the
German people in the next half century the non-Christian ideological
foundations on which to lead and shape their lives. This task does not consist
solely in overcoming an ideological opponent but must be accompanied at every
step by a positive impetus: in this case that means the reconstruction of the
German heritage in the widest and most comprehensive sense.” Himmler seized a
castle that had been built on the site of a victory the ancient German tribes
had won against the Roman Empire and remodeled it into what amounted to the
Vatican of his S.S. cult, and (though this isn’t touched on in the program) he
also sent out anthropologists worldwide to dig up “evidence” of his racial
theories — an effort even some of the other leading Nazis thought was nuts. The
show goes into some detail about how the S.S. were recruited (Himmler wanted
people with blond hair, blue eyes, at least 5’ 11” tall and with perfect vision
— even though Himmler himself was shorter than that, dark-haired and wore
glasses) and how they were trained to wipe any amount of humanity or compassion
out of them — though the S.S. training as shown here wasn’t that different from
what any army puts its recruits through
so they’ll lose their individuality and blend together as a unitary fighting
force.
The other Nazi Mega Weapons
episode shown last night was at least closer to what the show’s concept was
originally: it was first aired January 28, 2015 and called “The Siegfried Line”
— after the nickname Hitler’s enemies gave to the Westwall, the extensive fortifications and defenses Hitler
ordered built on the border between Germany and France to prevent a repeat of
the trench-warfare stalemate that had made World War I last four years and
produced so many human casualties. (The French similarly built the Maginot Line
but stupidly ignored the fact that in World War I the Germans had invaded
France via neutral Belgium; so they stopped the Maginot Line at the
French-Belgian border — and the Nazis, like the Kaiser’s army before them, once
again crossed through Belgium and got into France without having to bring down
the Maginot Line.) The Siegfried Line took advantage of the natural defenses of
the Hürtgen Forest on the German-French border — with its closely packed trees
and rolling terrain — and among its elements were “dragon’s teeth” (giant
concrete outcroppings built to stop enemy tanks), huge pill-boxes and turrets
from which German soldiers could aim machine guns at the enemy without being
vulnerable themselves, and concrete abutments that reinforced the natural
defenses of the Hürtgen Forest. Ironically, the Siegfried Line was at least in
part a victim of the Germans’ early successes in the war: Hitler ordered many
of its guns removed so they could be used in the Nazi invasion of France, and
by the time the fortunes of war reversed and he once again needed to worry
about defending the homeland, much of the Line’s fortification was obsolete
because improvements in light artillery, tanks and other mobile weapons had
made it possible for the Allies to break through the line.
Nonetheless, the
Line was effective enough as a defense that the U.S. Army’s first attempt to
break through the western border of Germany at the town of Aachen (also known,
by the way, as the city where Herbert von Karajan got his first important job
as conductor in 1938) turned into a bloodbath and delayed them long enough that
Hitler was able to put together an army for the counteroffensive that became
known as the Battle of the Bulge. “The Siegfried Line” tells its story largely
through two experts, retired British Army Captain Patrick Bury and “battlefield
archaeologist” Tony Pollard (one wonders just how you decide you want to be a
“battlefield archaeologist” and where you go to train as one), as well as the
diaries and letters of Fritz Tillmans, a German soldier who fought in the
battle for Aachen — and it’s a compelling one, even though the moral of Nazi
Mega Weapons as a whole is that the Germans
hobbled themselves with their mania for size; instead of doing what the Allies
did — building large quantities of small, maneuverable tanks and guns — the
Nazis concentrated on a few big weapons they didn’t have the resources to
mass-produce and which in some cases were absurdly vulnerable. One of the
previous episodes of Nazi Mega Weapons was about an ultra-huge cannon that was so large they had to build
special railway tracks just to move it — and it was so big and so difficult to
move it was a sitting duck for enemy aircraft. I know we’re not supposed to
make comparisons between Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump — that’s considered very politically incorrect even by Trump’s bitterest
enemies — but they have an awful lot in common, including this mania for making
everything “yuge” as well as a maddening (to their associates as well as
everyone else) tendency to base their decisions on whatever they’re told by the
last person who discusses something with them — the surviving diaries of Joseph
Goebbels and the memoirs of Albert Speer both describe their machinations to
make sure they were the last
people to see Hitler on a particular issue they wanted his support on, and
their frustrations when someone else in the Nazi hierarchy got to der
Führer before they did!
