by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched an episode of Nazi Mega Weapons, an occasional British show with an on-screen
anchorman who’s all too reminiscent of Eric Idle’s parodies of a newscaster on Monty Python, whose agenda has been to present the huge
construction and engineering projects commissioned by Adolf Hitler and his gang
as magnificent feats of human imagination while at the same time not only
enlisted in the service of an evil cause but pointless as well. This one was
about “The Eagle’s Nest,” brainchild of Hitler’s henchman Martin Bormann, who
was the most feared of Hitler’s aides mainly because, like H. R. Haldeman with
Richard Nixon, Bormann controlled access to Hitler. (Albert Speer’s memoir Inside
the Third Reich makes it clear how much
Speer hated and feared Bormann and kept trying to outmaneuver him.) Hitler
already had a spectacular home in the Berghof, a mountain overlooking the town
of Obersalzberg on the German-Austrian border (remember that Hitler was actually
Austrian and he liked being able to stand in front of his spectacular picture
window and look over the country of his birth), but Bormann kept expanding it
with a series of bunkers, tunnels to connect them and other installations that
were supposed to make the Berghof an impenetrable fortress. Not surprisingly,
none of it exists anymore except
the Eagle’s Nest, an inaccessible house Bormann had built at the peak of the
Berghof which could only be accessed by driving up a road tunneled into the
mountain (itself a major engineering feat since the damned thing was made of
solid rock!) and taking an elevator up the last 400 feet.
Unfortunately for
Bormann, when he took Hitler to it for the first time, instead of being
impressed, Hitler was freaked out of his wits — he said the elevator was too
vulnerable and he didn’t trust the mechanism. Ironically, the rest of the
Berghof was destroyed by a British bombing raid on April 25, 1945, five days
before Hitler’s suicide and the fall of Berlin (where he stayed until the end
because he didn’t like the image of himself as a coward dashing back to the
Berghof to escape), but the Eagle’s Nest was spared and is now a museum. The
show followed most of the pattern of the Nazi Mega Weapons episodes: marvelous feats of engineering that were
militarily worthless precisely because they were so big they couldn’t be mass-produced (among the
projects showcased in previous episodes are the “Mouse” tank designed by
Ferdinand Porsche and a huge piece of artillery that required a special
railroad system to move it and proved to be a sitting duck for enemy aircraft
raids — one would have thought Hitler, who’d won his early victories mostly
through the power of his air force, would have had some idea that his giant weapons were especially
vulnerable to air attack, but no-o-o-o-o), while the “Mouse” tank was too large to be mass-produced in any quantity that made a difference (and
when the Soviets captured the prototype in early 1945 they quickly concluded that it was so slow and vulnerable
it was useless as a weapon) — apparently Hitler, like Donald Trump, prized
bigness for its own sake and had virtually no sense of proportion. The Nazis so insanely wasted resources — both
workers and materials — on these oddball projects, as well as continuing the
Holocaust even when it was using up precious productive capacity (including
diverting all that fuel to run the trains to the death camps instead of
powering tanks and other weapons against the Allied armies), that they managed
to speed their own defeat, a bad thing for them but a good thing for the world.
