Plot Synopsis

NAZI MEGA WEAPONS explores the weapons Germany used during World War II, uncovering their engineering secrets and telling the stories of the engineers who designed them. Using rarely seen historic footage, re-creations of milestone moments and interviews with history, engineering, and military strategy experts, this series also reveals how these weapons sparked a technological revolution that changed warfare forever. Each 60-minute episode highlights a different weapon, including: the Atlantic Wall, which stretched thousands of kilometers from France to Norway and was designed to protect Nazi-occupied Europe from the Allies; U-boat pens, focusing on the U-boat base in the seaport city of Lorient, France, where an immense and impenetrable concrete and steel submarine pen still stands today; the V2 rocket, which was a destructive wonder weapon designed to bomb the Allies into resignation; and three more weapons that will be featured in their own episodes, which will be shown at a later date. On Wednesday, January 7, 2015 at 10pm (check local listings), PBS premiered the three-episode second season of NAZI MEGA WEAPONS. The season opener, "V1: Hitler's Vengeance Missile," chronicles how Hitler orders the development of a groundbreaking weapon in retaliation for devastating Allied bombing raids on German cities. Though it was ready too late to make a difference to the outcome of the war, its legacy is the cruise missile -- a weapon that changed the face of war forever. The second installment, "The Wolf's Lair," documents how Hitler becomes convinced of his own military genius as European countries fall like dominoes to the all-conquering German armies. He plans to invade Russia and orders the construction of a huge, heavily protected command complex of bunkers and buildings named the Wolf's Lair. But as he isolates himself in his concrete city, the war begins to slip from his grasp and a conspiracy is hatched to make the secret base his tomb. Then the season finale, "The SS," documents how under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, the SS becomes a terrifying cult that engineers Hitler's vision for a new Germany. By the start of the war, the SS holds sway in politics, police and security and is responsible for the creation of the concentration camps. Its power, influence and terror spread with the creation of a military wing: the Waffen SS. By the end of the war, the SS has grown into a machine that controls of every aspect of the Third Reich and brutally disposes of any opposition to Hitler.
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Season 3 of NAZI MEGA WEAPONS premiered on Wednesday, May 11, 2016 at 10pm on PBS (check local listings).