+Digital Books - 31 Nazi Inventions That Changed the World

Porsche took some ideas already tested on other models he designed, made some new ones and came to a car with an air-cooled rear engine, torsion bar suspension, rounded front hood for better aerodynamics and a “beetle” shape. During this period, the Nazi government invested public money in the construction of a new factory and sponsored the entire project in order to reduce costs.

The car of the German people was born, the KdF Wagen . KdF is an acronym for Kraft durch Freude (Power for Joy), a policy that preached increase of productivity, patriotism, and spreading the image of a modern German people. With the Nazi government-sponsored advertisements that read “ Mark Fünf die Woche musst du sparen, willst du imigen Wagen fahren” (“Five marks a week you should set aside, if you want your own car”), KdF was a success, selling over 300.000 units before it was officially launched, in 1940.

After the war, as part of the Volkswagen and German recovery plan, the model was named to Kafer , was exported and produced in several countries, given different adaptations, changes and names, being produced until the 1990s and becoming one of the most iconic and best selling cars in history.

The ZG 1229 Vampir was the first active infrared night vision device developed. It was generally used by German soldiers with the Sturmgewehr44 assault rifle, during World War II.

The first night vision devices were introduced by the German army in 1939 and were being developed by AEG since 1939. The ZG 1229 Vampir weighed about 10 kg, carried two batteries, an image converter, a tungsten light source and a sensor-filter that allowed only infrared light to appear. The soldier wearing the device was known as the night hunter.

Vampir equipment was first used in combat on February 1945. 310 units were delivered in the final stages of the war. Similar infrared equipment was installed on MG34, MG42 machine guns and 50 Mark V.Panther tanks.

The Z-line computers were a group of four computers, created by Konrad Zuse during the years of the German Nazi government. Konrad Zuse was a German civil engineer, computer scientist, inventor, entrepreneur and computer pioneer.

The Z1 was a mechanical computer designed between 1936 and 1937 and built between 1936 and 1938. It was an electrically powered binary mechanical calculator with limited programming capability. The Z1 was the first freely programmable computer in the world that used Boolean logic and floating-point binary numbers. It was completed in 1938 and completely financed with private funds. This computer was destroyed by the bombing of Berlin in December 1943, during World War II.

The Z2 was a mechanical and relay computer concluded in 1940. It was an enhanced version of the Z1, using the same mechanical memory but replacing arithmetic and control logic with electrical relay circuits. Zuse introduced the Z2 in 1940 to members of the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt fur Luftfahrt — DVL (German Air Force Research Institute). Photographs, plans and documentation for the Z2 were destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II.

The Z3 was a German electromechanical computer completed in 1941. It was the world’s first fully automatic programmable digital computer in operation. The Z3 was built with 2,600 relays and had a memory that stored 64 numbers of 22-bits. Its calculations were performed in binary floating-point arithmetic and already calculated square roots and performed a multiplication in about 5 seconds. The program code was stored in perforated film.

The Z3 was used to solve airplane wing vibration problems. Zuse asked the German government for funding to replace relays with all-electronic switches, but funding was denied during World War II, as this development was considered “unimportant to war”. The original Z3 was destroyed on December 21st, 1943. during a bombing of the Allies in Berlin.

The Z4 was the world’s first commercial digital computer, designed and built by Konrad Zuse in 1945. After the creation of the previous models, Zuse realized that he could create a company to market his Z models and created the Zuse Apparatebau . The Z4 was based on the Z3 design, but like the Z2, it was partially mechanical (memory) and electromechanical machine. A special unit called Planfertigungsteil (program building unit), which punctured program tapes, greatly facilitated the programming and correction of machine programs through the use symbolic operations and memory cells. The machine had a large repertoire of instructions, including square root, MAX, MIN, and sine.

To prevent it from falling into Soviet hands, the Z4 was evacuated from Berlin on February 1945 and transported to Göttingen . The Z4 was completed at the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt AVA (Aerodynamic Research Institute) facility, which was located in the Lower Saxony region.

American atomic bombs, which destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sealed the end of World War II in 1945. However, during the conflict years, Germany also had a nuclear power project that tried to use radioactive elements to create weapons of mass destruction capable of annihilating their enemies.

In 1938, German physicists Otto Hahn and Fritz Straßmann bombarded uranium atoms with neutrons and produced barium particles, releasing a large amount of energy, discovering the process of uranium nuclear fission. The process was the first step toward creating an atomic weapon, if it was carried out on a large scale, releasing highly destructive energy. In 1939 Germany’s nuclear plans became apparent when it took all Czechoslovakian uranium, under Nazi occupation, from the international market.

The program was divided into three distinct work fronts: the creation of a nuclear reactor ( Uranmaschine ); the production of heavy water or deuterated water (D 2O, a type of water that has deuterium, or “heavy hydrogen” in place of ordinary hydrogen); and the production and separation of the uranium isotope.