Look, I haven’t much interest in airplanes or warships aside from historical and anecdotal purposes, but firearms? Those wholly fall in my interest, and I can tell you exactly how ineffective “Nazi Supertechnology” was.

This is the MG 42.

This idiot gun, man.

As a firearm, it’s a good piece. Low cost, easy to produce, easy to disassemble and reassemble, easy to maintain, easy to operate, and reliable. What was the problem? It’s firing rate.

This idiot shoots around 1200 rounds per minute. Compared to other machine guns of its time, that’s about double to 1.5 times more rounds. The M1919 Browning was something like 450 rounds per minute, the Bren shoots roughly half at an approximate 600 rounds per minute. This was bad, because the Nazis weren’t exactly rich and lush with resources, ammunition included. Lightly squeezing the trigger of this thing shot from 4 to 7 rounds, which is a waste when you just want to do some light tapping instead of full on suppression fire or, you know, when you wanna conserve ammo because you don’t have a lot of it to begin with.

They called this thing “Hitler’s Buzzsaw” because of the sound it made when shooting. This wasn’t a compliment. Even when Mauser had produced a firearm that is, by all means, not bad at all, it still wasn’t what they needed. It’s a gun that didn’t take logistics into account, and hey hey, logistics kind of make or break a war. So there you had some Nazi shitheads, in their pillbox or their sundry fortification, trying to secure an area or perhaps a escape route, shooting small bursts to keep Allied soldiers from fuckrushing their position or flanking them, when SWOOSH they were out of ammo earlier than predicted, because the idiot buzzsaw ate so much ammo that it was just a liability rather than an advantage. You don’t need extreme firing rates in the first place. What was the point? Looking impressive. Seeming impressive. That’s all Nazis ever managed: Looking dangerous. I am not saying they weren’t a threat in World War II, I am saying that they weren’t the Ultra Mega Broly Superscience Megaentity some people love trying to make them out to be (”Nazis would’ve put people on Mars by the 70s!” haha choke on dick and die, dude), they were just really good at looking in control but otherwise were winging it, like that kid we all knew in school or college that clearly prepared his Powerpoint presentation at 2:30 AM and would just grab a paragraph summary from Wikipedia to recite it by memory and was really, really hoping no one would make questions.

So going back to ground zero of this post, I can tell you, with all certainty, that they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing with the firearms. They produced, like, a good assault rifle on the tail end of the war, mind you (StG44), but, haha, yeah, too little, too late. I don’t know about navy and air force enough to tell you with detail how bad they were at those, too, but I can tell you they were bad at those, too. Others can explain boats and planes better than I can. The point here is: “Nazi Supertechnology” is a dumb meme, and you’re dumb if you believe it.