10 Gargantuan Things Made Solely For Killing People

It's those Nazis again, this time pursuing the dream of making a tank bigger than everyone else's that could totally blow up all the other tanks and make Germany the best. Their solution was the Panzer VIII, which was nicknamed the 'Maus' because if there's one thing Nazis have it's a sense of humour.

In 1943 Hitler was shown a wooden mockup of an enormous tank design and, after inflating his lederhosen with glee, approved its construction. The result was a monstrosity that weighed more than 180 tons and sported a 128mm gun that could rip a Sherman tank in half.

It was big and dangerous enough, but what the Maus lacked was the ability to actually move. There wasn't an engine powerful enough to properly shift its enormous weight. Also, it couldn't cross any bridges because the architects of Europe hadn't anticipated anyone would ever try to drive anything that big over them. Instead the Germans planned to drive them along the bottom of rivers instead. The Maus probably never fired a shell in combat and was captured, along with the tank factory, by the Russians at the end of the war.