The Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus, Mouse on English, was an abomination of a tank, a Super-Heavy tank and one of the few who ever left the drawing table.

Super-Heavy tanks tend to share something in common, they really weren’t that terribly viable as weapons of true mass warfare, expensive and inflexible, most of them were cancelled before they ever reached anything that even vaguely resemble a prototype, most only ever appear on paper.

The Maus was basically a project assembled by piece of technological marvel that Ferdinand Porsche had developed for his proposed version of what would later become the Tiger II heavy tank.

The Tiger II was fairly silly on the grander scale, the Maus was outright fucking stupid on even a smaller scale, 188 tons of massive monstrous weight, ten meters long, three point seven wide and three point six high.

Designed as a breakthrough tank, for a period when Nazi Germany had long ago stopped doing any sort of breakthroughs beyond pointless wonder weapons.

The thing is, the Maus was by no means the biggest tank ever planned by the Nazi, the Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte (Rat) was so large it would have required a shipyard to build, the Ratte would have clocked in at well over a thousand tons, utterly beyond dumb, however, if it had been build, the sheer amount of resources spent on it, would probably had ended World War Two much earlier.

The Maus’ true failure lies in the fact that it actually reached the Prototyping stages, two prototype hulls were constructed, the second of the two were destroyed in the final stages of the war, with it’s turret intact.

The first hull had been dispatched as a support vehicle, but never reach anything important, the Soviet’s mated the intact turret and the first hull together, using 18 cranes to achieve it, mostly for test purposes.

After testing, the only surviving Maus was transferred to the Kubinka Tank Museum, were it remains to this very day.

Don’t stick to your ideas, when it becomes painfully obvious how dumb they are, also when Adolf Hitler think’s it’s a good idea, run the fuck away.