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"Well. Jetpack Hitler. Reality has finally jumped the shark." — Ryan Choi, The All-New Atom
, pretty much everyone agrees that the Nazis were very, very bad, what with the fascism, attacking their neighbors, systematic murder on an industrial scale, and so on. So, how do you make Those Wacky Nazis even more intimidating? Why, by giving them power armor and alien allies, of course!
A number of factors make this surprisingly plausible. Germany achieved many technological firsts and progressed enough in rocketry to kill plenty of Londoners, and earn a number of German scientists free passports to the US once the war was over. Late on bleeding-edge experiments were touted as Wunderwaffen , wonder weapons that would turn the tide of the war by revolutionizing it. Nothing much came from these projects at the time, or if they did, it was too late for Germany. Nearly all of them, however, were developed upon and used by other countries in the years after WWII — the StG 44, for example, inspired the AK-47, and the Messerschmitt Me 262 gave way to American and Soviet jet fighters.
So, if you have to pick one WWII power to give antigravity and a moonbase, the choice is obvious. Not to mention that Einstein (though a pacifist and a Jew, so hardly on Hitler's Christmas card list) was German, and Tesla, although actually Serbian (a Slav, so a member of another of Hitler's exterminate-on-sight groups), is frequently confused with this due to the country being part of the Austrian Empire when he was born. Needless to say, the theme is played upon endlessly in pulp callbacks and modern occult works.
Contrast Nazis With Gnarly Weapons, which is about the weapons they had in Real Life. See also Ghostapo, where Nazis uses super-demonry rather than (or combined with) super-science and Soviet Superscience, when it's the Dirty Commies showing up with giant robots and spaceships. Compare Historical Villain Upgrade.
Please Do Not Confuse With Stupid Sexy Flanders.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- The Fullmetal Alchemist movie Conqueror of Shamballa has the Thule Society as the main villains. (Who have extensive rocketry in the 1920s. Ayup.)
- Well, at least this explains why nobody in 1920's Germany is shocked to the point of speechlessness by the main character's robot arm.
- He does keep it hidden most of the time, though.
- The Nazis do get their hands on nuclear technology decades before the first bomb is ever made, but only because it came from Ed and Al's world where everything is more advanced (kinda). That and its implied Ed and Al stole it back.
- In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stroheim is a severely maimed Nazi soldier who gets several cybernetic enhancements throughout Part 2, including a minigun with armor-piercing bullets in his chest and a laser eye. The Jojo of this generation receives a robotic hand from the Nazis as a parting gift after he loses his in battle.
- While Millenium are primarily about using occult means to accomplish their goals (most notably the creation of a battalion of vampires) they also use advanced technology such as powerful, missile-shooting zeppelins, and microchip implants which can be used to remotely monitor (and incinerate) their soldiers.
- Also a very complex cyborg.
- Not a perfect example, though, as Hellsing is set in the modern era; Millenium is a splinter faction that survived the war (presumably building all this stuff in the intervening time).
- In the manga version of Space Adventure Cobra, it is eventually revealed that Salamander, the leader of the Pirate Guild is actually Hitler.
- In The Legend Of Koizumi, it turns out that all the Nazis- including Menegle and Hitler- survived WWII up to the present day, and are now living on a moon base. They travel from Earth to the Moon in classic UFOs, and have a gigantic Meteor Cannon that can hit any point on Earth with the strength of a nuke. The only way to stop them? Mah-Jong.
Comics
- Two words: Atomic Robo.
- Blackhawks in The DCU fought a lot of bizarre Nazi superscience (with bizarre Allied superscience). The most famous was the War-Wheel, a large spiked wheel with a centre like a tank from the First World War.
- Top Ten's Neopolis is an entire city designed by expat Nazi Mad Scientists, complete with flying castles, huge megastructures, and teleporters. In The Forty-Niners, some of them try using a time machine to alter the course of the war.
- Ultimate Marvel has Nazi Aliens, or rather aliens who helped Nazis with ahead-of-their-time ICBM and atom bomb technology, and then appropriated all their uniforms and symbols (and names, and bodies).
- Hellboy: The titular character is the result of an occult version of this and he spends most of the comic smashing and/or shooting the results of other Nazi super weapon projects.
- A crossover with The Savage Dragon revealed that the brain of Brainiape, an evil gorilla with mental powers, was actually Hitler.
- Many Captain America villains probably fall here. Arnim Zola and the first Baron Zemo are both archetypal Nazi Mad Scientists.
- Parodied in Team Triumph, with Nazis explaining their plan: [quote] "Zum Teufel, Auf Wiedersehen, giant Nazi robots!" [end quote]
- Captain Marvel Jr's archenemy Captain Nazi is the most obvious of several DCU supervillains created by Nazi technology. In his more recent appearances, though, he's been given a supernatural origin.
- In Fables, the Nazis animated Frankenstein's Monster to serve them, only to be stopped by Bigby and a band of allied soldiers.
- A 90's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic had a Hitler's brain operated robot travel in time to save his past self so he could later serve in order to be saved for his brain transplant.
- Superman At Earth's End is possibly the most literal example of this, not only with a mutant Gestapo armed with futuristic weapons, an army of half-human half-animal monsters, a giant evil Batman clone-monster, but with TWO clones of Hitler himself.
- An arc in Justice Society Classified involved the disembodied brain of Heinrich Himmler. Who built a giant railgun on THE MOON.
- Not entirely sure whether or not it's this or Ghostapo, but there is a Marvel Comics villain known as The Swarm. Who was originally a Nazi scientist who was devoured by mutant bees, and now his corpse controls the swarm. So he's A Nazi... Made of BEES!. Seriously, he even managed to have Ghost Rider running scared, as one commentator put it what good is hellfire against fascist bees?
- Which becomes...interesting, to say the least, when one learns about the use of flamethrowers in dealing with Africanised bees.
- It's super effective!
- In the early Wolverine comics, you had Geist, a Nazi...cyborg.
Films
- Iron Sky is this Trope. Trenchcoat spacesuits! A Swastika-shaped Moonbase! Invading Antarctic Moon-Nazis in flying saucers!
- They Saved Hitler's Brain.
- The Nazi propaganda cartoon shown in The Rocketeer film has an entire army of jetpack Nazis.
- The movie itself is a subversion; it was explained despite the Nazis' numerous efforts to create a working jetpack, they were unable to, and the plot of the movie revolves around attempting to steal one from the Americans.
- Outpost revolves around the Nazi project called Die Glocke.
Literature
- Robert A Heinlein brought this trope into its modern form by creating Nazis with atomic spaceships on the Moon in Rocket Ship Galileo, written only a couple of years after WWII ended. For the readers of the time, the Nazi's were probably the least fantastic part. Men on the Moon indeed!
- Lightning, by Dean Koontz has the Nazis in possession of a working Time Machine, which they intend to use to win WWII by finding out from our time just what went wrong for them when and changing it. Too bad their chrononaut fell in love with a 1980s novelist.....
- Phillip K. Dick's novel Man in the High Castle describes an alternate 1963 in which Germany and Japan won WWII. The Nazis have developed rockets into a substitute for airplanes and are sending manned rockets throughout the solar system. It is also mentioned that they have drained the Mediterranean Sea, an engineering task requiring advanced technology if ever there was one!
- In the Axis of Time Alternate History trilogy, thanks to Japan sending captured data, such as body armor and jet engines, to Nazi Germany, the Reich is now much more confident in winning the war. However, the Allies and the Soviets also have access to the technology brought from the future and the initial trilogy ends with Germany and Japan being nuked out of existence, with the Soviet Union in an even stronger position than it was at the end of the War in the real timeline.
- Zach Parsons' book My Tank is Fight! uses and subverts this: it gives detailed statistics on various rejected inventions of WWII (mostly German ones), and then imagines what they would have been like in the field. Most of them fail spectacularly. With the exception of the nuclear bombing of New York, though it doesn't avert the defeat of Germany.
- This is the plot of James Hogan's The Proteus Operation. In the untampered history, Hitler fell into obscurity after the Beer-Hall Putsch, ushering in a world of equality, prosperity, and peace, but corrupt future plutocrats attempted to establish an empire for themselves by engineering a Nazi victory, then traveling in time to rule the Nazi-conquered Earth. Due to their tampering, the Nazis won WWII in 1942 using nuclear bombs. The book involves time-travelers seeking to undo this. They only manage to partially succeed, resulting in what is heavily implied to be our actual history.
- David Langford and John Grant's disaster novel parody Earthdoom features Adolf Hitler time-travelling to modern-day Britain, and subsequently cloning himself using a farmer's livestock cloning machine. (The multiple Hitlers then end up on board one of the alien spaceships orbiting Earth at the time, where the aliens deal with them by broadcasting the looped message 'Can you trust the person next to you? He looks a bit semitic to me...')
- Danger Boy: Dragon Sword subverts this- a Nazi rocket scientist loudly declares "I am not INTERESTED in traveling through time or making contact with space aliens!"
- Australian sci-fi author Sean McMullen inverts this trope in his short story The Devils of Langenhagen. In the last days of the Third Reich an Me262 interceptor squadron is visited by some strange and elegent guests — a couple of high-ranking pilots (and their wives) flying very advanced aircraft (a Horten 229 and a Japanese Shinden canard fighter). It turns out that they're time-travellers on an adventure tour.
- An illustrated story based on Isaac Asimov's robot concepts involved the Nazis building a terrifying robot nicknamed the Iron Major. Since the robot was possessed by a mad scientist (and it ate human brains), they only succeeded in making one of it.
- The novel 1945 tells of an alternate 1945 where the Nazis, unencumbered by American involvement in the European War, now patrol the skies of Fortress Europa with a fleet of stealth jet-bombers and rocket planes.
- Charles Platt's Free Zone includes a visit to an alternate timeline where the Nazis won, took over Earth, Terraformed Mars and populated it with identical Aryan clones.
- J.R. Dunn's short story "Crux Gammata", while mostly focussed on the activities of an American rock band in The Seventies putting on a concert in a Nazis-won Alt!Europe, includes mention of Nazi moonbases and lunar aluminum factories.
- The Faction Paradox novel "Warlords of Utopia" by Lance Parkin has multiple universes work of allied Nazis working under a Cabal of Hitlers (including, oddly, the only one Hitler child August) who end up in a war against multiple universes of allied Romans (and other semi-mythic empires such as an Amazonian empire). They were all given their parallel universe jumping technology, but the Nazis had supersonic fighters by the end of the wars.
Live Action TV
- Sci Fi Channel's Movie of the Week: SS Doomtrooper: The Dirty Dozen versus Nuclear Powered Nazi Mutant Super Soldier. Featuring a one-thread-of-shoestring-budget Special Effects Failure in the title role.
- In The Man From UNCLE episode "The Deadly Games Affair", Napoleon is chasing after a high ranking Nazi scientist who was known to have been working on a very secret project near the end of the war. However, when he catches up with the scientist, Napoleon finds a diabolical lab below the scientist's garage, complete with a cryogenically frozen Hitler, who will be awakened using the spy's rare blood type.
- In The New Avengers episode "The Eagle's Nest", the Avengers prevent an attempt by an enclave of Nazis concealed in a British monastery to revive Hitler's preserved body.
- The Tomorrow People storyline "Hitler's Last Secret" is chock full of evil Nazi super-sciencey goodness.
- In the season three finale of Star Trek Enterprise, the victorious Enterprise returns home to find that they are in the mid-twentieth century, where aliens have used time travel to give the Nazis superior firepower and alter the timeline in their favor.
- Kamen Rider X gave us STARFISH HITLER!
- And again
- And as I recall a lot of the evil organizations in the early shows are said to base their cyborg surgery on Nazi techniques.
- In regards to that, three of the four original Big Bads, Colonel Zol, General Black, and Dr. Shinigami, were all ex-Nazis. Dr. Shinigami PERFECTED the cyborg technology that nearly all following evil organizations would use by experimenting on Jews in concentration camps.
- While not as impressive as some other entries, Vince McMahon was apparently under the impression that Those Wacky Nazis had mastered cryogenic freezing, as an original gimmick planned for Heidenreich (before he became a poetry-reading schizo, who anally raped Michael Cole) was that he would've revealed as an unfrozen Nazi super-soldier. Hard to tell which was the worse idea...
- In the first episode of Galactica 1980, after the Galactica arrived at Earth in 1980 one character wanted to use time travel to go back a few decades so that Earth could get a technological head start on building up defenses for the inevitable day when the Cylons arrived. After Adama et al rejected his idea out of hand he stole a timeship and tried to do it anyway... by giving advanced technological help to the Nazis in 1944. (Good idea, really poor implementation.) Our heroes foiled him, and then the series forgot about time-travel entirely.
New Media
- The presence of vast numbers of obviously CGI pictures of never-realised Nazi wunderwaffen on the internet and History Channel (e.g. Luftwaffe `46) has prompted Alternatehistory.com to create the conspiracy theory that "the Nazis would have won the war if they'd spent all their money on tanks and guns instead of inventing CGI before computers existed".
Tabletop Games
Video Games
- The video game grandaddy of this trope is the classic Wolfenstein 3D, which featured Stupid Powered Armor Hitler as the final boss. Sequels Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein have good old B.J. Blazckowitz dealing with Nazi superscience along with the occult as well as Nazis With Gnarly Weapons.
- City of Heroes has a variety of nazi inspired and nazi-derived villains. Including nazi (artificial) vampires, nazi supersoldiers, nazi robots, time travelling alien nazis...
- Persona 2: Innocent Sin had, among the many things that could possibly have made it unreleasable overseas, Nazi robots. (And Hitler. He and his robots were hiding in Antarctica. Except it's not really him. It's complicated... Or Is It?)
- PC game Silent Storm starts off pretty innocuous, with an Allied special squad fighting against the evil Nazis and using a lot of historically accurate weaponry. Then you get powered armor suits.
- Averted in Command and Conquer's Red Alert series, if only because the whole point of the series is that they eliminated Hitler right off the bat. Its result? We got Stupid Jetpack Stalin instead...
- Stupid Tesla Coil Stalin, actually. To be followed by Stupid Psi-power Yuri and Stupid
Jet Pack Humongous Mecha Yoshiro. No, the Alternate Timeline doesn't take itself that seriously, why do you ask?
- The second Freedom Force game has the ranting Nazi psychic Blitzkrieg go back in time to supply the Third Reich with Energy X. The series being what it is, even the non-superpowered Nazis are very Wacky.
- The Secret Weapons of World War II expansion for Battlefield 1942 added in various "planned", but not implemented, World War II vehicles and gadgets including, you guessed it, jetpacks.
- The Playstation Two game Ring of Red is basically the version of the Korean War in a world where the tail end of World War II was fought with Humongous Mecha.
- Who could forget the bonus levels of Medal of Honor: Underground where you fight Nazis in knight armour (resplendent with their swastika shields), Nazi zombies (or aliens; this was the PS 1 so it's hard to tell, although the level title "Rotten to the Corps" in which they reside could point to them being the reanimated dead), and, of course, Nazi Robot Super Soldiers! You even assemble your own Robot Buddy called Panzerknacker to help you take out the bad guys.
- The Xbox 360 SRPG title Operation Darkness is nothing but this trope.
- Blood Rayne had some of this, most notably Infantry General D. Mauler and the Super Panzers under G. Gosler's command. It also had quite a bit of Ghostapo.
- And actual nazis in longcoats and rocket packs.
- The bonus mode of Call Of Duty: World At War, Nazi Zombies, in addition to the titular undead, includes quite a bit of this in downloadable maps, one of which is set in a factory with swastika-emblazoned teleporters, and features a Ray Gun (by name) and "Wunderwaffen" as weapons.
- not in gameplay, but on the IN GAME WEBSITE! Front Mission 3, Wanzer,Wanderung Panzer (english: Walking Tank) as the name Implies are birth and firstly developed In German!!
- Crimson Skies has Die Spinne, a German arms cartel that is heavily implied to be front for the Nazi Party (the games are set in an Alternate Universe version of the 1930s). Their arsenal includes zeppelin carriers, zeppelin battleships bigger then most skyscrapers designed to eat other zeppelins, Tesla Coil like weapons, an extremely potent fighter plane armed with said Tesla weapon, Humongous Mecha Spider Tanks and tlittle things like magnetic rockets and remote controlled rocket launchers (in the 30's). Oh, did we mention the weather control device built on a armored platform suspended between two of the aforementioned zeppelin battleships?
Webcomics
Web Original
Western Animation
- An episode of Justice League has the Big Bad send a laptop through time to himself in the 40's which contains mechanical schematics and Allied war plans, including the Normandy Invasion. The Nazis actually turn the tide of the war (with the War Wheels from the Blackhawk example) and very nearly destroy New York City with an atom bomb. Needless to say, the heroes stop him in Just In Time. Oh, and Hitler is frozen but is thawed out at the end to carry on to his appointed destiny.
- An episode of Justice League Unlimited has a (fortunately failed) attempt at a Nazi Super Soldier formula, which gets dug up and perfected by the anti-superhuman General Eiling so he can become a superhuman to get rid of all the superhumans (wait, what?).
- An episode of Captain Planet played with this. It also revealed that Hitler's stare can kill Captain Planet.
- That's right, folks, Hitler is so evil he can overcome the power of the spirit of the Earth just by staring at it.
Real Life
- Although not as extreme as fictional examples, the Real Life Nazi Germany did have a technological edge on the Allies & Soviets, in equipment such as:
- The Messerschmidt Me 262, which, although barely edged out by the Gloster Meteor in being the first operational jet fighter, was easily the highest-performance fighter in the war, making up with sheer speed & power, and devastating armament, what it lacked in maneuverability. It easily exceeded even the Meteor in performance, and could have been in service earlier and had greater effect on the war if Hitler had not wanted it to be used as a bomber(a job which it was not suited for). It ended up being too little too late and was usually grounded due to fuel shortages or logistical issues.
- It was only superior on a certain level. The Messerschmidt Me 262 employed a jet engine design that was more effective initially, but has proven to be a dead end design in the long run. So it was a short term superiority.
- The Panzer V Panther tank, which was the last practical tank design the Nazis built, and was indeed Awesome Yet Practical. Although it was initially marred with mechanical and conceptual flaws, these flaws were rectified in the due course of time, and the resulting Panthers achieved an optimized blend of survivability, firepower and mobility and were qualitatively superior to most Allied and Soviet tanks. However, design and production efforts were not concentrated on building and improving the Panther, but were shifted to creating the unwieldy, overspecialized, overweight, expensive, extremely complex and impractical Tiger, Tiger 2 and Jagdtiger. Again, logistical issues, incompatibility with the Tigers and other vehicles, and insufficient numbers did in the Panther.
- The Americans actually were not that far off, but often had to use less impressive machines because all American equipment had to be shipped across an ocean before it was used. Boring But Practical
- The Type-XXI U-Boat, aka. the Elektroboote, the first 'true' submarine. Previously, submarines were just small-ish surface vessels which were capable of going undersea for short bursts of time to launch an attack before having to surface again. The Type-XXI was capable of remaining under for a significantly longer time, and were much stealthier and faster than previous U-boats. Although 118 hulls were completed by the end of the war, only a pathetic 4 vessels made it to operational status - too few to make a difference.
- All of the Wunderwaffen, though not many of them actually made it to service. The V1 and V2 cruise missiles did, though, and gained lot of (in)fame. Guided weapons such as the Fritz-X bomb also existed, but were very rare. There was also the Me 163 rocket interceptor designed for the single purpose of destroying bombers in one-shot hit-&-run passes. And of course, there was the Schwerer Gustav, a whopping 800mm railway gun.
- How about this crazy thing: a helicopter that had jets on it's blade tips. I give you the FOCKE-WULF TRIEBFLÜGEL. Just shows precisely how off the track these guys were, and how BRILLIANTLY they were handling things.
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