I’m the “Grumman made mail trucks and from a societal impact perspective, they’re more useful than the F-14 ever was” kinda military historian.
People don’t like that kind of military historian.
I’m also a “the only thing the german military industrial complex produced of note in WWII was this” kinda military historian.
Yeah, if you go by how fast everyone else stole a design, by far the greatest german invention of either world war
the one other nazi military design that you could argue really was high quality (because people kept using it well after the war) is the MG 42
several NATO countries, including Germany, still use what is basically an MG 42 redesigned for 7.62x51 as their general purpose machine gun
Yeah but you could have mechanised infantry without a machine gun a lot easier than you could without jerry cans
"Sepp. Was meinst du, ha? We have no Sonderkraftfahrzeuge... we don't have enough trucks... we barely have horses to pull artillery!"
"Ja, ja, Dieter. Ich weiss, man, sure sure. I get it."
"So why for have you all these divisions called Panzergrenadiere?"
"Hitler said-"
"Oh, fuck."
"Hitler said that they're Panzergrenadier divisions and that means they're mounted in armoured vehicles. Mechanized infantry!"
"Mechanized? Mit was, bitte?"
"...boots?"
"Ja und?"
"...bicycles?"
"We haven't even stolen enough bikes from the Dutch to make that happen!"
And so roughly 10% of anything called a 'mechanized division' in the German Heer around 1944 was actually sent into battle with an engine more complex than two feet and tired legs.