"the towers had a poor track record and didn't down many aircraft, instead acting as a deterrent because any plane that came in range would be shot down" Well, uh... doesn't that mean they did their job then? I mean if no plane is willing to go within 10Km of an area because they don't want shot down then I'd say it did its job.
The weird thing is it worked back then. Though if they weren’t able to go around it they would just bombard it until it goes down making it more of a delay rather, because in order to be used the war situation has to be pretty bad in the first place
@@RobinTheBot That’s actually right, yeah. They needed two loads of TNT in the whole tower to destroy the first one in Berlin although the first load was already thought to be overkill. And that was from the inside. From the outside you’d need nothing shy of a nuke to crack those things.
They perfectly do job actualy, no antibunker bombs and volumetric explosives at time to defeat them. They shit becoz of their cost in resources. Any of these gigantic constructions cost material as minimum as 4-6 great fortified defence points. That s probably much better to have 15 good AA flack points ensteed of 3 exceptionaly good. Hitler's gigantomania spill some effetiveness of German army.
As horrible as it is, it always makes me very sad to see if people simple wanna wipe out and put some kind of censorship on the past. All these things are reminders of history and we should deeply respect that.
Piet Muijs Very few people want to destroy these towers to censor history. Also, as you can see, most of the towers still stand, so I don't get what your point is?? Germany post-WWII has been great about remembering the past. Your comment is redundant and useless to German people.
Piet Muijs Well war is a simple way of settling different opinions. If you dont want war the one party, will always have to be submissive to the other resulting in dictatorship. We need war. As much as you dont want to admit it war is good, it maintains stability.
My mother took shelter in one of these flak towers as a little kid in Vienna. Fortunately for her, she lived right across the street from it. So when the air raid siren went off, she could get into it before the American bombers were over head. One after effect of it for her was severe claudstrophobia. I'm glad these towers still stand. People need to be reminded of the horrors of war.
I find these towers, pretty interesting. They were built for war serve their purpose, then simile, and defiance of the defeat of the Nazis, those towers refuse to fall to the demolition at the allies used. But today they have been turned into towers for peace with I recall one of them being turned into a sort of a public space with a museum inside a sort of green space on the roof with solar panels on top. It’s just crazy with those German engineers were able to come up with and develop during the 1930s and 40s
Sumit Dhull I used my knowledge from skill share to build this tower. As you can see they taught me how to make a almost indestructible building, and you can learn how to build one on skill share.
I doubt the shoots did come from the tower, notice how the heavy AA gun is in a "hole" give extra protect to the gun and the crew. They cant lower the elevetion enough to shoot "down" from the tower before the gun barrel hit the concrete.
@@kirgan1000 Actually it is well documented that the zoo tower guns did force the Soviets to abandon their first two attempts at reaching the Reichstag. The distance from the zoo to the central area was far enough that the angle of elevation didn't need to be too low.
I don't understand how the flak towers defeated the soviets when they only provided some fire support and were meant for anti bomber so not like they were built to do it even if some 128mm guns Managed to knock a few Soviet tanks out
@@thurbine2411 @@thurbine2411 let me emphasize the words you said.... ONLY SOME firesupport..... Well its not like anyone would get scared if a whole barrage of 20mm and 37mm shells come flying their way from all the way at the end of the river.... its not like if you took 1 20mm round to the face that you would die and most tanks that came its way were bombarded with a weapon meant for both anti air duties and anti tank duties capable of firing flak - HE and AP rounds ... nah true its not like such a tower is only a few 1500 men strong with no way to destroy it...
Mauro Moens Well it couldn't change the outcome by much and yes it only provided some fire support. It couldn't provide much help for the whole city defenses and I know that a 20mm bullet will kill you very easily but still it couldn't make the soviets lose in any way. It was a formidable defensive structure but not impossible to win over. You don't have to destroy something to win just go around or wait. The tower didn't have the same firepower as the 2 soviet armies with their massive artillery strength.
@@thurbine2411 well strangely enough they did have enough firepower to make the soviets retreat and go around it. You say it didnt have the same strenght as the soviet artillery... if that were true.... wouldnt that mean they wouldve neutralized it
@@Niidea1986 This particulair Panther tank was used as a stationary gun platform. Tanks that were beyond economical repair, but still with a functional turret could still be used against the Russians.
Yeah it's a Panther, I doubt it would have been a captured one however, lacklustre communication and frantic fighting in Berlin would have made these Panthers targets for other Russian units whether they were actually German or just repurposed. By this time the Russians had a thriving production rate and the IS-2/3 was superior (imo) to the Panther I
Yes, that is true. Though they had a memo in the Red Army that told their soldiers to use Panthers and Tigers until they broke down. They fixed Panzer III and IV but left the larger but more poorly engineered "cats" to rust.
It does look like a Panther and doing a bit of digging, it seems the rubble around it is part of an intentional defensive position. They used partially functional/broken tanks, with the rubble adding extra protection
When I wrote this comment 3 days ago, I never thought 7 people would see that too. If anyone else notices anything else off about the video, add to comments.
@Brylle Cruz you're right but it's unfitting. If I talk about an army losses i show the army typical machines, not the rare ones, taken by other armies
00:17 That infantryman nearly got TKed by the dude firing that anti tank cannon, bet his ears were ringing after catching the blast of the muzzle break to the face...
What he doesn’t talk about is the impressive foundations that were made to absorb the shock of the guns firing. The engineers came up with using massive amounts of sand to disperse the shock and impact of the guns firing. Otherwise the concrete would have ended up cracking.
I moved to Vienna a few weeks ago and at the evening of my first day i decided to go for a little run in the Augarten. It didn't take long and I stumbled across the tower (codename peter). This thing is surely a monster. I was really astounished by it's size, though being in the middle of Vienna. After doing some research what the purpose of this tower was, I spent more than an hour just looking at it. If you ever have the chance to come near Augarten, this tower is definitely a must see! It has an absolutely remarkable aura.
Yeah, i thought those videos of the towers were taken from some stock website, i didn't expect him to actually go there and record them himself, great job indeed.
The 189th exactly, this is a bit that people forget about equipement of different sides, they're also a great show in different production capabilities and design approaches.
Yes it is, but you can either get a special permission or do it illegally, in most cases nobody cares. Police is quiet friendly with drone pilots if they don't act like complete retards. I haven't flown over Vienna yet, but I have done dozens of illegal flights (since any flight with a camera has to be permitted in austria) and even got caught by the police several times. Usually they are either interested in the drones specs or just wanna know if you checked if it's safe to fly here, they never really cared, which i appreciate alot.
calls them "evil towers" then proceeds to say thousands of civilians could take shelter in them. I would have preferred this video if you had left the flare out and just got to the nitty gritty details of the tower.
Thats...a very good building in any zombie apocalypse theme scenario... With most buildings, even a wall can be broken through with enough effort and hammer banging. This building would laugh at human's hammer.
@@ryanhawkin7574 Unless the wall is made of steel, or concrete wall with rebar, standard cement plastered concrete bricks could be destroyed with sledgehammer, even ordinary hammer for hammering nails.
Everyone keep saying how germany defeated the soviets but if you listen closely you'll hear him saying that this just the towers merely extended the war time by a bit.
I will be uploading a video showing you the ruins of Hitler's home in Berghof early next week. Subscribe here to check it out. th-cam.com/channels/Met4qY3027v8KjpaDtDx-g.html edit: I'm still working on this video. I created my original edit and I felt the tone was VERY off. Re-editing it as soon as I have some time again.
These things are called „Flakturme“ and their purpose was to serve as air-raid shelters and anti-aircraft posts. They are so massive that they cannot be demolished. I‘ve seen a couple, the last one in Vienna. They‘ve tried to turn them into everything from wine cellars to vertical gardens, but they‘re still montstrous reminders of carnage and destruction.
Of course there's always been a use for defenses in war, but was the Maginot Line made up of "castles" per se? I found these to be interesting because they seem to look and behave more like castles as opposed to something like the Ouvrage Schoenenbourg.
Well, the somewhat stupid part, is concentrating such major amounts of ressources into stationary strongholds while WWII was a highly mobile conflict. Maginot seems pretty similar in that regard, even though they put more of it underground by hollowing out large hills. The major turret defenses of these forts were usually on top of a natural formation with mines and bunkers below it. The scale of it seems similar enough. I'd agree that these look a bit less crazy, but the concept was just as outdated. And in my book maginot forts get a castle bonus for being build on top of hills. Eben Emael seems very castl-y ; )
JUST MONIKA youtube is stupid when did youtube become so dumb probably the idiot CEO that let Logan Paul keep his channel because he makes money for TH-cam
@@thurbine2411 No I think he meant the time the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The Soviet-Afghan war lasted for 9 years and the Soviet lost well more than one engagement in that war.
And probably got a concussion from just the blast itself. Muzzle blast is no joke, especially when its a shell going from 0 to 680 m/s from a 76mm ZiS-3 in milliseconds.
For all the triggered people out there, Death Castle was the nickname given by allied troops because of how much of a suicide mission it would be to attack them. The towers themselves weren't inherently evil, but they were very good at what they were designed to do which was defend civilians and kill attackers.
@@SelfProclaimedEmperor No, there were only about three or four of them. Once the city was largely in Soviet hands, all anyone had to do was besiege the towers until the defenders gave up.
5:16 "Thanks to the funding of the Marshall Plan cities were rebuild brick by brick..." Lol. While it was a nice (but not selfless) gesture to support your former enemy the amount of money was pretty much nothing compared to the destruction. Just for comparison: Italy and even the BeNeLux countries got more from it than an devastated Germany.
Lars V the thing is that pre marshall plans germans were forbidden to do business. Look it up. You were basically not allowed to employ ppl in productive jobs. Most production was forbidden. These sanctions were lifted, thus allowing a normal economy to start working again. That was the most important part. Not the actual spend money. Especially bcs the sums were really not worth mentioning... Probably the delivered goods were more valuable. Especially what american citizens send... Ppl never bother to learn about these restrictions
Lars. Who the fuck cares what Germany got from the Marshall Plan. If the Soviets killed 26,000,000 germans in retribution then the amount of funding would have been double for the remaining germans. Fuck wit over 70,000,000 people were either murdered or displaced thanks to the Nazis and you are crying?
@@gregorymalchuk272 Interestingly enough, they ended up doing the exact opposite of extermination, Purposefully rebuilding the German economy and military, employing former Nazi war criminals to assist in the endeavor, Specifically to make them a new frontline ally against the spread of the new enemy n.1... the Communists. They did the same in Japan and Italy. These defeated aggressor nations were propped up and former perpetrators of mass killing enrolled in their service... The only major nation that was not only practically untouched by the war, but even increased their industry (which needed to be propped up) pumped their resources to fight communist nations which were practically leveled with the ground during the war... Oh and Britain helped as well, their industries also suffered only minor damage. From the Soviet perspective, their former allies propped up their former butchers... Interestingly, in response the Soviets were pumping their limited resources into East Germany as well, to attempt and balance it out. So if you think about it... The real winners of WW2 were indeed Italy, Japan and Germany along with the U.S and Britain, and the real losers were the Soviets, the Yugoslavs and the Chinese.. the communists. Who after having their nations devastated, along with loosing massive amounts of their populations, also were left to fend and rebuild by themselves, while their image was turned into something worse than the Nazi/fascist aggression and genocidal tendencies of the previous decade. At the same time Japans, Italy's and Germans conduct during the war was whitewashed (all but the Holochaust of jewish people, while ignoring the genocide of over 18million slavic people and millions of Chinese and Indians) and the perpetrators reinstated. Better not bash the new allies, and put the crimes on a select group removed from the general populace(In Germanies case the SS) even though the Wehrmacht and the imperial Japanese army along with the Italian army, were all out of the general populace, and as we now know, all committed extensive ethnic cleansing and deliberate murder of civilians. (The Japanese still honor their war criminals at a shrine, to the endless dismay of the Chinese, which they were butchering throughout the war) In the long run, Italy, Japan and Germany didn't loose, they won.
The title of this piece, in case anyone hasn't noticed, is "The WW2 Towers That Defeated the Soviets". The last time I checked any of my history books, the Soviets captured Berlin and contributed disproportionately to the defeat of Nazi Germany. The debate about the effectiveness of towers could be had by Frodo and the survivors of the Quest.
@@chaosXP3RT No, it isn't. 80% of German military casualties occured on the Eastern Front. The USSR was the single biggest reason the Nazis were defeated. I know it hurts your feelings, but the big bad commies did more than the liberal imperialist states of the West
Visited the flak tower with the aquarium in Vienna a few years back. It's pretty cool what they made out of it tbh, and it gives a nice view of the whole city on the top floor.
There used to be two of these monsters standing in the St.Pauli district of Hamburg. One was actually demolished in the 1970's, quite a formidable task and it took ages to take down piece by piece, but the second is still standing and is used as a TV broadcasting platform. It was just lately decided to keep this last Flak bunker standing for posterity to witness the madness of war through such buildings. All over Hamburg, smaller bunkers exist, often used by music bands for rehearsals - they are practically sound proof inside due to their massively thick construction methods. I have been in a couple of them, always a weird experience, I can tell you.
radio boys yes and you were a wittness to that ??idiot did you saw what was Germany like after war?razed to ground and dust..But German people are hard working they rebuilt much of stuff brick by brick by them selves that it looked like before bombing..Hard working people not like gay French Slave country England or America made on genocide of indian tribes or Soviet Union that killed 30 milion people in gulags..30 milion oh wait Stalin is a good guy as long as you Fight alongiside USA and British it doesnt matter who you kill just kill damn Hitler..
Just so you know one of the tanks that you showed at around 1:25 is a german panther tank and the towers main weakness was that the cannons were meant to fire vertically and not horisontally so when the guns were turned towards the tanks on the ground the towers steel beams took damaged from the shocks from the cannons firing and they were also drawn by Hitler who took inspiration by medival castles
I don't remember anyone defeating the soviets... Oh wait, the Finns Edit: Wow, 100+ salty comments. So easy to trigger youtube these days :DD Oh course they didn't defeat them, I'm just a fat ass troll
Maximus Lee Yes they did but it was really sad, if you compared both losses, Finland couldn't compete with Soviet Russia's army but lasted long losing very little so in the end, most would say the Finnish won
I'm always reminded of Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation review of MOHA where he shows a Flak Tower and expresses his skepticism that the Nazis actually had what he describes as a "Doom Fortress" :D They sure are Doom Fortresses tho, you'd never guess that one with the cracked roof had survived an attempted demolition; it looks more like some kind of minor bomb damage.
i scrolled down to find this. that was crazy, the man was barely across and the other guy ran up and pulled the hammer.. i suppose there was a serious threat coming in down the road but dam that one guy almost was on video being absolutely destroyed.
You didn't say anything about the third tower in Vienna that's in the Barracks of the "Stiftkaserne". It's used by the military as a server farm (a friend of mine works inside the bunker) and some of the most important government servers and services are run in there. I worked there when I was in the military and it was an awesome sight every day
Comrade Serb No because Mid-to-Heavy caliber cannons were used for AA roles and were manually loaded, like italian 90mm AAA cannons or German 8.8cm or Japanese 120mm ones. Not all small caliber AA guns were Automatic cannons.
Not impossible to attack, not impossible to destroy. But doing so would be very expensive, probably weeks of constant assault/bombardment or months of mining/sapping, tons and tons of precious ammo, many men, lots of machines. Just like castles of old. Too much trouble to take so attackers would instead encircle them, force the occupants to come out or endure siege. Ugly either way.
I had hoped we would get the answer to that question. I'm always amazed at why concrete structures built then are still upright and solid and yet something built 20 years ago with the same materials is already crumbling.
It's beautiful engineering, the entire structure served as the frame itself. Unlike most building which have specified beams and colums that hold everything up that you can destroy with some satchel charges. To make the frame that holds them up fail you have to know how down the entire building piece by piece.
I remeber reading some where that nazi germany used like 3 times more rebar as modern concrete making a much stronger structure for wartime use. That is probably the reason they are still standing today.
the german took that secret to the grave as it stands for know we can not build something as good as those building and since fort construction have stopped from ww2 the knowledge is lost and remains in the history books of ww1 ww2 forts :-( i have a copy of fort construction teached in the greek engineering corps but all its so outdated and there is nothing new while the ammunition have improved which would make this designs not worth so much and you will need to come up with a new design to coutner the developemnt but thats the cycle you build a fort enemy can not take ite army build weapons against forts, forts fail forts design to counter the weapons forts are not taken new weapon are designed forts faill and you get the cycle
Those really are impressive defensive structures and, despite the aid of slave labor, its equally incredible they could be designed and built in six months during a war without suffering severe issues.
He survived. In the longer version you can see him getting up again. If you look closely you can see him trying to catch himseld with his arms towards the ground. He would't do that if he would be that.
The large strong towers demonstrate multiple uses. The design plans should be updated and improved for use for aquafarming, hydroponic vertical farming, energy storage and production ( solar/geothermal/wind/etc), and other useful features. The initial design was for war - but new updated designs are for keeping people happy, healthy, and fed fresh delicious organic foods. :-)
Hey, it was a very well made and interesting video, but as in other videos on this channel I would have loved to see some details about how these defensive towers were built and about the materials to make these towers so resistant to attacks.
Lots and lots of concrete is plenty to make a bunker immune to any nonnuclear weapons available at the time. I'm curious how resistant they would be to modern bunker busting missiles or if you could even get in range to use those weapons against these towers.
depends on how expensive heavy and fast it is, steel/depleted uranium/tungsten carbide rounds work the same way on smaller scales. in reality you would probably just go after the offensive defenses on top or leave it alone like was done according to war tourist dot eu "The Mighty Flak Towers" the Grand Slam could get through the u-boat yard's 7 meter thick concrete ceiling in France, Saint Nazaire. according to some small arms manufacturers that is equivalent to 15 to 20 meters of common soil depending on the type of round
TRY PAYING ATTENTION KIDDO 8m OF REINFORCED CONCRETE WALLS AND 5m STEEL REINFORCED CONCRETE ON TOP. PuBLic ScHools and The EmbeDDed NEA wiLl be the DeatH of AmERicA. *American parents HOME SCHOOL YOUR KIDS if you want them to have a REAL CHANCE when they grow up.*
he said 2.5 meters of reinforced concrete, back then they didn't have quality UHPC so today for the same effect would be 1/2 or less thickness for same ballistic resistance wikipedia says the zoo tower, the first of the flak towers, could hold 15,000 people, and has 2.4m walls and 1.5m thick roof. wartourist's museum PDF "The Mighty Flak Towers" of the sites show 3.8 meter thick roof. an air raid shelter and climate controlled shelter for artwork plus an 85 bed hospital
Assuming you can't do wrong and that you know better than anybody else is pretty common for any high level position, whether you're an engineer or a CEO. Actually pretty common throughout the human race, makes no sense to expect otherwise.
icterio1 thats the first step in becoming an engineer, instructions are for weak hamburger eating truck driving capitalist scum. Trust me I'm an engineer.
I visited the tower in Vienna, nowadays an public aquarium, with also in the highest part a information point about the tower during WWII, and a restaurant. Very impressive. Because these building were all so solid, the most rational option would to use all of them for new purpose and not so difficult and expensive efforts to destroy it.
I'm glad they did repurpose them. Why use resources to bring them down when you can turn them into something beautiful and with purpose. And it would BURN Hitler to see them utilized for a greater good!! 😉 The only thing I would differently is paint them with something beautiful. There are a lot of great young artists out there that would jump at the chance. For the price they paid the demolition crews, they could've changed some young peoples lives.
These would make for a excellent server farm and super cell tower, easy to cool/heat mountable solar and hardened against attack allowing for the L towers to become internet hubs and communication relays.
There are no plants currently producing Nokia Phones in Sweden to date. The Brand has gone Global though and there are manufacturing facilities in North and south Americas, Europe, China and South Korea. Nokia originated in Finland.
but it also don't prove him right. sometimes very evil ideas are quite popular and need to be eliminated. look trump for instance, or hitler, or bolsonaro, or thatcher, or hirohito, or mussolini, or cigarette ads, or the terrorist organization self proclaimed as the islamic state, or the terrorist organization self proclaimed as state of israel...
@@noname_atall what are you going to do? take people down for crimes they haven't committed yet? If you KNOW they're going to do a crime surly you have evidence to back that up? present it. But if their only crime is having bad ideas then debate them. If you can't win a fair debate perhaps it is you ideas that are flawed. If your opponent does as the adl does and tries to defame you, you could try sueing them.
The open-platform-artillery-tower, got out of use in the early 19th century, not for the Germans where it is still superior engineering in the 21st century
+Jedi You imbecile. Don't forget a whole lot of the brilliant White engineers in USA has their ancestry from precisely Germany. The genetic and cultural nobility of old Europe.
Nobility is something like George Washington: A lifetime of fighting for the king, hunting, politics and owning 70000 acres and a lot of slaves. Most Germans got to America because they felt like like those slaves or to avoid the kings generals.
I like that Hamburg turned them into something, its a shame that the Berlin ones, and the other two Vienna ones could not have been turned into something.
TheMr77469 Yeah, the "Haus des Meeres" (that's the one in Vienna which has been repurposed) is great. The one in Augarten is just gigantic, but it doesn't look so stable anymore, especially the third one (I forgot the name of the park where it stands).
I lived near one of these in Vienna in Augarten. They are exceptionally formidable. It's interesting to learn more about them now and on a youtube channel since the Viennese who lived nearby seemed to know nothing more about them than I did despite having lived there for many years. This was a fantastic video and made my time living in Vienna richer.
Britannic hayyomatt Have you heard about german rocket scientists? They brought us a big step ahead from moving into outer space by developing the V2 for example.
The two towers in Hamburg are on the Heiligengeistfeld, near the St Pauli Football Club stadium and just across from where the Reeperbahn begins on Budapester Straße. I happened to be living in Hamburg in 1973 when the authorities decided that the towers had to go. They got in the specialists and worked out a plan. What's not visible are the inside walls, which are fashioned in such a way as to deflect any blast should a shell penetrate the outer walls. Anyway, the specialists made all the necessary calculations, set their charges and detonated them. There was an absolutely deafening explosion that shattered every fucking window in a three-mile radius, but the towers were untouched after the huge cloud of dust had dispersed. It was a sort of involuntary comedy act, but I think it was then that they decided to make other plans for the towers. MsG
This reminds me of the days I played Age Of Empires. I would sometimes build dozens of attack towers with overlapping ranges of attack in the area between my village and the enemy's village, then live my days in peace while the towers defended my people
@Родина-мать зовёт! Hitler: attempts to exterminate Russians Russia: goes on a warpath to beat Hitler's ass, uses brutal and excessive force because everyone in the army is seething with rage Hitler: shocked Pikachu face
"stark reminders for the inhabitants of these cities of an evil war, waged by their ancestors" - this is actually VERY accurate. The Vienna one that is now an aquarium is located right next to Vienna's most popular shopping street. I remember the first time I walked by (as a little boy) with my grandmother (who was a child herself when the 3rd Reich fell), her telling me that it was a decommissioned flak tower. It led to one of the first, and most honest conversations about the war I had had up until that point. There's always talk about tearing some of them down (bc of prime, inner-city locations and such), but I think they should be granted Denkmalschutz-status (heritage protection status). In Vienna, we may have tons of statues, plaques, monuments, Stolpersteine, etc. to remind us of the despicable acts committed there - but IMO none immediately command the amount of respect like those giant, concrete behemoths. Especially to a child, the sheer size of it lends the situation more gravity. "What did we do so we had to build those giant towers?" #neverforget
combined amercian, russian, british including canadian and french just to defeat the german.. im pretty sure the geman had been using skillshare to enhance their engineering skill
tyron smith the russian could not done that without the help of the American. US sent a very large amount of supply and ammunition to Soviet to keep those russian fighting
Russians defeated Germany on their own. Hitler concentrated 75% - 85% of the Nazie army in the Eastern Front. US and Canada did not star fighting Hitler until late 1943 when the soviets already liberated Eastern Europe and were marching towards Berlin by then.
@tyron smith the guy is clueless, US and Canada didn't start fighting Hitler until 1943 they were primarily fight the Japanese. The US and Canadian army would have been wiped out if they would have actually engaged them in 1940
@@jaketorralba4521 US weapons were inferior against German equipment, and incomparable with Russian equipment as well, so it would have been pointless. Besides, US wanted Russia to fall, don't believe that propaganda in US history books because they actually claim they are the ones who defeated the Germans.
Medal of Honor: Airborne featured a level entirely about assaulting one of these towers with some paratroopers. Pretty mediocre game overall, but this was something interesting about it.
Hey uh I just wanted to mention a small typo at 0:48. The speaker says there are 4x 128mm guns at the tower. This is slightly incorrect because while there were 4 MOUNTS, each mount had twin 128mm guns bringing the total up to 8 on the tower, thus giving it the 96 rpm rate of fire.
As a quite historical interested German I am actually shocked that I never heard about these towers of concrete and steel...they are an amazing example how Hitler used to react to problems. (aaand they look like a modern castle keep, which is far less sinister^^) :D Thank you for giving me something new to visit at my next trip to one of these citys^^
There is a book called 'The Last Battle' by Cornelius Ryan about the final days of Berlin's fall and the book talks about life in the tower. Based on accounts, they were packed shoulder to shoulder and people would die but its so packed that the would remain standing squished in the crowds. The accounts of the mass rape of Berlin by the Soviets is really hard to read too so beware before you pick up the book.
Not really. The towers did their job and defeated the Soviet forces assaults against them. The title doesnt state that the towers won WW2. It is simply emphasizing the fact that the Flak towers themselves defeated the Red Army's attempts of demolishing them to rubble. They pretty much forced the remaining troops and civilians to surrender.
@@EmmAyeVee ``the WW2 Towers that the soviets never conqured `` would sound lot more better and more accurate to the reality ... however appreciate explanation of your point of view!
@@voxer99 They just defeated them selves. Sorry not sorry. Peace. Can we make a future that is excellent for kids everywhere please. People can ultimately use they're earned money the way they want, educating and helping in deciding what to do with the money is key. Love.
"the towers had a poor track record and didn't down many aircraft, instead acting as a deterrent because any plane that came in range would be shot down"
Well, uh... doesn't that mean they did their job then? I mean if no plane is willing to go within 10Km of an area because they don't want shot down then I'd say it did its job.
Yeah, it's like when people said the Maginot line failed because everybody went around it.
It fucking worked if they could not cross it.
@@SirDavid290 it's spelled Maginot line
@@M81005 Forgot the T.
@@SirDavid290 yea. nice you edited it
@@SirDavid290 except rommel of course, basically walked through it
0:17 rip the guy in front of the cannon
Lmao
Been looking for this comment. :D :D :D
I was watching that on repeat. :D
@@vedranb87 Same here. Probably didn't die but his eardrums were toast for good.
@@Attila_Meszaros And anyone else's in that squad. Whoever decided, "hey, let's check if this canon is loaded" probably went major Oops after that. :D
Soviet soldiers were cheap
0:16 Friendly fire: on
Lol
poor dude
Shoot forgot to turn that off in the settings
always wonder what happened to that guy
Jesus christ that gunner is such a idiot. Really shows how little the Soviets valued human life. I mean he wasn't hit but it looks very dangerous.
-"Mein Fuhrer! Ze Allies have gone airborne!"
-"Go medieval! Build me a giant castle!"
-"Jawohl!"
The weird thing is it worked back then. Though if they weren’t able to go around it they would just bombard it until it goes down making it more of a delay rather, because in order to be used the war situation has to be pretty bad in the first place
@@Icetea-2000 those towers could not be destroyed by traditional bombing. They were mountians, and impervious to all available weapons at the time.
@@RobinTheBot That’s actually right, yeah. They needed two loads of TNT in the whole tower to destroy the first one in Berlin although the first load was already thought to be overkill. And that was from the inside. From the outside you’d need nothing shy of a nuke to crack those things.
They perfectly do job actualy, no antibunker bombs and volumetric explosives at time to defeat them. They shit becoz of their cost in resources. Any of these gigantic constructions cost material as minimum as 4-6 great fortified defence points. That s probably much better to have 15 good AA flack points ensteed of 3 exceptionaly good. Hitler's gigantomania spill some effetiveness of German army.
When you build a tower that is too strong for you to demolish.
*STRUGGLING FROM SUCCESS*
Underrated
@@anxietyplague1221 fr
As horrible as it is, it always makes me very sad to see if people simple wanna wipe out and put some kind of censorship on the past.
All these things are reminders of history and we should deeply respect that.
Piet Muijs Very few people want to destroy these towers to censor history. Also, as you can see, most of the towers still stand, so I don't get what your point is?? Germany post-WWII has been great about remembering the past. Your comment is redundant and useless to German people.
Just look at the same thing happening all over the place in the US.
+Leroset
where did he mentioned german history or its people?
Piet Muijs Well war is a simple way of settling different opinions. If you dont want war the one party, will always have to be submissive to the other resulting in dictatorship. We need war. As much as you dont want to admit it war is good, it maintains stability.
lol what is this dumbass dog-whistling comment
My mother took shelter in one of these flak towers as a little kid in Vienna. Fortunately for her, she lived right across the street from it. So when the air raid siren went off, she could get into it before the American bombers were over head.
One after effect of it for her was severe claudstrophobia. I'm glad these towers still stand. People need to be reminded of the horrors of war.
I find these towers, pretty interesting. They were built for war serve their purpose, then simile, and defiance of the defeat of the Nazis, those towers refuse to fall to the demolition at the allies used.
But today they have been turned into towers for peace with I recall one of them being turned into a sort of a public space with a museum inside a sort of green space on the roof with solar panels on top.
It’s just crazy with those German engineers were able to come up with and develop during the 1930s and 40s
german engineers used skillshare for building the towers
Sumit Dhull I used my knowledge from skill share to build this tower. As you can see they taught me how to make a almost indestructible building, and you can learn how to build one on skill share.
german scientists knew how to do a symmetrical blast, 😂👌🏼💨
lmao
They must have learned how to build those towers on TH-cam.
Nope they used rapidshare
You must construct th-cam.com/video/T4Ox2t5c4As/w-d-xo.html
The German level of engineering in the 30s and 40s was phenomenal.
Like their strategic bombers and long range escort fighters. Awesome. Naval aviation. Can't do better than German aircraft carriers.
still didn't win the war!
Their defeats we're phenomenal too. Awe inspiring even.
they were 25 years ahead of anyone else...
@@michaelprovence2159 yeah just like US in vietnam
1:22 "Reducing there tanks to smoldering scraps of metal" Shows a picture of a dug-in Panzerkampfwagen V Panther
Fantastic.... I wasn´t the only nerd to notice this straight away.
Exactly🤣🤣
I doubt the shoots did come from the tower, notice how the heavy AA gun is in a "hole" give extra protect to the gun and the crew. They cant lower the elevetion enough to shoot "down" from the tower before the gun barrel hit the concrete.
@@kirgan1000 Actually it is well documented that the zoo tower guns did force the Soviets to abandon their first two attempts at reaching the Reichstag. The distance from the zoo to the central area was far enough that the angle of elevation didn't need to be too low.
@@taylorc2542 Go play with your Hitler action figure you Hitler Youth wannabe.
**Berlin falls**
Flak tower: _Well boys, we did it, the Soviets are no more!_
Why do I see you everywhere
I don't understand how the flak towers defeated the soviets when they only provided some fire support and were meant for anti bomber so not like they were built to do it even if some 128mm guns Managed to knock a few Soviet tanks out
@@thurbine2411 @@thurbine2411 let me emphasize the words you said.... ONLY SOME firesupport.....
Well its not like anyone would get scared if a whole barrage of 20mm and 37mm shells come flying their way from all the way at the end of the river.... its not like if you took 1 20mm round to the face that you would die and most tanks that came its way were bombarded with a weapon meant for both anti air duties and anti tank duties capable of firing flak - HE and AP rounds ... nah true its not like such a tower is only a few 1500 men strong with no way to destroy it...
Mauro Moens Well it couldn't change the outcome by much and yes it only provided some fire support. It couldn't provide much help for the whole city defenses and I know that a 20mm bullet will kill you very easily but still it couldn't make the soviets lose in any way. It was a formidable defensive structure but not impossible to win over. You don't have to destroy something to win just go around or wait. The tower didn't have the same firepower as the 2 soviet armies with their massive artillery strength.
@@thurbine2411 well strangely enough they did have enough firepower to make the soviets retreat and go around it. You say it didnt have the same strenght as the soviet artillery... if that were true.... wouldnt that mean they wouldve neutralized it
Now that's proper tower defence
Defense*
if the objective is to be ignored and get roflstomped. sure...
@@elitemation They're the same.
@@iopohable salty little communist hahahahahaha, click off the video if you're just going to complain like a baby
Those are utterly fascinating, it's a pity none of them were preserved as museums but it's good to hear not all of them are slated for demolition.
"Reducing their tanks to smouldering scraps of metal in a short time, ..." *shows picture of destroyed PANTHER*
I don't get it...
who knows, maybe it was a captured tank :P
@@Niidea1986 This particulair Panther tank was used as a stationary gun platform.
Tanks that were beyond economical repair, but still with a functional turret could still be used against the Russians.
@@kossa_maneka315 let me send you back to primary school
@@Niidea1986 umm thats... I mean it's kinda dumb to think that... A tank...
1:22 isn't that a German Panther tank? Not a russian one?
Or was it a captured tank?
Yes that is a panther, and I’m pretty sure Russians didn’t use captured German equipment
Yeah it's a Panther, I doubt it would have been a captured one however, lacklustre communication and frantic fighting in Berlin would have made these Panthers targets for other Russian units whether they were actually German or just repurposed. By this time the Russians had a thriving production rate and the IS-2/3 was superior (imo) to the Panther I
Invictus The Russians didn't use German equipment because they were prone to breakdowns and more complicated to use. Not because the IS2 was better.
Yes, that is true. Though they had a memo in the Red Army that told their soldiers to use Panthers and Tigers until they broke down. They fixed Panzer III and IV but left the larger but more poorly engineered "cats" to rust.
It does look like a Panther and doing a bit of digging, it seems the rubble around it is part of an intentional defensive position. They used partially functional/broken tanks, with the rubble adding extra protection
Those structures are testament to the marvels of German Engineering.. and the legacy of the forgotten workers who helped build them..
Those workers were living in concentration camps mind you.
Germany, overengineer everything.
@@noname_atall No but overengineering is the perversion of the qualities of german engineering you could maybe say.
@@noname_atall I know, but still, they were so good at building new and weird stuff.
those structures are a testament to stupidity.
if only the Soviets had signed up for Skillshare they wouldve taken it down easily
Skillshare wasn't around then. Then again neither was the internet.
Patrick Milewski it’s a joke
r/whooosh
R/woooooosh
Markeos77 to who
gotta love him showing destroyed panthers and calling them soviet tanks lol
When I wrote this comment 3 days ago, I never thought 7 people would see that too. If anyone else notices anything else off about the video, add to comments.
Lol wow 7 likes you should be proud
@@jeffdebono624 i know, when I set out on this adventure 4 days ago, I never thought I would get this far
@Brylle Cruz thank you for you constructive comment and we will continue to build apon this!
@Brylle Cruz you're right but it's unfitting. If I talk about an army losses i show the army typical machines, not the rare ones, taken by other armies
00:17 That infantryman nearly got TKed by the dude firing that anti tank cannon, bet his ears were ringing after catching the blast of the muzzle break to the face...
rollie *_Artillery operator has been kicked for team killing_*
Oof
He's probably ok. Probably deaf if not in a coma.
rollie Stalin muzzle blast stronk
What he doesn’t talk about is the impressive foundations that were made to absorb the shock of the guns firing. The engineers came up with using massive amounts of sand to disperse the shock and impact of the guns firing. Otherwise the concrete would have ended up cracking.
I moved to Vienna a few weeks ago and at the evening of my first day i decided to go for a little run in the Augarten. It didn't take long and I stumbled across the tower (codename peter). This thing is surely a monster. I was really astounished by it's size, though being in the middle of Vienna. After doing some research what the purpose of this tower was, I spent more than an hour just looking at it. If you ever have the chance to come near Augarten, this tower is definitely a must see! It has an absolutely remarkable aura.
The quality of the videos are increasing exponentially with time.
Videos= Quality^2
Duwang Man
That's parabolic, not exponential.
Yeah, i thought those videos of the towers were taken from some stock website, i didn't expect him to actually go there and record them himself, great job indeed.
@john titor
shhhh Domain }x> 0
Eventually they will reach critical mass...
*Demonetized already*
Not monetized in the first place. Check mate TH-cam
Benito Llan Matos you beat me to it.
hehehe nice one Real Engineering
TH-cam did Nazi that coming.
Real Engineering
Now that's indestructible.
Soviets on top of the parliment building in Berlin:
Am I a joke to you?
" reducing the Soviet tanks to wrecks " shows a picture of knocked out German panther
The 189th it was probably a captured german tank that the soviets used cus they own tank wus too shit
That's how Goebbels propagada works. As we may see here, it is pretty much alive
Josh it is different design parameters the M4 Sherman may have not been the best tank of the war but it was the best tank for the USA during the war
It was captured.
The 189th
exactly, this is a bit that people forget about equipement of different sides, they're also a great show in different production capabilities and design approaches.
That is some impressive drone footage 👌
FutureNow Sign up to skillshare and learn to produce footage like this or choose from may other skills available to be learnt :D
and an impressively smooth segue into his sponsorship too
Are flight permits required in Vienna?
but isn't it illegal to fly drones over vienna? idk.
Yes it is, but you can either get a special permission or do it illegally, in most cases nobody cares. Police is quiet friendly with drone pilots if they don't act like complete retards. I haven't flown over Vienna yet, but I have done dozens of illegal flights (since any flight with a camera has to be permitted in austria) and even got caught by the police several times. Usually they are either interested in the drones specs or just wanna know if you checked if it's safe to fly here, they never really cared, which i appreciate alot.
calls them "evil towers" then proceeds to say thousands of civilians could take shelter in them. I would have preferred this video if you had left the flare out and just got to the nitty gritty details of the tower.
Claxiux u gotta understand youtube viral marketing to let the title go my friend
I was expecting more engineering too.
Also, the towers were ordered by Hitler who was enraged after the civilians were bombed by the enemies.
He said they were a constant REMINDER of an evil war...
evil war
and there is a glorious war??
are not all war evil??
Thats...a very good building in any zombie apocalypse theme scenario...
With most buildings, even a wall can be broken through with enough effort and hammer banging. This building would laugh at human's hammer.
few hammer strikes? not everyone lives in a cardboard house mate
@@ryanhawkin7574
Unless the wall is made of steel, or concrete wall with rebar, standard cement plastered concrete bricks could be destroyed with sledgehammer, even ordinary hammer for hammering nails.
*laughs in rust*
@@lolbosss steel reinforced concrete walls dont rust.
@@eleethtahgra7182 the steel would rust and expand cracks in the wall over time
You didn't actually explain the engineering of the buildings.......
He did mention it but could have gone into more detail.
Seems like there wasn't much complicated engineering involved. Pour huge amounts of concrete. Make sure the bottom can support the top.
quite the contrary. their design is the basis for most modern bunkers as they are the first to consider shock waves and the likes in their designs.
Alexander F this ismt you regular old building,he could have said more about supports of the building and how they made the walls 2.5 meters thick
The title just said the story of these buildings
Everyone keep saying how germany defeated the soviets but if you listen closely you'll hear him saying that this just the towers merely extended the war time by a bit.
True
Your name already spelled your age... Stfu.
I will be uploading a video showing you the ruins of Hitler's home in Berghof early next week. Subscribe here to check it out. th-cam.com/channels/Met4qY3027v8KjpaDtDx-g.html
edit: I'm still working on this video. I created my original edit and I felt the tone was VERY off. Re-editing it as soon as I have some time again.
Real Engineering is this the same kind of towers filmed by Jerryrigeverything?
Real Engineering giorgi is from georgia :D
Did you also visit Wewelsburg ?
I don't like to read manuals either but when it comes to features: RTFM
Real Engineering I noticed that your T-shirt icon is still the old version. Don't know if you knew that
These things are called „Flakturme“ and their purpose was to serve as air-raid shelters and anti-aircraft posts. They are so massive that they cannot be demolished. I‘ve seen a couple, the last one in Vienna. They‘ve tried to turn them into everything from wine cellars to vertical gardens, but they‘re still montstrous reminders of carnage and destruction.
Carnage and destruction? They were bomb shelters.
I just want to know where the Nightclub one is, because that sounds properly debauched - bet it's fun too.
Seeing these in real life is crazy. They're way bigger than they look in the video from the drone footage
People always forget how tall 50 meters is; the flak towers are about 13-16 floors. Very impressive.
Castles? Used in warfare? What year is it?
Google: Maginot Line
Of course there's always been a use for defenses in war, but was the Maginot Line made up of "castles" per se? I found these to be interesting because they seem to look and behave more like castles as opposed to something like the Ouvrage Schoenenbourg.
Well, the somewhat stupid part, is concentrating such major amounts of ressources into stationary strongholds while WWII was a highly mobile conflict. Maginot seems pretty similar in that regard, even though they put more of it underground by hollowing out large hills. The major turret defenses of these forts were usually on top of a natural formation with mines and bunkers below it. The scale of it seems similar enough.
I'd agree that these look a bit less crazy, but the concept was just as outdated. And in my book maginot forts get a castle bonus for being build on top of hills. Eben Emael seems very castl-y ; )
Its actually a flakturm or “flak tower”
Meant for AA defense
**put Nazi on title**
TH-cam: *_demonetize intensifies_*
JUST MONIKA youtube is stupid when did youtube become so dumb probably the idiot CEO that let Logan Paul keep his channel because he makes money for TH-cam
Dino Fan It's because their motivations are political rather than financial.
lol here come the conspiritard alt-reichtards
Strong Back pretty strange if you think about it
*I N T E N S E S H A K I N G .*
That defeated the USSR
Stalin: umm Yes but actually no
Taliban defeated the ussr
No. There was no taliban yet in the 80a
"That defeated the USSR"
Red army: Kills Hitler
Rosa i guess he meant that they managed to defeat the soviets in one engagement
@@thurbine2411 No I think he meant the time the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The Soviet-Afghan war lasted for 9 years and the Soviet lost well more than one engagement in that war.
did anyone else saw that poor soviet soldier getting blasted by close range friendly artillery fire.
let that rat have it.
@Brylle Cruz ohh so he's just deaf now :-)
johan dahlström Swedish or Norwegian?
Vinny Booboo that wasn’t a nazi getting blasted
@Vinny Booboo i hope you get sick kiddo. The death of civilians is not funny.
0:16 lol he fell from the blast :D
Da comrade is great tactic
xd
And probably got a concussion from just the blast itself.
Muzzle blast is no joke, especially when its a shell going from 0 to 680 m/s from a 76mm ZiS-3 in milliseconds.
reu tardio and what can we do with that ?
this is why you have specific protocols to shout CLEAR before blasting any kind of ordnance
For all the triggered people out there, Death Castle was the nickname given by allied troops because of how much of a suicide mission it would be to attack them. The towers themselves weren't inherently evil, but they were very good at what they were designed to do which was defend civilians and kill attackers.
As said in the video, they were designed to defend the city against allied raids, to protect the civilians.
Berlin was full of these towers, it only took the Soviets about 10 days to take most of Berlin.
@Busy Sheun socialism and communism is on the left.
Defend civilians? You mean defend the guys who genocide civilians...
@@SelfProclaimedEmperor No, there were only about three or four of them. Once the city was largely in Soviet hands, all anyone had to do was besiege the towers until the defenders gave up.
“We tried to make it fall down but it didn’t work, so we reinforced it so it wouldn’t fall down!”
25tons of dynamite when dust come clear tower were still standing lool
They needed the engineers who exploded the whale in 1970. The highway department of Oregon.
"one of them becoming a nightclub" *WHAT*
Luca Gorosito Rave Bruder
just for the sake of clarification, a night club, is just a club, like a disco. But in some countries people refer as nightclub to stripclubs
Its actually 2 night clubs and a musician school
saturday nacht fuhrer?
Club dead?
5:16 "Thanks to the funding of the Marshall Plan cities were rebuild brick by brick..." Lol. While it was a nice (but not selfless) gesture to support your former enemy the amount of money was pretty much nothing compared to the destruction. Just for comparison: Italy and even the BeNeLux countries got more from it than an devastated Germany.
Lars V the thing is that pre marshall plans germans were forbidden to do business.
Look it up.
You were basically not allowed to employ ppl in productive jobs.
Most production was forbidden.
These sanctions were lifted, thus allowing a normal economy to start working again.
That was the most important part.
Not the actual spend money.
Especially bcs the sums were really not worth mentioning...
Probably the delivered goods were more valuable.
Especially what american citizens send...
Ppl never bother to learn about these restrictions
Lars. Who the fuck cares what Germany got from the Marshall Plan. If the Soviets killed 26,000,000 germans in retribution then the amount of funding would have been double for the remaining germans. Fuck wit over 70,000,000 people were either murdered or displaced thanks to the Nazis and you are crying?
@@aesop8694 Shut the fuck up rascist idiot.
@@kloschuessel773
Yes, Morgentheau and the Hebrews in the Roosevelt administration attempted to exterminate Germans post war.
@@gregorymalchuk272 Interestingly enough, they ended up doing the exact opposite of extermination, Purposefully rebuilding the German economy and military, employing former Nazi war criminals to assist in the endeavor, Specifically to make them a new frontline ally against the spread of the new enemy n.1... the Communists.
They did the same in Japan and Italy.
These defeated aggressor nations were propped up and former perpetrators of mass killing enrolled in their service... The only major nation that was not only practically untouched by the war, but even increased their industry (which needed to be propped up) pumped their resources to fight communist nations which were practically leveled with the ground during the war... Oh and Britain helped as well, their industries also suffered only minor damage.
From the Soviet perspective, their former allies propped up their former butchers... Interestingly, in response the Soviets were pumping their limited resources into East Germany as well, to attempt and balance it out.
So if you think about it... The real winners of WW2 were indeed Italy, Japan and Germany along with the U.S and Britain, and the real losers were the Soviets, the Yugoslavs and the Chinese.. the communists. Who after having their nations devastated, along with loosing massive amounts of their populations, also were left to fend and rebuild by themselves, while their image was turned into something worse than the Nazi/fascist aggression and genocidal tendencies of the previous decade.
At the same time Japans, Italy's and Germans conduct during the war was whitewashed (all but the Holochaust of jewish people, while ignoring the genocide of over 18million slavic people and millions of Chinese and Indians) and the perpetrators reinstated. Better not bash the new allies, and put the crimes on a select group removed from the general populace(In Germanies case the SS) even though the Wehrmacht and the imperial Japanese army along with the Italian army, were all out of the general populace, and as we now know, all committed extensive ethnic cleansing and deliberate murder of civilians. (The Japanese still honor their war criminals at a shrine, to the endless dismay of the Chinese, which they were butchering throughout the war)
In the long run, Italy, Japan and Germany didn't loose, they won.
The title of this piece, in case anyone hasn't noticed, is "The WW2 Towers That Defeated the Soviets". The last time I checked any of my history books, the Soviets captured Berlin and contributed disproportionately to the defeat of Nazi Germany. The debate about the effectiveness of towers could be had by Frodo and the survivors of the Quest.
Title of the video is wrong
Shut up you lazy commie
"contributed disproportionately to the defeat of Nazi Germany"
That's debatable
@@chaosXP3RT No, it isn't. 80% of German military casualties occured on the Eastern Front. The USSR was the single biggest reason the Nazis were defeated. I know it hurts your feelings, but the big bad commies did more than the liberal imperialist states of the West
Visited the flak tower with the aquarium in Vienna a few years back. It's pretty cool what they made out of it tbh, and it gives a nice view of the whole city on the top floor.
Linoc10 Yeah, definitely. I live there and see it quite often
I wrote my master thesis about the Adaptive Reuse of flak towers!
Amazing video 👌🏼
There used to be two of these monsters standing in the St.Pauli district of Hamburg. One was actually demolished in the 1970's, quite a formidable task and it took ages to take down piece by piece, but the second is still standing and is used as a TV broadcasting platform. It was just lately decided to keep this last Flak bunker standing for posterity to witness the madness of war through such buildings. All over Hamburg, smaller bunkers exist, often used by music bands for rehearsals - they are practically sound proof inside due to their massively thick construction methods. I have been in a couple of them, always a weird experience, I can tell you.
A minor mistake in the beginning:
it wasn't two Soviet armies.
It was two "fronts" (i.e. army groups); the 1st Belorussian and the 1st Ukrainian
Say what you will about 1940s Germany, but they sure knew how to build stuff.
Well, with hundreds of thousands of slaves anyone can build massive structures with tonnes of resources in short amount of time.
fatbadboy329 which slaves?
who built them specifically?
millions starved while forced as slaves to work for Germany
radio boys yes and you were a wittness to that ??idiot did you saw what was Germany like after war?razed to ground and dust..But German people are hard working they rebuilt much of stuff brick by brick by them selves that it looked like before bombing..Hard working people not like gay French Slave country England or America made on genocide of indian tribes or Soviet Union that killed 30 milion people in gulags..30 milion oh wait Stalin is a good guy as long as you Fight alongiside USA and British it doesnt matter who you kill just kill damn Hitler..
Just so you know one of the tanks that you showed at around 1:25 is a german panther tank and the towers main weakness was that the cannons were meant to fire vertically and not horisontally so when the guns were turned towards the tanks on the ground the towers steel beams took damaged from the shocks from the cannons firing and they were also drawn by Hitler who took inspiration by medival castles
I don't remember anyone defeating the soviets...
Oh wait, the Finns
Edit: Wow, 100+ salty comments. So easy to trigger youtube these days :DD
Oh course they didn't defeat them, I'm just a fat ass troll
Poland in 1920 too :D
KnownNiche they didn’t defeat them
The Finnish lost
Maximus Lee Yes they did but it was really sad, if you compared both losses, Finland couldn't compete with Soviet Russia's army but lasted long losing very little so in the end, most would say the Finnish won
Fireslice04
The Finnish obliterated the Soviets but they lost 😢
0:17 RIP that one dude
We need a CoH 2 map of this.
My man check out the Berlin map by playmobile in the workshop, there is a flak tower off map.
There is a flakturm map in Day of Infamy. It's a fucking nightmare.
The last level of Medal of Honor Airborne has you landing on and fighting inside one of these.
meerkat1954 I fucking love that mission
Trust me it sounds fun but its honestly one of the worst maps in DOI its a slog to fight Through
Medal of Honor Airborne everyone ?
Wong chen I really miss MOH
I was hoping someone would remember
I miss that game
the music at this level!! eargasmic :)
I'm always reminded of Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation review of MOHA where he shows a Flak Tower and expresses his skepticism that the Nazis actually had what he describes as a "Doom Fortress" :D
They sure are Doom Fortresses tho, you'd never guess that one with the cracked roof had survived an attempted demolition; it looks more like some kind of minor bomb damage.
i love it when people use 0:14 in a serious WW2 video. The soviet almost getting blasted by the cannon always cracks me up.
i scrolled down to find this. that was crazy, the man was barely across and the other guy ran up and pulled the hammer.. i suppose there was a serious threat coming in down the road but dam that one guy almost was on video being absolutely destroyed.
You didn't say anything about the third tower in Vienna that's in the Barracks of the "Stiftkaserne". It's used by the military as a server farm (a friend of mine works inside the bunker) and some of the most important government servers and services are run in there.
I worked there when I was in the military and it was an awesome sight every day
at 0:16 did he shot that solider with that anti tank gun?
His body would have blown in half if he was
Apparently he died from the concussion. But that's only what I heard, I don't really know where you'd find out
He fell from the shockwave but i think he was fine just got hurt and i think he went deaf or something
Idiot gun crew fired before he was out of the radius of the muzzle blast. No problem. Life in Glorious Soviet Red Communist Boshevik Army cheap. No?
Probably just the noise made him shit a brick, any loud bang at the point in that city would scare anyone enough into getting down.
For anyone wondering, the towers had a fire rate of 8000 rounds per minute mostly because the 20mm and 37mm gun mouths used automatic cannons.
Comrade Serb
No because Mid-to-Heavy caliber cannons were used for AA roles and were manually loaded, like italian 90mm AAA cannons or German 8.8cm or Japanese 120mm ones.
Not all small caliber AA guns were Automatic cannons.
Not impossible to attack, not impossible to destroy. But doing so would be very expensive, probably weeks of constant assault/bombardment or months of mining/sapping, tons and tons of precious ammo, many men, lots of machines.
Just like castles of old. Too much trouble to take so attackers would instead encircle them, force the occupants to come out or endure siege. Ugly either way.
are there any key structural/design developments that made these behemoths so impregnable or was it just do to sheer volume of concrete?
I had hoped we would get the answer to that question. I'm always amazed at why concrete structures built then are still upright and solid and yet something built 20 years ago with the same materials is already crumbling.
It's beautiful engineering, the entire structure served as the frame itself. Unlike most building which have specified beams and colums that hold everything up that you can destroy with some satchel charges. To make the frame that holds them up fail you have to know how down the entire building piece by piece.
I remeber reading some where that nazi germany used like 3 times more rebar as modern concrete making a much stronger structure for wartime use. That is probably the reason they are still standing today.
Thanks, Blitz. That makes sense. Next time I build anything with rebar and concrete, I will give that a go.
the german took that secret to the grave
as it stands for know
we can not build something as good as those building
and since fort construction have stopped from ww2 the knowledge is lost and remains in the history books of ww1 ww2 forts :-(
i have a copy of fort construction teached in the greek engineering corps but all its so outdated and there is nothing new
while the ammunition have improved which would make this designs not worth so much and you will need to come up with a new design to coutner the developemnt
but thats the cycle
you build a fort enemy can not take ite
army build weapons against forts, forts fail
forts design to counter the weapons forts are not taken
new weapon are designed forts faill
and you get the cycle
0:18 did he get shot by the arty what I’m so confused 🤷🏼♂️ 😂
hitman harvey IKR?? Like wtf was that 😂
Wow didn't see that until you pointed it out. That's a powerful muzzle blast
😂😂😂
The blast startled him
Haha and I like how the shooter just runs away right after
Those really are impressive defensive structures and, despite the aid of slave labor, its equally incredible they could be designed and built in six months during a war without suffering severe issues.
That guy at 0:17 probably had a bad day after that.
naaah, that guy probably had NO day after that :P
He survived. In the longer version you can see him getting up again. If you look closely you can see him trying to catch himseld with his arms towards the ground. He would't do that if he would be that.
Or he died after that,i saw people survive near hits from ASM's walked for a while than died due to internal damage
"evil castles" "nazi death towers"
*talks about how civilians took shelter in them*
N Vannote. DO you even know what nazis were?
Yes but block of concrete are not evil by nature.
Weeljak Nah bro, they only used special jew hating gravel and concrete...
Zte Axon 7 Bruh are you for real... I really hope you’re taking the piss
you brainwashed
The large strong towers demonstrate multiple uses. The design plans should be updated and improved for use for aquafarming, hydroponic vertical farming, energy storage and production ( solar/geothermal/wind/etc), and other useful features.
The initial design was for war - but new updated designs are for keeping people happy, healthy, and fed fresh delicious organic foods. :-)
Hey, it was a very well made and interesting video, but as in other videos on this channel I would have loved to see some details about how these defensive towers were built and about the materials to make these towers so resistant to attacks.
Lots and lots of concrete is plenty to make a bunker immune to any nonnuclear weapons available at the time. I'm curious how resistant they would be to modern bunker busting missiles or if you could even get in range to use those weapons against these towers.
depends on how expensive heavy and fast it is, steel/depleted uranium/tungsten carbide rounds work the same way on smaller scales. in reality you would probably just go after the offensive defenses on top or leave it alone like was done
according to war tourist dot eu "The Mighty Flak Towers" the Grand Slam could get through the u-boat yard's 7 meter thick concrete ceiling in France, Saint Nazaire. according to some small arms manufacturers that is equivalent to 15 to 20 meters of common soil depending on the type of round
TRY PAYING ATTENTION KIDDO 8m OF REINFORCED CONCRETE WALLS AND 5m STEEL REINFORCED CONCRETE ON TOP. PuBLic ScHools and The EmbeDDed NEA wiLl be the DeatH of AmERicA. *American parents HOME SCHOOL YOUR KIDS if you want them to have a REAL CHANCE when they grow up.*
he said 2.5 meters of reinforced concrete, back then they didn't have quality UHPC so today for the same effect would be 1/2 or less thickness for same ballistic resistance
wikipedia says the zoo tower, the first of the flak towers, could hold 15,000 people, and has 2.4m walls and 1.5m thick roof. wartourist's museum PDF "The Mighty Flak Towers" of the sites show 3.8 meter thick roof. an air raid shelter and climate controlled shelter for artwork plus an 85 bed hospital
owww roasted!
"I am the type of person that never reads instructions". Is this your mentality as an enginner?!!
Move fast and break things or why Silicon Valley shouldn't make bridges.
Assuming you can't do wrong and that you know better than anybody else is pretty common for any high level position, whether you're an engineer or a CEO. Actually pretty common throughout the human race, makes no sense to expect otherwise.
Absolutely. "The first step towards ignorance is presume you already know something".
icterio1 thats the first step in becoming an engineer, instructions are for weak hamburger eating truck driving capitalist scum. Trust me I'm an engineer.
I mean
I saw it just as a way to subtly start recomending skillshare
Not mainly as some ignorance confession
So the last mission of ,,medal of honor'' was real
Lmao even I thought that the last mission of MOH Airborne was fake. It was real all along
No it was fake. Really cool game. The US never took a flak tower.
Never needed to .
I visited the tower in Vienna, nowadays an public aquarium, with also in the highest part a information point about the tower during WWII, and a restaurant. Very impressive. Because these building were all so solid, the most rational option would to use all of them for new purpose and not so difficult and expensive efforts to destroy it.
Nice place to survive a zombie apocalypse
I find them oddly beautyfull... especially the ones that have been repurposed.
Sizano Green they look amazing.
I'm glad they did repurpose them. Why use resources to bring them down when you can turn them into something beautiful and with purpose. And it would BURN Hitler to see them utilized for a greater good!! 😉 The only thing I would differently is paint them with something beautiful. There are a lot of great young artists out there that would jump at the chance. For the price they paid the demolition crews, they could've changed some young peoples lives.
Sel Akery Yeah, better give the artists what they need, or else they might become dictators and start a war, lmao
These would make for a excellent server farm and super cell tower, easy to cool/heat mountable solar and hardened against attack allowing for the L towers to become internet hubs and communication relays.
Should’ve just made it out of nokia phones
MrWonderWaffles Nokia is made in Sweden and I'm pretty sure Sweden and Nazi Germany weren't allies
There are no plants currently producing Nokia Phones in Sweden to date. The Brand has gone Global though and there are manufacturing facilities in North and south Americas, Europe, China and South Korea. Nokia originated in Finland.
So obviously everyone misunderstood what he said. 🙄
That's unfair, nobody would've destroyed it, except for Nokia Shell Rounds. But that might just cause a nuclear explosion.
Just trolls trolling trolls ^^
WHEN YOU CUT A MANS TONGUE OUT YOU DONT PROVE HIM WRONG...YOU JUST PROVE YOU ARE SCARED OF WHAT HE HAS TO SAY
Censorship much?
but it also don't prove him right. sometimes very evil ideas are quite popular and need to be eliminated. look trump for instance, or hitler, or bolsonaro, or thatcher, or hirohito, or mussolini, or cigarette ads, or the terrorist organization self proclaimed as the islamic state, or the terrorist organization self proclaimed as state of israel...
@@noname_atall what are you going to do? take people down for crimes they haven't committed yet? If you KNOW they're going to do a crime surly you have evidence to back that up? present it. But if their only crime is having bad ideas then debate them. If you can't win a fair debate perhaps it is you ideas that are flawed. If your opponent does as the adl does and tries to defame you, you could try sueing them.
German engineering is truly masterful.
They have their fair share of foul ups
The open-platform-artillery-tower, got out of use in the early 19th century, not for the Germans where it is still superior engineering in the 21st century
American Engineering truly OUT MASTERED the "master race". FUCK NAZI Germany
+Jedi You imbecile. Don't forget a whole lot of the brilliant White engineers in USA has their ancestry from precisely Germany. The genetic and cultural nobility of old Europe.
Nobility is something like George Washington: A lifetime of fighting for the king, hunting, politics and owning 70000 acres and a lot of slaves. Most Germans got to America because they felt like like those slaves or to avoid the kings generals.
0:29 this man is flexing hard on berlin with them rolexes on his wrist
I like that Hamburg turned them into something, its a shame that the Berlin ones, and the other two Vienna ones could not have been turned into something.
TheMr77469 Yeah, the "Haus des Meeres" (that's the one in Vienna which has been repurposed) is great. The one in Augarten is just gigantic, but it doesn't look so stable anymore, especially the third one (I forgot the name of the park where it stands).
Those are some awesome buildings. Retrofitting them like that is an awesome use of them. They are history. I'm glad some have survived.
1:53 damn selfie sticks never seem to run out of style for some people...
besmen 42 lol
I lived near one of these in Vienna in Augarten. They are exceptionally formidable. It's interesting to learn more about them now and on a youtube channel since the Viennese who lived nearby seemed to know nothing more about them than I did despite having lived there for many years. This was a fantastic video and made my time living in Vienna richer.
We can all agree that Nazis had a lot of fictional ideas that they could easily turn to reality
yep , if it wasnt for the commies the reich would be on the moon in 1946
no, most of the Nazi ideas were impractical and insane.
and the ones that weren't, the US and UK had them too.
Britannic hayyomatt Have you heard about german rocket scientists? They brought us a big step ahead from moving into outer space by developing the V2 for example.
@@thebasher7204 The V2: a short range highly inacurate "IC"BM, doing more harm to the producing country than to target, surely a magnificant weapon!
The two towers in Hamburg are on the Heiligengeistfeld, near the St Pauli Football Club stadium and just across from where the Reeperbahn begins on Budapester Straße. I happened to be living in Hamburg in 1973 when the authorities decided that the towers had to go. They got in the specialists and worked out a plan.
What's not visible are the inside walls, which are fashioned in such a way as to deflect any blast should a shell penetrate the outer walls. Anyway, the specialists made all the necessary calculations, set their charges and detonated them. There was an absolutely deafening explosion that shattered every fucking window in a three-mile radius, but the towers were untouched after the huge cloud of dust had dispersed. It was a sort of involuntary comedy act, but I think it was then that they decided to make other plans for the towers.
MsG
This reminds me of the days I played Age Of Empires. I would sometimes build dozens of attack towers with overlapping ranges of attack in the area between my village and the enemy's village, then live my days in peace while the towers defended my people
Did you see that one guy fall to the ground @ 0:17 after almost getting hit by that artillary.
Yeah, he probably had internal injuries from the artillery
1:22 that looks like Panther! Since when Soviets had Panthers?
Also how tower defeated Soviets? Didn't they win and liberated most of Europe except Belgium and half of France?
@Родина-мать зовёт! Yep
@Родина-мать зовёт! Hitler: attempts to exterminate Russians
Russia: goes on a warpath to beat Hitler's ass, uses brutal and excessive force because everyone in the army is seething with rage
Hitler: shocked Pikachu face
@Родина-мать зовёт! Are you... on drugs? Or this is how insanity looks like?
@Родина-мать зовёт! That was my question. Never answer with a question on a question.
What a complete video Sir, I'm really amazed the quality the narration.... every part of the video It's on point. Thank You very much.
"stark reminders for the inhabitants of these cities of an evil war, waged by their ancestors" - this is actually VERY accurate. The Vienna one that is now an aquarium is located right next to Vienna's most popular shopping street. I remember the first time I walked by (as a little boy) with my grandmother (who was a child herself when the 3rd Reich fell), her telling me that it was a decommissioned flak tower. It led to one of the first, and most honest conversations about the war I had had up until that point. There's always talk about tearing some of them down (bc of prime, inner-city locations and such), but I think they should be granted Denkmalschutz-status (heritage protection status). In Vienna, we may have tons of statues, plaques, monuments, Stolpersteine, etc. to remind us of the despicable acts committed there - but IMO none immediately command the amount of respect like those giant, concrete behemoths. Especially to a child, the sheer size of it lends the situation more gravity. "What did we do so we had to build those giant towers?" #neverforget
In Soviet Russia you tear tower down, in Austria tower tears you down.
Yeah. Them being in the very heart of our city makes them so much more accessible then sites like former concentration camps.
Amazing all the massive stone structures where made in ww2 I love learning about all of them
combined amercian, russian, british including canadian and french just to defeat the german.. im pretty sure the geman had been using skillshare to enhance their engineering skill
tyron smith the russian could not done that without the help of the American. US sent a very large amount of supply and ammunition to Soviet to keep those russian fighting
Russians defeated Germany on their own. Hitler concentrated 75% - 85% of the Nazie army in the Eastern Front. US and Canada did not star fighting Hitler until late 1943 when the soviets already liberated Eastern Europe and were marching towards Berlin by then.
@tyron smith the guy is clueless, US and Canada didn't start fighting Hitler until 1943 they were primarily fight the Japanese. The US and Canadian army would have been wiped out if they would have actually engaged them in 1940
@@jaketorralba4521 US weapons were inferior against German equipment, and incomparable with Russian equipment as well, so it would have been pointless. Besides, US wanted Russia to fall, don't believe that propaganda in US history books because they actually claim they are the ones who defeated the Germans.
@@bobyberry8394 i pretty sure canadians die in 1940 while france campaign and canada declare war against germany in same time than british and france
An Irishman doing great things,thank you from a
Tramore man here in Svendborg,Denmark.
Sounds like real life Wolfenstein
MrDJRObert1234 No shit
whoa he is right, Nazism was a fascist movement in 20th century Germany
Medal of Honor: Airborne featured a level entirely about assaulting one of these towers with some paratroopers. Pretty mediocre game overall, but this was something interesting about it.
Greetings from Austria!
Grüße aus Österreich!
Greetings from the *US of A*
Grüß Gott!
Viribus Unitis!
Great history lesson! Very interesting!
Look forward to seeing more!
Hey uh I just wanted to mention a small typo at 0:48. The speaker says there are 4x 128mm guns at the tower. This is slightly incorrect because while there were 4 MOUNTS, each mount had twin 128mm guns bringing the total up to 8 on the tower, thus giving it the 96 rpm rate of fire.
Then: let’s use this large artillery to take out this big bunker
Now: MOP
Great video.
I saw a “zoo” tower in Vienna myself and was amazed by it’s brutality
The purest definition of 'Impregnable'
God damn those Nazis had brilliant minds.
And terrible military strategy
Had...
I mean I guess. They were pretty fucking sub par half of the time. I mean, who the fuck uses horse drawn carts for logistics in a mechanized war?
@@ThatRatBastard People who lack fuel.
@@duxveritatis2569 Who goes to war without proper fuel?
Excellent video as an old engineer i appreciated the great attention to detail of the towers and the great color video in HD.
As a quite historical interested German I am actually shocked that I never heard about these towers of concrete and steel...they are an amazing example how Hitler used to react to problems.
(aaand they look like a modern castle keep, which is far less sinister^^) :D
Thank you for giving me something new to visit at my next trip to one of these citys^^
There is a book called 'The Last Battle' by Cornelius Ryan about the final days of Berlin's fall and the book talks about life in the tower. Based on accounts, they were packed shoulder to shoulder and people would die but its so packed that the would remain standing squished in the crowds. The accounts of the mass rape of Berlin by the Soviets is really hard to read too so beware before you pick up the book.
ColoradoStreaming thanks a lot for the recommendation, and the warning is quite appteacciated aswell^^
Master of Suicide people can say what they will about the man but AH was a genius
defeated??? ... the video title leads to a confusion
Not really. The towers did their job and defeated the Soviet forces assaults against them. The title doesnt state that the towers won WW2. It is simply emphasizing the fact that the Flak towers themselves defeated the Red Army's attempts of demolishing them to rubble. They pretty much forced the remaining troops and civilians to surrender.
@@EmmAyeVee ``the WW2 Towers that the soviets never conqured `` would sound lot more better and more accurate to the reality ... however appreciate explanation of your point of view!
Defeated in battle. But not defeated them in the entire war.
You're right. Nothing defeated the Soviets. They won.
@@voxer99 They just defeated them selves. Sorry not sorry. Peace. Can we make a future that is excellent for kids everywhere please. People can ultimately use they're earned money the way they want, educating and helping in deciding what to do with the money is key. Love.
it seems amazingly short-sighted to try to demolish the towers instead of repurposing them
They are still scared of anything a Nazi may have touched.
Very interesting! Thank you and congratulations on your excellent production.