Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte

The Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte, German for Land Cruiser P. 1000 Rat, was a design for a 1,000-tonne tank for Germany in the Second World War. It may have been proposed by the Krupp director Edward Grote in June 1942, who named it Landkreuzer, and it grew out of a 1941 Krupp study of Soviet heavy tanks that also produced the Maus. Hitler approved of the idea and ordered Krupp to begin development in 1942, but Minister of Armaments Albert Speer cancelled it in early 1943, before any prototype was made. On paper it would have been about 35 metres long and 14 metres wide on six tracks, driven by two marine diesel engines of the type used in U-boats and armed with a twin 28 cm naval gun turret. Some historians doubt the project ever went beyond an outline and think the surviving diagram may be a hoax or an engineer's sketch.