Today’s creation may look like a jauntily retro space rocket, but it is in fact an Aggregat 4, known affectionately by the Germans during World War 2 as the ‘Vergeltungswaffe 2’, (or V-2 for short). That extravagant title translates as ‘Retribution Weapon’, which is an apt name, because retribution was all the V-2 was designed to do. Which makes it surely one of mankind’s most evil inventions.
But also one of the cleverest. Whilst abhorrent in purpose, the V-2 rocket was brilliant in engineering. It was the world’s first guided ballistic missile (which considering it first few in 1944, when a computer was the size of an office block, is scarcely believable), and also the first man-made object to cross the boundary of space.
That cleverness made it all the more evil though, as the 3,000 V-2 rockets launched from Germany during the Second World War are estimated to have killed over 9,000 people in London, and later other European cities. Another 12,000 concentration camp prisoners died in the making of it, and yet at the end of the war the Allies rushed to capture the designs to accelerate their own missile production.
Thankfully this V-2 is nothing more than a collection of superbly shaped Danish plastic, and it comes from previous bloggee Sunder_59 of Flickr. There are further pictures of Sunder’s perfectly recreated Vergeltungswaffe at his photostream – click the link above to see more of the worst mankind can do.
