Third Reich

The title of this article or section is based on conjecture The name used for this article's subject is conjectural. The subject itself may be canon or non-canon.

For Third Reich's successor during the CCA/NSDF war, see Himmelluft.

The Third Reich

Information
Faction: The Third Reich
Era: The History of Biometal Warfare
Occupied Worlds Luna

The Third Reich space program was an ill-fated effort to return Nazi Germany to its former supremacy by launching a blitzkrieg from the Moon long after the end of the Second World War.

History

Origins

The Excelsior launches from Greenland

The Nazi space effort was started some time prior to 1937 under the orders of Adolf Hitler after he met with English scientist Jon Beardsly in 1935. A secret research outpost was set up in Greenland without the knowledge of the Danish government where the Nazis had Beardsly work on his Ice-Fusion Engine. In 1939 they drafted Henkel and Hartbaum in to assemble their first space craft, the Excelsior, using scrap metal from vehicles destroyed during World War I. The craft was finally launched on May 14th 1940, with Beardsly aboard, and plotted a course for the moon.

The German space program lay largely dormant while Beardsly was in space. It was eventually brought back into operation after Beardsly's second audience with Hitler, when he presented the Führer with a small lump of biometal and described its possible applications. Hearing this, the Nazi leader promised the division with whatever funding and resources it needed and expanded it to include teams of German experts to draw up maps of the Lunar surface based on Beardsly's recollections.

Militarisation

The Sturm was one of the few units based directly on Beardsly's drawings.

By April 1943 the maps were complete and the Germans were able to remove Beardsly from the picture, and with him the risk of betrayal to the British Secret Intelligence Service. General Kranken, now the leader of the Reich's space program, began to prepare the battalion for military action. The Reich's scientists and technicians began attempting to produce the first biometal war machines but it soon became apparent that Beardsly's designs were not suited to military applications, so Wilhelm Arkin - one of Beardsly's original technical team - was asked to produce new designs using the originals as templates.

Revision

It was barely than a year from the unit's revision that the Germans began to lose the war; with the Soviets pushing from the east and Western Allies from the west, Kranken made the decision to re-task his unit again. They would abandon the rest of the German military and flee first to the Arctic Circle and then to the Moon, far beyond the reach of either the Allied or Soviet forces. From there they would pour their forces into the Russian and American superpowers before sweeping back across into Europe from both east and west, eliminating all opposition and seizing control of the world.

Discovery

During the destruction of the myriad classified documents and incriminating evidence by Nazi officials as the Allies rolled in to Germany, a single memo penned by Kranken escaped notice and was discovered by an American soldier in an abandoned communications bunker. After scrutinising the document and finding no evidence to suggest that it was faked despite their lack of familiarity with the writer or his battalion, the NSDF mobilised in preparation for the worst.

Return and Defeat

The Nazi invasion was finally launched in July 1947, by which point the German troops were becoming desperate. The assault went poorly; the first half of the invasion force was destroyed by American rockets, while the remainder was forced into a retreat by the fledgeling NSDF after only a few hours. It took a matter of days for the Americans and Soviets to gather enough resources from the destroyed German fleet to follow the remainder into space, and after the initial crushing defeat it took less than six months for the NSDF and CCA to wipe out what was left of the German forces.

Legacy

The Jagvespe, a prototype of which may have been uncovered by the Soviets in Dresden

It was the remains of the devastated German fleet that first gave the NSDF and CCA the last of the biometal they needed to make it into space. Wilhelm Arkin himself would move to a position with the NSDF after the war, and despite the widespread destruction of German documents and machinery the technology and hardware used to build the Reich's spacecraft were still in working order with the Russians invaded Germany. With Arkin on one side and the plans and machinery on the other, the designs that had originated with the Rech's space program influenced the American, Russian and Chinese operations in space, and their influence could still be seen in the ISDF some fifty years later.

Some of the Reich's designs were rediscovered in a vault in East Berlin in 1991 during preparations for the German reunification, but the volume in which these vehicles were actually constructed - or indeed whether there were any which remained undiscovered - never became clear. One prototype unit is believed to have been discovered, but no official record of this was made.

Units

Only four of the units produced by the Reich space program were ever discovered: the Rovenkampf, a precursor to the Recycler later seen employed by other spacefaring factions; the Vossketen cargo tug; the Jagvespe scout; Sturm scavenger and Bezirker turret. It is believed that some of these units may have been commissioned for terrestrial duty, but no evidence of this has ever been found.

Trivia

• The units that form the basis of the Third Reich's space program were originally created for Lost Brigade, an early version of Battlezone set during the Second World War.
• Given the names of the Third Reich's various military wings - the Wehrmacht (eng: "armed forces"), Luftwaffe (eng: "air force"), Kriegsmarine (eng: "navy") and Waffen-Schutzstaffel (eng: "armed protective squadron") - it is likely that the spacefaring wing would have a similarly basic name. A competition run by Activision on the Battlezone website listed the "East German Himmelluft" (from "Himmel" (eng: "sky") and "luft" (eng: "aerial") as an option in a question asking for the name of the faction opposing the NSDF.

Appearances

• The History of Biometal Warfare (First appearance)