At the end of World War II, the Wehrmacht experimented with the strangest technologies. There are too many projects that had too little chance of being realized. For example, the "Vortex Cannon" was supposed to stop the infantry, destroy enemy bombers …
By March 1945, Allied forces had occupied all large areas of Germany. Hidden in dilapidated factories or in underground bunkers, military specialists found original, sometimes very strange designs of weapons. In late April 1945, American soldiers in Hillersleben (about 20 kilometers northwest of Magdeburg) stumbled upon such a training ground. The strangest thing was the object in the form of an L-shaped corner pipe, one end pointing to the sky. This structure rested on a trolley for heavy implements.
In fact, it was a kind of cannon: the "tube" was designed to direct the energy of a detonating mixture of oxygen and hydrogen into the sky. Or, to put it simply, it was a "Whirlwind Cannon" for launching artificial tornadoes. According to the plan, this installation was supposed to "work" as an air defense system, destroying the approaching bombers.
The cannon for artificial tornadoes was developed in 1943 by Mario Zippermeier. Its design consisted of a tank containing a combustible gas that was fed into a combustion chamber located at the base of a long pipe. A complex system of fixtures and turbines gave the gas flow an initial rotation, and then it exited through nozzles at the end of the pipe and formed a vortex funnel.
During interrogation, Zippermeier and the engineers who participated in the tests said that their weapons in the experiments broke a two cm thick wooden board located at a distance of 200 meters. And the height of artificial tornadoes reached three hundred meters!
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While it sounded good, it actually showed how irrelevant the idea of such a weapon was. Even low-flying aircraft rarely flew below two hundred meters. In addition, at a speed of 450 kilometers per hour or more, it would be almost impossible to directly hit an aircraft using wind power.
