If reality never sank in at Grotte’s aerie in Essen, it did at the armaments ministry in Berlin. Albert Speer realized that if the Maus was impractical on most terrain and impossible on bridges, both the P.1000 and P.1500 would have been ridiculously immobile. One day in early 1943, when the Führer wasn’t looking, he pulled the plug on both projects.
    The Maus project, though, continued. Two had proceeded into the test phase and four more were being built in the summer of 1944 when Speer ordered those four to be scrapped. By now, he realized that he must devote the diminishing industrial capacity of the Third Reich to weapons that had a chance of affecting the outcome of the war.
    Those first two tanks remained at the big Wehrmacht weapons proving ground at Kummersdorf, about 20 miles south of Berlin, until May 1945. With Soviet troops closing in on Berlin, one Maus prototype, which had a functional turret, was reportedly sent to nearby Wünsdorf to help protect the headquarters of the German High Command. There appear to be no accounts of it having fired a shot. The Germans scuttled it to keep it out of Soviet hands, though the turret remained intact.
   Today, the P.1000 Ratte and the P.1500 Monster have become the stuff of legend, remembered in the way we remember fables from another time and place. The original blueprints are apparently long gone, superseded by fanciful artists’ illustrations that have the appearance of science fiction.
     In the case of Porsche’s Maus, however, something tangible has emerged from the mists of time. The Red Army had seized remnants of both prototypes in 1945 and shipped them to their top-secret tank proving ground at Kubinka, about 50 miles west of Moscow. The two monster tanks vanished from public view and for half a century were presumed to have been scrapped. Then, in 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians opened a tank museum at Kubinka to show off their vast collection of captured and Soviet-era armored vehicles. Among these—a Maus! The single intact turret had been mated with the intact first prototype hull and chassis.
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