COBI Karl-Gerät 040 (600 mm) Set 2530

COBI's Karl-Gerät 040 (600 mm) is built from 1,500 blocks, with rotating wheels, working tracks, a movable barrel and a functioning loading system. Three figures of German soldiers and a Feldgendarmerie dog are included. All markings are printed; no stickers.

Six were built, and every one had a name

When a weapon exists in single figures, it gets treated like a person. The six Karl-Gerät mortars were named from Germanic and Norse mythology: Adam, Eva, Thor, Odin, Loki and Ziu.

Adam and Eva were the first two, and after 1944 they were renamed Baldur and Wotan — apparently because biblical names had become politically awkward.

Each one was effectively a hand-built machine with its own crew, its own maintenance history and its own reputation. They went to Sevastopol in 1942, to Brest-Litovsk, and Ziu was used against Warsaw during the 1944 uprising. That is close to the complete operational history of the type: three campaigns and six vehicles.

Two survive. One, Ziu, is at Kubinka outside Moscow.

The gun

60 cm calibre, firing a concrete-piercing shell weighing over two tonnes, designed to punch through several metres of reinforced concrete before detonating. Later the barrels were rebored to 54 cm for greater range with a lighter shell.

Nothing about it was practical. A firing position took hours to prepare, moving between positions meant partial disassembly and a special railway wagon, and each mortar needed its own dedicated ammunition carrier built on a Panzer IV chassis with a crane, because no crew could lift a two-tonne round.

The dog in the box belongs to the Feldgendarmerie, and it is there because something like this arriving at a railhead needed guarding.

In the COBI range

Set 2560 is the Karl-Gerät "Ziu" with 1,574 pieces, four figures and a named brick. Set 2057 is the Warsaw Uprising figure set — the other end of what Ziu was firing at.

Specifications

Pieces: 1,500 · Figures: 3 and a dog · Working tracks and loading system · No stickers