The largest gun ever used in battle.
Eager to invade France, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler demanded a new weapon that could easily pierce the concrete fortifications of the French Maginot Line — the only major physical barrier standing between him and the rest of Western Europe.
In 1941, the year after France fell, German steelmaker and arms manufacturer Friedrich Krupp 
A.G. began constructing Hitler’s Gustav gun, according to the documentary ” Top Secret Waepons.” Friedrich Krupp died age 48 on 22-12-1902 in Essen.
Schwerer Gustav was the name of a German 80 cm (31.5 in.) railway gun. It was developed in the late 1930s by Krupp as siege artillery, Siege artillery were heavy guns and other bombardment devices designed to bombard fortifications, cities, and other fixed targets. They were capable of firing heavy cannonballs or shells but required enormous transport and logistical support to operate. They lacked mobility and thus were rarely useful in more mobile warfare situations. They have been generally superseded by strategic bomber aircraft and surface-to surface missiles in modern warfare. for the explicit purpose of destroying the main forts of the French Maginot Line, the strongest fortifications then in existence. The fully assembled gun weighed nearly 1,350 tonnes, and could fire shells weighing seven tonnes to a range of 47 kilometers (29 mi). The gun was designed in preparation for the Battle of France 
, but was not ready for action when the battle began, and in any case the Wehrmacht’s Blitzkrieg offensive through Belgium rapidly outflanked and isolated the Maginot Line’s static defenses, eventually forcing the French to surrender and making their destruction unnecessary. Gustav was later employed in the Soviet Union at the siege of Sevastopol during Operation Barbarossa, where among other things, it destroyed a munitions depot buried in the bedrock under a bay. The gun was moved to Leningrad, and may have been intended to be used in the Warsaw Uprising like other German heavy siege pieces, but the rebellion was crushed before it could be prepared to fire. Gustav was destroyed by the Germans near the end of the war in 1945 to avoid capture by the Red Army.
It was the largest-caliber rifled weapon ever used in combat, the heaviest mobile artillery piece ever built in terms of overall weight, and fired the heaviest shells of any artillery piece. It is only surpassed in caliber by the unused British Mallet Mortar 
and the American Little David 
bomb-testing mortar (both 36 inch; 914 mm)
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