In the popular understanding of World War 2 there tends to be something of a fetishisation of the Nazis technological and engineering capabilities, usually informed by the idea that they punched significantly above their weight because of stuff like the Tiger tank or their V1 and V2 weapon projects. There's lots of history channel documentaries about things like their experimental aircraft or the absurdly gigantic Schwerer Gustav artillery piece for example. At the most extreme end of things you end up with Sci-fi nazis in the vein of the Wolfenstein or Overlord that's a bit of staple in videogames and movies.

However I've been intrigued when I read some more left orientated discussion on this where it is often argued that this entire phenomenon of Nazi Super-Engineering and crazy scientific advancement is extremely overblown, that products like the Tiger were objectively badly designed when it came to real life battlefield utility and sucked up unnecessary amounts of resources that could have been better spent on less ostentatious things. Even if things like the V2 rocket were impressive developments they were terrible ways to expend resources at a time when Nazi Germany really could not afford to be wasting away time and money on such frivolities. Furthermore that the Nazi's engineering was quite unimpressive compared to their enemies, especially the Soviets, and that this was made obvious by the way they tried to imitate some key Soviet products, most notably the way the Panther tank was heavily inspired by the T-34, but characteristically had a whole bunch of bells and whistles that compromised its overall effectiveness, especially when it came to producing quickly and in large numbers. There's a perception from this point of view that the Nazis created equipment and vehicles that were extremely over-designed and thus broke down or failed and were difficult to repair at critical times compared to the more robust Soviet equipment.

The reasoning for why the perception of Nazi Super Science exists, under this line of thought, is because of a combination of the Nazi's love of huge, charismatic projects that look good in a propaganda reel even if they are painfully inefficient, like giant tanks or artillery guns, stereotypes about German industriousness and technology both before and after the war and the Cold War era considerations where the Western Allies in particular placed great emphasis on German technology and general fighting ability both because it made them seem more impressive when they defeated the Nazis despite the huge economic and population disparity and because it played into the notion that the Eastern Front was defined by a professional, advanced German army that man-per-man was vastly superior to the Soviets and only lost because of the crude weight of numbers that the Soviet Union could bring to bear.

So what's the current consensus on Nazi engineering? Were they building bleeding tech that let them punch far above their weight or were they taking months to construct Frankenstein monstrosities of tanks and planes that probably broke down before it even got out the factory gate and wasted tons of precious time and money?