Hasta La Gadget!

This is of the weirder files to come out of WWII. The July 23rd 1945 issue of LIFE magazine detailed a secret Nazi plan to concoct a giant space mirror or magnifying glass that would concentrate solar rays to burn whole cities or oceans (Google books link).

Kind of like a super-sized version of using a magnifying glass to burn ants.

In Germany last month, U.S. Army technical experts came up with the
astonishing fact that German scientists had seriously planned to build a
“sun gun,” a big mirror in space which would focus the sun’s rays to a
scorching point at the earth’s surface. The Germans, the Army reported,
hoped to use such a mirror to burn an enemy city to ashes or to boil
part of an ocean.

Plausible schemes to build a station in space were
engineered on paper long before the war. European rocket enthusiasts,
including Dr. Hermann Oberth, who may have been the designer of the V-2,
had planned to use the space station not as a weapon but as a refueling
point for rockets starting off on journeys into space. … The only major
obstacle: constructing a rocket powerful enough to reach a point where a
space station could be built. If the modern German scientists had been
able to make such a rocket, they might have ben able to set up their sun
gun. Whether the sun gun would have accomplished what they expected,
however, is another matter.”

Even if the Nazis would have maintained power long enough to create a space Reich, it appears this dream of a city-destroying sun gun was far from practical.

Since the sun appears in the sky as a disk and not as a point, the best
any optical system can produce is an image of this disk. At very short
focal lengths, the image is small and hot but as the focal length is
increased the image becomes progressively bigger and cooler. At the
distance the Germans proposed to set up their mirror (3,100 miles) the
image of the sun cast on the earth would be about 40 miles in diameter
and not hot enough to do any damage.

via Blastr