If you look at the German tanks of 1943-1945, you will notice that their armor resembles corrugated cookies. It is all the more surprising that there was nothing like this at the beginning of the war. Why did the German soldiers make such a strange “pattern”, and how useful did it turn out to be in practice?
The corrugated armor of German vehicles after 1943 is nothing more than steel coated with an anti-magnetic compound called zimmerite. Calling zimmerit paint would be wrong. It's more of a protective paste. Its creator is the Berlin form of Chemische Werke Zimmer & Co. A protective composition was prepared from barium sulfate, polyvinyl acetate (Movilith 20), ocher pigment, sawdust and zinc sulfate. The shares of the listed ingredients in the total mass of the paste were 40%, 25%, 15%, 10% and 10%, respectively. Zimmerite was supposed to protect German armored vehicles from Soviet magnetic mines - it would prevent them from sticking to steel armor.
Zimmerite did make the machine weakly vulnerable to magnetic charges. In combination with well-chosen paint, the corrugated surface of the armor also significantly improved camouflage qualities. An unexpected advantage became clear after the start of using a protective paste. However, the composition also had disadvantages: it was extremely difficult to apply zimmerite, and the procedure itself took a lot of time. The paste dried and hardened for as long as 8 days, subject to regular processing of the applied zimmerite with a blowtorch.
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Why did the Germans even take up the creation of zimmerite, if in the USSR they almost did not use magnetic mines? Apparently, the German staff officers thought ahead, analyzing the fact that the USSR did not have its own infantry anti-tank grenade launcher during the war years. At the same time, in the infantry of the Red Army, tanks "overcame" everything they could - from bottles and bundles of grenades to dogs, hung with explosives. Analyzing the frightening number of suicidal throws of Red Army soldiers on tanks at the beginning of the war, the Nazis considered that magnetic anti-tank mines would be quite in the spirit of the Red Army. In the end, the fascist generals made a mistake. However, zimmerite was by no means a pointless development. Suffice it to say that until 1945, both the Soviets, the Americans and the British tried to repeat it.
If you want to know even more interesting things, then you should read about what answer did the Red Army come up with for the German Tiger tanks.
Source: https://novate.ru/blogs/170322/62442/