Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at Morphy's
taking a look at this registered,
fully transferable, Erma EMP submachine gun.
Now, I previously did a video on the
Spanish La Coruña Arsenal copy of the EMP.
And I covered a lot of its developmental history there,
so we're just going to touch on the highlights here.
If you want the full story,
go check out the video on the Spanish copy.
In a nutshell, Heinrich Vollmer was an experienced World War One firearms designer,
who after the war decided to work on developing his own submachine gun.
The German government was very interested in this,
despite technically not being allowed to have or develop submachine guns under the Versailles Treaty.
But they actually funded Vollmer's work independently.
Most of the time an inventor like this will partner up with some financier or manufacturing company.
Vollmer was doing all of that on his own because he had this government financing.
And that was fine through the 1920s until the great depression hit.
A lot of the German financing dried up. Vollmer, because he was such a small operation
he tried to market the gun commercially and wasn't very successful at it.
Sold a couple hundred guns, but that's about it.
At that point, by the way, his gun looked quite a bit like this, but it didn't have a barrel jacket.
He resolved the issue by selling his design, his intellectual property and everything, to the Erma Company.
And they were much better situated to market it and sell it internationally, and they did just that.
Now they put barrel shrouds back on,
and they would manufacture this in a variety of configurations.
This is the short-barrelled version, which is most common here in the US.
There's also a version with a four inch longer barrel,
and often a bayonet lug.
They were offered in a couple of different calibres.
The magazine well here is designed to be long enough
to accommodate cartridges like .30 Mauser and 9mm Steyr (or 9x23).
Although this example, and most of them that we see in the US, are in 9x19 Parabellum.
So, let's go ahead and take a closer look at this, and I will show you primarily
the differences between the German guns and the Spanish copies.
Because here in the US we actually have probably more of the Spanish copies
floating around than we do the originals.
The wooden vertical front grip, combined with the regular traditional style pistol grip
and the left-hand side magazine really makes this a pretty darn distinctive gun,
these are easy to spot and are quite recognisable.
Now if we look at some of the features.
Starting at the front we will see a very simple sort of barleycorn
(rather narrow barleycorn - it's not as triangular as some) front sight.
We have a barrel shroud which is
a really simple separate piece of metal here that's just kind of pressed in place.
There's a screw on the top, but other than that,
it's these pressed-in dimples that hold it in place over the barrel.
And that's just to protect your hand from a potentially very hot barrel.
We have a front sling bar right there, in front of the ejection port.
We have the magazine well here on the side.
As I mentioned, the magazine well was made long enough to accommodate
multiple different cartridges, because, well, in the 1930s
people ... hadn't really decided on what the best submachine gun cartridge was,
and so you had a lot of interest in a variety.
.30 Mauser, 9 Parabellum, 9 Steyr, .30 Luger, a lot of different options.
So the 9mm ... Parabellum, 9x19, magazines
are easily recognised by this spacer in the back of the magazine.
Here we have a 9 Steyr, or 9x23 magazine, and you can see the follower comes all the way back
because that's a couple millimetre longer cartridge.
Overall capacities were, I believe, 30 or 32 rounds, as well as 20.
Notice this is in fact not an EMP magazine, this is actually a Spanish MP41/44 magazine.
The magazine stop is different there. And the construction on the back is a bit different.
This Spanish magazine will actually lock into the EMP, although it's a very tight fit.
Now moving on: we have this cool thing, which is distinctively German.
This is typically called a 'police safety', and it was instituted for German police forces
because they wanted some sort of manual safety mechanism that would lock the bolt in place.
So what this is is basically just a scalloped block
that in the fire position is retracted out of the receiver,
and in the safe position runs into the bolt and locks it in place.
I'll show you the cutout in the bolt when we take this apart in a moment.
So this was added to a wide variety of submachine guns
that were in German police use during the Weimar period.
So you'll see it on MP18s, MP28s, Erma EMPs and others.
The Spanish-made guns have a tangent sight on them,
where this commercial German proofed Erma has a pair of flip sights.
So these are calibrated for 100 metres and 200 metres.
We do also have a safety notch in the back of the receiver which allows you to lock the bolt in place.
However, that involves having the ejection port wide open.
So part of the interest in this police safety
was to have a way to keep the bolt closed, keep the gun clean,
but also prevent the bolt from bouncing back should the gun be dropped on the stock.
We have a fire selector back here, "D" is for dauerfeuer, or full-auto. "E" is einzelfeuer, or semi-auto.
What's interesting is in semi-auto you can hear that disconnector click,
it works like semi-auto, as you would expect.
In full-auto it's actually a progressive trigger, and if you only pull it back
a little bit you get the same effect.
And from here, pulling the rest of the way drops the sear.
So you can actually see the sear right there. And you can see it dropping and snapping back up.
And then if I pull the trigger all the way through, the sear drops the rest of the way.
So it's unusual to find a gun that has both a semi-auto selector and a progressive trigger.
We have some distinctively German markings on the back here.
EMP, that of course stands for Erma Maschinen Pistole.
Serial number, this is a matching gun.
And then we have a little eagle over N proof, and that is a German commercial proof mark.
There is also an "H" stamped into the very front of the stock,
and that indicates German military police use.
So we know this was not just a gun made in Germany and sold commercially,
but actually one that was used by the police, and the police safety really reinforces that.
Now the Spanish copies have an additional plunger safety here on the bottom of the stock,
which is not present on this gun.
The Spanish copies are also marked on the back of the magazine well, which this one is not.
Here all we have is the serial number up here on the front.
And this has a typical German style of sling cutout.
The Spanish copies have a sling bar mounted on the back of the stock.
The Spanish copies have a solid sort of plum-shaped bolt handle,
where the German one is hollowed out and has some grooves.
The German selector lever is also marked on the wood,
where the Spanish selector markings are on the actual trigger guard or receiver,
and they have a little bit of a different style of wooden cutout.
But the "E" and "D" - distinctively German. If you see "S" and "A" on the metal, that's a Spanish copy.
One of the design elements that Vollmer put in place was a fairly unique takedown system for this time period.
And that's what this rear trigger is, it is actually a takedown lever.
So to disassemble the gun we want to have the bolt forward, it doesn't matter if it's locked or not.
And then we want to pull the trigger and this ... disassembly lever all the way back.
Then you can take the whole upper assembly, rotate it about 60 degrees, and pull it off of the stock.
This system would be copied on the German MP40 in military service.
Looking inside here, we have the serial number again inside the stock.
And now you can really clearly see the sear.
So in semi-auto mode that just drops a little bit and then resets.
And in full-auto you can pull it all the way down, and hold it out of the way of the bolt.
Once we get to this point of disassembly the rest is easy.
The whole bolt assembly just comes out the back of the gun.
We have a ... telescoping recoil spring here.
As I mentioned, I discussed this again in the Spanish copy video,
this is an interesting technological situation in that it was first commercially introduced by Vollmer,
but it was actually first patented by Schmeisser.
There ... was a several year delay between when Schmeisser filed his patent
and when it was approved and published.
And during that time Vollmer introduced it in one of his earlier commercial guns.
Now the slot right here in the bolt is for that police safety.
Alright, so right in there you can see a round block in the receiver.
And that ... there we go (sorry, this is a little hard to film, this is a weird angle).
There we go, you can see that block.
So that's the safe position where it ... locks the bolt and prevents it from moving.
And then,
that is the fire position where it's out of the way.
And the camera doesn't know what to focus on, because there's nothing in there anymore.
One interesting element of the EMP's history which I know a lot of people
will bring up in the comments if I don't mention it, so I will here:
is that they were actually very popular with the Spanish Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War.
Actually, I think they were popular with everybody in the Spanish Civil War.
But many thousands of them were purchased by Spain and used during the Spanish Civil War.
That's why there is a Spanish post-war copy, that's how popular they were.
But at the end of the Spanish Civil War a lot of refugee Republican fighters
... fled into France over the Pyrenees, and the French confiscated their arms at the border.
And took in something like 3,250 EMP submachine guns, although only about half that many magazines.
Very shortly thereafter, when France and Germany went to war,
France had a serious deficit of submachine guns.
And they would issue out some 800 of those Erma EMPs for use by groups like the Garde Mobile and the Corps Francs.
... And then, of course, those guns would be confiscated in turn by the Germans after the French Armistice.
Giving these guns an interesting circular path of being produced in Germany,
sold to Spain, moved to France, and then re-taken by the Germans.
Like a lot of the inter-war submachine guns that came out of Germany and Austria,
the EMP is really a very high quality, very fine firearm, it was well made.
This was before the era of stamping took over with submachine guns,
and so there's a ton of precision machine work, and a lot of man hours went into producing this.
And I think the result kind of speaks for itself, they're gorgeous guns,
as are some of the other contemporaries like the Steyr MP30s and MP34s,
the MP35s, and a number of these other patterns of submachine gun.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed getting a chance to take a look here,
hopefully this will help some of you differentiate between German and Spanish versions of the Erma.
And we're actually going to take this out and do some shooting with it.
So stick around for tomorrow's video where we will have this guy out at the range.
Thanks for watching.