Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Rock Island
Auction Company taking a look at some of the guns
that they are going to be selling in their upcoming
September of 2017 Premier Auction.
And today we have not one, but two
MP35 submachine guns.
This is another of those submachine guns that were used by German forces
during World War Two, but never actually formally adopted by the Wehrmacht.
The Wehrmacht basically used the MP38 and the MP40
... and they used all of the production of those guns that was available.
And that left a lot of other groups that weren't directly associated with the army,
like various police and security organisations, and most notably the SS,
those guys had to get their firearms from somewhere else.
And so they tended to buy in relatively small batches from smaller-scale manufacturers.
And the MP35 is a perfect example of that.
So the background on this thing is that it was designed by Theodore Emil Bergmann.
... Helpfully, Theodore E. Bergmann is the son of Theodore Bergmann, of the same name.
Theodore Bergmann senior was the one who was involved with, say, the Bergmann pistols.
Where Emil (we'll just call him Emil because it's easier)
he was the son, he kind of broke off and worked on his own.
... He didn't have his own factory production facility, but he did some designing of his own.
And when the German army started doing submachine gun trials in the early 1930s,
he was one of the guys that submitted a design, and this is basically what he submitted.
... The initial one was the 1932 version, it was the BMP and BMK32.
So that was Bergmann Machine Pistol and Bergmann Machine Carbine,
because he had both a short barrel and a long barrelled version of it.
And at that point he was actually contracting the manufacture of the guns
out to Schultz & Larsen up in Denmark.
Long-time viewers of the channel will recognise Schultz & Larsen
from a previous bolt-action ... rifle video we did on one of their designs.
Anyway, by 1934
he'd found someone better to do his construction for him, and that was down in Germany.
The Walther Company actually manufactured these guns as the 1934 model of these guns,
which had a few improvements and was typically a short-barrelled version like this.
And Walther was actually able to sell these to a bunch of different countries.
So the early Danish version had actually been adopted by Danes, and I believe also the Swedes.
The Danes adopted it in 9mm Bergmann
to go with their 1910 and 1921 model Bergmann pistols, convenient. ...
And then the MP34 version, ... a bunch of them were sold to China,
a number of Latin American countries, Ethiopia actually bought Bergmann MP34s.
It's kind of cool, you'll find their little rampant Lion of Judah ... marking on Ethiopian MP34s.
And then there were a few final modifications made and this turned it into the MP35.
... And it was sold commercially by Walther under that name.
Now once World War Two started ... someone in the German government
(I'm not clear on exactly who), decided that they needed to manufacture MP35s.
And in this case primarily for the SS and also for some police units.
And so they specifically requested that a company called Junker & Ruh
(r-u-h, I think that's how you pronounce it),
be given a licence to manufacture these guns, and they were.
And from 1940 until 1945 this company manufactured the MP35/I.
And what we have here today to take a look at are actually a pre-war gun,
and a 1943 wartime production gun.
And this '43 one is actually marked "RFV", for I believe the Reichs Finance Ministry.
One of the really distinctive elements of the MP35
is that it has a magazine mounted on the right side of the gun.
It's far more typical for side-mounted submachine gun mags to be on the left.
The idea is that if you are shooting right-handed you get to hold the gun in your right hand.
And then you can change the magazine with your left hand, and it's convenient.
Now Bergmann chose to do this the opposite direction.
And there is, as far as I've found, zero actual documentation on why he made that decision.
So, I will give you three possible speculative reasons.
Number one is maybe he was left-handed and he just wanted it to work well for him.
I suspect that's probably not the case.
Number two would be that perhaps he was the sort of guy
who had a different opinion on the best way to use a submachine gun.
And perhaps he thought that because these guns are relatively forward heavy,
you should maintain a grip on the gun with your support hand,
and change the magazine with your right hand.
One other legit potential reason is that with the magazine feeding from the right,
a right-handed shooter will have an easy view into the ejection port.
This means that if there are any potential malfunctions or problems,
it's easier for the shooter to be able to see exactly what's going on.
Some people will say that having the gun eject out the left will cause problems for a right hander.
I can tell you as a person who shoots a lot of guns that are set up the opposite
(ejecting out the right when I'm shooting them left handed),
that virtually never causes any problems at all.
Certainly not with guns like this that eject pretty much straight out the action.
The only time it can be an issue is something that ejects
very sharply backwards, which is not a submachine gun.
Now a quick look at markings before we start disassembly.
The very early 1932 guns will have
Danish manufacturing markings on them: Schultz & Larsen in Otterup, Denmark.
I don't have one of those to show you, what I do have is one of the wartime guns.
Now the early 1932 guns that were made in Denmark will have
(I believe up here on the back of the receiver),
they'll have some markings indicating their Danish manufacture.
I don't have one of those to show you, but I do have a German wartime production one.
And on that we have a pretty typical German-style set of wartime markings.
So the designation of the gun is MP35/I.
And then we have our three letter manufacturer code, which in this case is "ajt".
And that is the subcontractor that was manufacturing these.
Then 43 is the date of production, and this "1790 d" is the serial number.
So this is a relatively late production gun,
"d" would indicate that there were three series of 10,000 before this.
So 1790 d is the equivalent of 31,790 in total production.
And then it's duplicated here because this is part of the bolt and a separate part.
Which we will now take apart.
OK, I lied, actually there are a couple of things I need to show you first.
One is the safety lever, which is here on the left side of the receiver.
And it's this big long throw of a lever.
Backward is "F" for fire, and forward is "S" for safe.
This is the disassembly lever, which we will get to in just a moment.
And then the select fire mechanism ...
is actually built into the trigger.
So this is sort of a progressive trigger, but not quite.
The way this works is if you just pull the trigger you have semi-auto fire.
And you can ... hear the disconnector tripping in there.
If you want full-auto what you have to do is depress this lever,
and then you can pull the trigger all the way back for fully automatic.
However, if you don't touch this lever, if you just push back on the trigger, it stops here.
So one of the potential problems with a progressive trigger
(which is to say a short pull is semi, and a long pull is full-auto)
one of the potential problems is that under stress most people are
probably just going to yank on the trigger and end up firing full-auto, even if they didn't intend to.
Well, with this trigger design it's a little bit harder to do that.
Because no matter how hard you pull at this point, you are only getting one shot.
You have to bring your finger down and engage this bottom lever as well in order to fire full-auto.
Now, the ... upside is that it makes it a little bit more secure to fire semi-auto under stress.
The downside is it's kind of a pain to deal with full-auto fire.
That's a little bit awkward to do, you have to kind of mess with your trigger finger down at the bottom.
And it kind of likes to pinch your finger when you do it.
But I suppose that's the trade-off there.
The sights on the MP35 are pretty typical,
we have a tangent leaf sight there out to 1,000 metres ...
coupled with a big barleycorn-style front post.
And we actually have a built-in sort of muzzle brake chamber, with two vents on the top.
Now the cocking mechanism is also rather unusual, and harkens kind of ... forward to the G41.
The idea here is that this duplicates the manual of arms of a bolt-action rifle.
So in order to charge this weapon you rotate this handle vertical,
pull it back like a bolt, and then push it forward and rotate it back down.
And we now have the bolt locked open.
On the one hand this is kind of goofy, in that it's a really complex workaround
instead of just having a handle on the side that you can pull to charge the gun.
The idea that you would need this to work the same way as a bolt-action
or else people wouldn't understand how to use it, I think that's pretty far-fetched.
And I think that idea is supported by the fact that basically nobody else did this
except for the MP35 and the Mauser version of the Gewehr 41,
where it was something specifically requested by the German military.
Who, by the way, never requested it again on anything after that.
However there are some benefits to this.
Because there's no charging handle anywhere else, there's no open slot in the receiver to let dirt in.
And in this way it's kind of similar to the Finnish m/31 Suomi,
which had ... the handle in the same place, it was just a straight pull handle,
but the open slot in the receiver was hidden underneath the wood
and thus not subject to dirt getting in.
Similarly with this the opening is back here,
and it's only open when you're actually operating the action.
Once you start shooting, this is locked in place and doesn't move, that's totally non-reciprocating.
So you actually have a pretty hermetically sealed submachine gun here, and that's a good thing.
Now disassembly is pretty easy, all we have to do is open this bolt all the way,
and then push down on this disassembly lever ... right here.
And then I can pull the bolt, a rather long, heavy bolt assembly, all the way out the back of the gun.
Now before I take this apart any further I want to show you one of
the other interesting features that it has, and that is this little arm right here.
When the bolt closes, this actually hits on a protrusion in the receiver
and it gets cammed backwards.
And that is what actually causes the firing pin to protrude.
So this is a pretty effective safety. If the bolt isn't closing fast enough,
and [doesn't] strike the breech face completely, the gun won't fire.
So if you only pull the bolt back a short distance and let it go,
there's a spring in here that's fairly stout.
And while this will hit, it won't hit with enough energy
to actually push the firing pin far enough through to set off a primer.
So that can help protect you from the ... bolt somehow coming backwards
stripping a cartridge, and then going forward and maybe firing it.
It probably won't happen with this design.
This also means that until the bolt has actually hit the breech face
the firing pin isn't protruding out the front.
So if you have a cartridge that jams while it's trying to feed,
you really have no danger of it firing out of battery, because the firing pin here won't let it.
Now we can take this apart a little further by pushing the handle in,
rotating it ... this direction, there we go.
And we can disconnect this handle assembly
from the spring, and the firing pin, and the bolt body itself.
The handle assembly has this arrow helpfully engraved in it,
so that in case you forget which way the bolt has to go to close, well, it's that way.
And then if we look at the bolt body and the firing pin
you'll see that the firing pin has this big open cutout,
which is what interacts with this camming lever in the bolt body.
So this lever - this is the firing setup,
but I can rotate it around so you can see this is the piece that's normally sitting in there.
And then, when I push on this end, that cams this whole thing forward
against this firing pin spring and forces this to protrude.
So that's about it for mechanical functioning of the bolt.
The rest of this material is just here to give it mass,
which brings the rate of fire to about 650 rounds per minute.
Which is a pretty good middle ground for a 9mm open-bolt submachine gun.
One last thing I should point out.
Magazines, according to the literature, were made in 24 and 32 round varieties.
We have a 32 rounder here.
And then ... one of these two guns actually comes with this,
which appears to be a legit 20 round magazine.
So this doesn't look like it's something anyone cut down,
and it is marked at 10, 15, and 20 rounds. So it seems authentic to me.
It may have come out of a different contract for these guns.
That's one of the things with these early commercially sold submachine guns,
is that they were often made in a wide variety of options for different customers.
In fact in addition to 9 Parabellum,
the MP35 was also manufactured in 9 Bergmann (9x23, aka 9 Largo).
It was also manufactured in 7.63 Mauser, in 9x25 Mauser Export, and even in .45 ACP.
So there are examples of those magazines, and also those guns, floating around in various places.
In total about 40,000 of these were manufactured by the end of World War Two.
And of course of the wartime production ones
the vast majority were used by the SS and various German police organisations,
just like this one that you saw up close.
Pretty cool to have two of them here, they're pretty rare guns to find these days,
as are most of ... this period of submachine gun.
They just weren't manufactured in very large quantity,
and not a whole lot of them came back to the US after World War Two.
So if you would like to have either one of these,
or perhaps if you're the sort of person who needs to have them both,
take a look at the description text below this video.
You'll find links there to Rock Island's catalogue pages for both of these examples.
Those pages will include Rock Island's pictures,
description, price estimates, all that sort of good stuff.
And you can place bids either here at the auction live September 8th through 10th,
or online, or through the phone.
Thanks for watching.