Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
with a pair of Krieghoff Lugers.
Krieghoff, or more specifically Heinrich Krieghoff,
is one of the small-scale manufacturers
of Luger pistols that always bring a lot of interest
from people who are interested in Luger collecting.
And so I figured we should take a look at
what these things are, who was Heinrich Krieghoff,
and how did he come to make Lugers for the Luftwaffe?
So, the story actually begins in 1886 with his father, a man named Ludwig Krieghoff,
who got together with I believe a British partner by the name of Sempert,
and created the company Sempert & Krieghoff to make arms.
And they got started, and did guns and stuff basically.
Well, Heinrich Krieghoff, his son, was born in 1889.
When he came of age he actually went to Liège, to FN in Belgium,
and apprenticed as a gunmaker. Got his education in that trade.
And eventually came back to Suhl in Germany
and opened his own company, which he also named Krieghoff.
So he created Heinrich Krieghoff Waffenfabrik,
specifically to manufacture military arms, and parts, and military contracts.
So it's important to consider here, we have two Krieghoff companies.
We have Sempert & Krieghoff owned by Ludwig,
and we have Heinrich Krieghoff Waffenfabrik owned by Heinrich.
Now when Ludwig died, Heinrich ended up inheriting a controlling stake
in Sempert & Krieghoff, and maintained ... that company.
So he actually had two companies running at the same time,
Sempert & Krieghoff focused on sporting arms,
Heinrich Krieghoff Waffenfabrik, as the name would imply, focused on military arms.
And it is Heinrich Krieghoff Waffenfabrik that was responsible for these Lugers,
so that's the company that we're going to be focusing on today.
Anyway, through the 1920s and '30s Krieghoff had some business, not a ton,
but he ... subcontracted for parts manufacture, he worked refurbishing guns.
In particular he was a subcontractor for the Simson company,
which was the one German company authorised to manufacture and rebuild military arms
for the German military under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, so during the Weimar era.
Now there are only a couple of sets of Luger tooling that have ever actually been manufactured.
There was a set of Luger tooling made by DWM, who were the original manufacturers.
And there was a set made by the Erfurt Arsenal that manufactured the guns during World War One.
It is that Erfurt set of tooling that went to the Simson Company
after World War One to build new guns to equip the restricted German military.
There would also be a set made by the Swiss,
and there would be one set made by Krieghoff, which we'll get to in a moment.
What happens though is in 1934 the Luftwaffe sort of appears out of nowhere,
(I think it was actually '35), the Luftwaffe bureaucratically ... came into existence.
It had been under the guise of ... a German air sports association that, boof, becomes the air force,
because the Treaty of Versailles had prohibited any German military air force.
So of course they did it anyway, they just kind of hid it under a different name.
Until you get to that point in the mid-30s where Hitler starts
just ignoring the restrictions of Versailles and rearming Germany.
So the Luftwaffe is all of a sudden a thing.
The Luftwaffe needs handguns.
And so in 1934 the Luftwaffe puts out a ... request for 10,000 pistols.
And Heinrich Krieghoff Waffenfabrik bids on this contract,
based on the idea of making Lugers.
And he was doing this using the tooling from Simson, sort of.
He wins the contract by the way.
Now at this point the Simson Luger tooling is basically useless,
it's worn out, it's not good enough for a serious production run.
So Krieghoff uses it as a model for creating his own set of Luger tooling,
and that would be the third set in existence.
There would eventually, by the way, be a fourth set created by the Swiss,
and that's it: only ever four sets of Luger tooling made.
So, Krieghoff in 1934 wins this contract to make 10,000 Luger pistols.
He does this, he makes his own tooling,
... it's hard to believe that he actually made a profit on this.
But that's not necessarily the whole goal for him.
Krieghoff was trying to get ... into more military contracts for the now rearming German military.
And probably, it's hard to say exactly but probably, considered this Luger contract
as a stepping stone more than an end profit goal on its own.
So he makes really good Lugers, he has made a whole brand new set of tooling.
His Lugers are parts interchangeable, which is something the German military was not used to.
They were used to having hand fitting required
if you were going to repair a Luger or swap parts, that sort of thing.
Krieghoffs don't need it, like they're really nicely finished, they're really well made.
And this really impresses the Luftwaffe. And it results, pretty much directly,
in Krieghoff getting a contract to now make MG 15 machine guns for the Luftwaffe.
And Heinrich's plan works very well, the machine gun contract leads to other contracts.
He never does make more than the original first batch of Lugers.
There's basically one production run that results in a lot of parts
that are assembled over the course of the entire war.
We'll touch on the numbers in a moment.
But he moves on to bigger and better things making machine guns.
And by 1945 Krieghoff has, I think, 12 operating manufacturing facilities spread across Europe,
mostly in Germany, but some of them in some of Germany's occupied territories.
And he does fantastically well, like his plan works, pretty cool.
Now, we need to go in and take a look at these two pistols,
and we'll talk about how many of these Lugers were made and when.
But first I want to point out, in a bit of irony,
... at the end of World War Two, Suhl is in the Soviet zone of occupation.
And the Soviets will actually tear down the plant in 1947.
And they of course took all of the Luger tooling out first,
and transported it, ironically, back to Simson,
which is now under the name of the Ernst Thälmann works.
And that tooling goes back to the original Simson factory,
where it's used to produce Lugers for the German Volkspolizei under ... East German rule.
So interesting what happens with ... these sets of tooling.
At any rate, let's take a closer look at the guns themselves.
Krieghoff's original contract was for 10,000 guns,
but he actually manufactured a total of 13,825.
Some of that overrun was for commercial sales.
Some of it was ... to account for production scrap, parts that weren't quite up to tolerance.
And part of it was because he anticipated that there might be
a follow-up request for more guns after the initial delivery.
And in that guess he was correct, there was in fact an additional request by the Luftwaffe.
So the initial contract of 10,000 were delivered between 1935 and 1937, mostly '36 and '37.
The initial 1935 guns used ... "S" as a code for 1935.
Once they hit 1936 they started using actual dates, initially just 36,
and then a full four digit 1936 ... date instead of a code.
So this is a 1936 gun.
All of Krieghoff's guns are marked with their logo and name, Krieghoff of Suhl,
and that HK, and their cool kind of sword and anchor logo.
These don't have quite as many serial numbers as ... the DWM production guns.
But you will find them on the barrel extension there,
and on the bottom of the frame as well,
and on the magazine. It's nice that actually both of these pistols have matching magazines.
You may notice the plastic grips here, and our other pistol has ... black plastic grips on it.
That is something that was adopted later than this by other manufacturers,
but Krieghoff used plastic grips from the very beginning, so that's correct and appropriate.
And because these guns went to the Luftwaffe instead of the regular Army,
they have Luftwaffe [acceptance] marks on them. ...
So it's a little bit of a different style of eagle, this is an LWA2 acceptance mark down in there.
And that's what you will expect to find on a correct Krieghoff pistol.
So that accounts for our first 10,000 guns.
Now there would be another 2,000 that were provided to the Luftwaffe between 1940 and 1944.
The bulk of these were in 1940, and that is what we have here.
So this is a 1940 chamber date,
as you can see there.
The serial number on this is 11167.
And I should have mentioned this on the previous one,
most of these guns - not quite all but most of them - are also
serialised on the barrel, including this and ... our previous 1936 gun.
So frame, barrel, and barrel extension serial numbers here.
And again a matching magazine, which is pretty cool.
And by this point they were using a black plastic grip instead of brown.
Other than that, these guns are totally standard ... Luger pistols.
Krieghoff didn't change anything about the design, he just has slightly different markings,
and frankly, really quite high production values.
Now the pre-war guns are finished a little more nicely than the wartime ones,
just because of the amount of time that they were willing to put into them.
But all the Krieghoff guns are of really quite excellent quality.
And it's important to remember that these parts were manufactured before the war, all of them.
So the surface finish suffers a little bit over the course of the war,
but it's not like they were reducing the standards of parts manufacture
because all of that had already finished by 1937.
Standard magazines for these, nothing different about those.
Now I did mention a total of 13,825 guns, 12,200 of those went to the military,
and then there were 1,625 that were sold on the commercial market.
Because the commercial market for pistols did continue to exist in Germany during World War Two.
There wasn't a lot of it, but there were officers who could buy their own handguns,
party officials could buy handguns,
various other people ... with the right connections could buy handguns.
And there was a little bit of that production that was authorised for the civilian market.
So this did happen.
There are in particular a small number of engraved platinum-plated Krieghoff Lugers
that are actually quite well documented.
And I have a video on one of those that I'll link at the end of this, if you're interested in it.
But in general what we have here are just very nice production wartime P08 Lugers,
with a unique manufacturer's mark on them.
I think it is also important to discuss briefly who used these pistols.
When people hear that, "Ah, these are Lugers for the Luftwaffe."
You think, "Luftwaffe, airplanes, like pilots. You've got German fighting aces flying around with
fancy very nice Lugers in their holsters in case they get shot down, right?"
Well, no, not really actually.
There were a whole wide variety of pistols that were used by the Luftwaffe,
because the Luftwaffe incorporated a whole lot of things beyond fighter aces.
Obviously there are tons of bomber crews, reconnaissance aircraft,
but more importantly the Luftwaffe also incorporated
air defence units, which are ground units. They also of course had paratroopers.
... At the end of the war there would be Luftwaffe infantry detachments
that were just used as plain infantry.
But they legitimately had hundreds of thousands of men
in anti-aircraft batteries on the ground, and those guys also got sidearms often.
If you're in an [anti-aircraft] battery crew, it's
maybe more effective for you to have a handgun than a rifle,
because how likely are you to actually run into enemy soldiers?
And those are the people who tended to get Lugers.
You'll see them a lot with Fallschirmjäger, with paratroopers.
The pilots themselves, the guys you might think about flying around in Messerschmitts,
they tended to prefer a much smaller pistol.
Because the chances were very small that they would actually have any use for a pistol,
and it was way more convenient to have something like a PPK.
So you don't really see these with pilots, or even with flight crews in general.
Probably a few, but most of the time Lugers like this, Krieghoff Lugers,
went to air defence crewmen on the ground.
So, as I said at the beginning, these are quite scarce guns.
Obviously production was pretty limited, and a lot of them were
lost in various ways during World War Two,
and they've always been a very interesting subset for collectors.
So hopefully you enjoyed the video,
learned a little bit about what they are, and why people think they're neat.
Thanks for watching.