Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at
the Royal Army Museum in Brussels,
part of the War Heritage Institute of Belgium.
And we are taking a look at some of the really interesting
firearms from their reference collection.
Today we have a ZfG38.
This is a really ... unusual piece of firearm, sort of.
So these were made by Haenel in Germany in 1939.
The Allies didn't really find out about them until
basically the occupation of Germany, when Allied troops started overrunning parts of Germany.
And when US soldiers found these things,
and British soldiers, and presumably Russian soldiers too,
they assumed, for obvious reasons, that this was some sort of booby trap weapon.
I mean, ... the trigger on here is essentially a tripwire trigger.
It's got three gigantic bipod feet that you nail down into the ground to lock it in place.
And this one has a little 25 round magazine in it,
but these also were equipped with 70 round magazines.
And so to the Allies this was clearly
some sort of last-ditch hold-out booby-trap nefarious sort of gadget.
The truth is completely different. The truth is these were manufactured in 1939,
long before the Germans had any plan of booby trapping anything or retreating from anywhere.
And these were designed and used as a training aid.
So the idea is, to have a ... really good realistic training field
you need to have return fire at the troops who are doing training.
It's one thing to run around and shoot at targets and such,
but it doesn't do as much to simulate the stress
or potential problems of combat if nothing's actually shooting back at you.
At the same time you don't actually want live ammo coming back at your training guys and killing them.
And so what Haenel did was build a blank-firing remotely-triggered machine gun.
And that is this, the
Which is literally designed to be hammered into the ground,
and to represent an enemy machine gun emplacement
that can be fired at a specific determined time during an exercise.
So when troops get to a certain point,
an instructor, or a referee sort of person, can yank on a tripwire for one of these.
Or you could actually just set up the tripwire and have it as a simulated ambush.
These only fire blank ammunition.
They were originally designed for the German 1933 pattern wood bullet blank ammunition.
And they actually made two versions: they made this, the infantry/ground version,
and they also made a tank version to go into tanks.
So really an interesting, ... like, I don't know that there were that many
British or American ranges that had return fire simulators like this.
So let's take a closer look at it, let me show you how this works internally.
It is a beast, this thing weighs 22 pounds,
which is quite a lot for a gun that doesn't actually put out a projectile.
These are very helpfully marked right on their receiver tube,
Zf. Ger. (
Serial number, this one's right in the middle of production.
We have Haenel's marking, the date.
The tank versions of these will actually be marked "Pz.Kpfwg."
and "Nachb." for
The magazine on here looks very much like an MG 13 magazine.
In fact these magazines can be used in an MG 13, but not vice versa.
So just a basic 25 round mag.
You do occasionally see the magazines out there.
If we look on the underside of the gun, we have our bolt handle.
These things fire from an open bolt, ... so they'll fire from that position.
Notice that back here (marked with an "S") we have a submachine gun style of safety notch.
So you can lock the bolt back like that to keep it locked in the safe position.
And then the trigger is built into this mechanism here.
And this is set up to be fired by a pull wire or a trip wire,
either from the front or from the back.
So you can push this in from either side, ...
like that, to release (there we go) to release the bolt and fire the thing.
This is only usable with blank ammunition.
It is a simple unlocked system. The bolt ... weighs less than a pound, it's like 360 grams.
This is kind of like the Japanese blank-firing training machine guns
where if you put live ammunition into this thing it will basically just explode and destroy itself.
We can go ahead and disassemble it by just unscrewing the back.
There we go. So there's our receiver end cap.
And then we've got a very long recoil spring.
And we've got this spring guide from the back.
And then we've got this spring guide that goes in the front
that includes a fixed firing pin, ...
and the bolt itself.
So the charging handle is fixed to the bolt, we have an extractor there.
No locking lugs of any kind. A really quite lightweight bolt.
And this fits on there when it's actually in the gun.
The spring nests into that.
And then the other guide tube goes on the back.
So when this is actually being fired, these two compress into each other like so.
We can also take off the barrel.
The front end of this tube is also just threaded.
There we go. Most of the barrels for these things were just plain hollow tube
that was profiled at the back to ensure that it would feed properly.
This one, although you can't really see it on camera (maybe you can there),
this one is actually a worn out and reused machine gun barrel, as were some.
I can tell that because it actually has rifling in it.
Now the muzzle device on this looks like it was something
that was intended for crimped blanks, not wood bullet blanks.
The other muzzle devices that I'm aware of
have an 8mm exit orifice with shredder teeth in it
to ... make sure that the wooden bullet has been destroyed
and isn't going to go downrange and hit somebody.
By the way, I have to really thank German researcher Michael Heidler
for everything that he has discovered about these guns.
He actually wrote an article about these that I published on Forgotten Weapons
a couple of years ago, and that's where I'm getting my information on this.
At any rate, slightly different muzzle device here.
But the infantry version of the ZfG38 used this style of little short 8 inch barrel.
The tank versions had substantially longer barrels.
Also unique to the infantry version was this front bipod.
These legs can swing up, but when they're down you've got these holes
so that you can stake the thing solidly into the ground.
We have these holes front and back.
Here's the one on the back, and this is actually bevelled on both sides.
And this is so that
you can run your trigger wire from the actual trigger straight back to this,
and then it can go off at an angle in whatever direction it needs to.
And when the wire is pulled on you will get a straight linear pull
backwards on the trigger so that it works properly.
And then we've also got this rear single leg. Again with a big hole in it to stake it down.
And that ... can fold up and under the gun.
This whole thing, by the way, is heavy because all of the parts are really thick.
You can see how thick these things are.
The tube itself is 0.2 inch wall thickness, that's like a 5mm wall thickness,
it's a really heavy-duty piece of steel tube.
There it is, there's all the parts of the ZfG38 taken apart.
Total production of these, ... between the tank and the infantry versions,
was 6,103 - so actually quite a lot of them.
And they were all manufactured in 1939 before the war began.
Very few of them survive today,
probably because who would keep one? This doesn't make a very good souvenir.
It's bulky, it's stupidly heavy for what it is.
And it's not actually any sort of useful thing, like a German pistol or rifle might be.
So very few of them went anywhere as souvenirs.
They didn't get saved after the war because they weren't really all that useful any more.
And so I suspect the vast majority of them were just scrapped and destroyed at some point.
It was really cool to find this one down in the reserve collection
here at the Belgian Royal Army Museum.
They ... don't have this out on display, but they have a whole bunch of other
cool World War One and World War Two and post-World War Two stuff on display.
Uniforms, small arms, an entire hall of technical development
showing the manufacture of individual components,
like every individual component of some early pattern rifles, there's a ton of cool stuff here.
So if you ever have the chance, if you're in Brussels,
definitely take some time and stop by and check out the museum.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.