Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today courtesy of Legacy Collectibles
looking at a couple interesting pieces of Walther history.
Now what makes these interesting is that these are all guns
that were taken from the Walther factory by American GIs
when they captured the place. And I think there's some really interesting...
Just the story of how this happened to me it's pretty interesting.
So the town is of course Zella-Mehlis in Thuringia,
and ... the first US units to set foot in the town
were the 11th Armored Division and the 90th Infantry Division.
And they entered Zella-Mehlis on April 4th 1945 and they would spend,
you know, different elements came and went, but they spent about a week there before they continued moving forward.
These were front line combat troops who were pushing towards Berlin, and they would be followed by
... like occupation support backup troops. But they had close to a week when they were in Zella-Mehlis and
of course the Walther factory was a well-known institution.
It was a major prize for the army to capture, and they knew that there were going to be guns there. And so
when the army formally arrived after the town had been secured, they pretty well locked down the factory.
They inventoried the guns, confiscated them, and at that point they took something like 1,600 P38s out of the factory,
4,600 PPs and PPKs. There were Sturmgewehrs in various stages of assembly.
There were like 2,200 sniper rifles in the Walther factory at that point.
And these guns were pretty much put under military lock and key and carted off to be formally handled.
However, before that happened there was a lot of opportunity for individual soldiers to kind of wander through the factory
and get themselves some souvenirs, which American soldiers are really good at.
In particular non-commissioned officers, guys who are in positions of command with the small units that were initially in the town,
Sergeants, lieutenants, they were in positions of command such that they could walk in and just decide, "I'm gonna take that, now it's mine."
In a way that you know your typical private maybe would have had a more difficult time doing.
And these guys brought back a bunch of guns. And they range from guns that were basically in shipping crates ready to go out,
to guns that were assembled ... in the factory after occupation by captured,
well, liberated foreign labourers, by German workers, by American soldiers themselves.
So, as I said, we have three examples of these guns, and I think it'll be cool to take a closer look
at what makes these different from each other. And what makes them
different from kind of a standard production version of the same pistol.
So first up is a P38. Now this is a standard typical military production P38, except
it's from the very end of the war because we're talking about April 1945 here. So there are a few discrepancies.
If we take a look at the markings it has a "byf" 44 slide, byf was actually a code for Mauser.
So this is a Mauser slide that was shipped to the Walther factory.
They did this with a number of different factory parts in an effort to maintain production,
you know, the parts that Walther couldn't make they'd ship in from other factories.
Or, you know, if they had overflow, do whatever they can to try and maintain maximum production.
The frame here, it's a little harder to see but it has an "ac" code,
so that is Walther and a Waffenamt proof mark there. However, there's no serial number on this gun.
So this would have been not quite ready to actually ship out, not quite all the way through the production process.
But that's really exemplary of the sort of guns that US troops were able to walk in and just kind of pick up out of boxes or off of work benches.
If we look on the right side of the slide you can see that there is one Waffenamt and one proof mark there.
This gun is missing its final firing proof. So it was ... built, but it hadn't gone through the actual proof firing.
When that had happened it would have gotten its third proof mark, and that's
when it would have gotten serialised and formally accepted for military service.
So there's one other actually really cool little piece of information that came out of some of the investigation into the guns
... that were taken as souvenirs from the Walther factory, and that is the use of "dov" marked slides.
This was Czech production and there had always been kind of this debate as to whether they were ever actually used
or what happened to them because
at the most only 100 or 200 of those ... slides were produced, just a short run thing.
Well, it turns out one of the 11th Armored guys actually
he grabbed a pistol out of one of the shipping crates when he was in the factory at the beginning of April
and it turned up later on the collector market, still his, with a dov slide, and it's this really cool element of
... a researcher being able to talk to the literal individual who picked this gun up from the Walther factory,
and had never altered it since, and being able to prove that yes, in fact those Czech slides came to Walther and were put into production there.
Along the same sort of lines we have a very late production Walther PP here.
Now these were in production basically right up until the end of the war
because these were used by the German Army, as opposed to just the police.
Production of these went to the serial number range at 397,000. This one has a slide of high 393,000
and a mismatched frame that's in the low 394,000. This is a gun that would have been taken as parts,
probably an assembled frame and an assembled slide, and matched together and taken as a souvenir
by one of the GIs in that early wave of occupation troops.
Or I suppose, being Americans everything that we occupy is liberated,
so we'll call them liberation troops that came in in early April.
Late in the war there were a bunch of measures that had been taken to simplify and expedite
production of these guns, as with everything else that the Germans were manufacturing.
And that included getting rid of the slide markings, so we just have a still somewhat rough plain slide surface there.
Just as a comparison, here's what a very early production Walther PP looked like.
These have this gorgeous high polished blue finish, and you can see a fairly elaborate slide marking there.
And that has all gone by the wayside. The original plastic grips were at the very end of the war replaced by wood,
because even things like plastic mouldings were getting to be difficult to do.
And everything about this gun ... it's cruder. It's not as finally finished as the pre-war examples.
So that's your change in production economy over the course of the war.
The proof marks on a PP are twofold, there's one on the slide and one on the frame.
Now these are crown N because this is a very early pre-war gun.
By the time the war was underway there would have been an eagle N proof mark.
However, as you can see there are none on this pistol, and that's because again,
this was assembled from a couple of major ... components in the factory to be taken as a souvenir.
So we would expect a pair of eagle N proof marks on the slide and frame right there.
Last but not least, we have perhaps the most interesting of these which is a PPK that is just a real mishmash of odd parts.
This is the sort of thing that was made by scavenging one of this and one of that from different bins in the factory.
So we have no markings on it on this side at all. There is a Dural, which is an aluminum alloy, frame.
Now they had made Dural frames on and off for various contracts, some for the police, some for the commercial market.
They didn't hold up as well as the full steel frames, but they were out there.
So this is a Dural frame that was left over for some reason or other. When you're in a factory situation
that sort of thing happens. You have parts overruns, you have a part that doesn't meet
a spec of some sort but isn't totally garbage, and things get put in bins.
And when the war is over and the Americans are wandering around the factory offering, you know,
packs of cigarettes to a factory worker who can put together a gun for them. This is the sort of thing that results.
We do have one marking here.
This is not a standard factory marking and we don't know exactly what this indicates.
It could have been added after the gun left the factory, you know, as a need for a serial number for some sort of registration.
It could have been added at the factory. It could have been something as simple as
the GI who wanted this gun figured he couldn't get Bring Back papers, you know,
War Trophy papers for it if he didn't have a serial number to write down, so he had a serial number put on it.
But ultimately, we don't know. It's just an odd marking on the gun.
Looking at some of the other unusual elements. We have grey coloured grip and magazine floorplate, which is quite scarce.
These were used only for a short period of time,
and again the sort of thing that there would have been some leftovers laying around in a bin in the factory somewhere.
And they were used on this gun.
The extractor is nicely fire blued, which suggests that it was made quite early, if not pre-war.
And again survived for some reason. You'll notice parts like the hammer and the rear sight are blued.
You know, this is not a gun that came out of a regular production line. In fact, the safety lever is engraved.
... I know I'm repeating myself now, but this is just a mishmash of various parts put together
as a souvenir gun for a GI who had access to the factory.
Again for comparisons sake here's a really nice condition pre-war very early production PPK.
We have the same sort of nice ornate slide marking as on the PP.
The early brown sort of grips and this beautiful high polish blue.
Of course it's got the same sort of proof marks and serial number as the production PP.
None of which exists on this factory gun.
This is just kind of a cool piece that I figured I'd throw in here because it's neat.
A piece of a Walther ... glass display thing
that was taken by another one of the soldiers as a souvenir from the factory at this same time.
... His descendants probably wished that he'd taken like a party leader PPK.
That would have been worth a little bit more than a piece of broken glass, but still.
It's just you know indicative of the souvenir mindset, and some of the interesting
and unusual stuff that came back with some of the American soldiers.
So to me this sort of little vignette, the occupation of the Walther factory and what happened there
and how that turns into souvenirs that come back to the US. I think that's a very cool little special piece of history there.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed getting a chance to take a look at these examples.
I'd like to thank Legacy Collectibles for giving me access to them.
They specialise in exactly this sort of thing, World War Two German small arms. So if you're interested,
you can check out their website. You can also check out their YouTube channel,
because they have one of those and they have a bunch of interesting short little vignette sort of videos on
interesting, mostly German, World War Two small arms and some of the history that surrounds them.
So I'll have a link to their channel in the description text below.
Thanks for watching.