Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
taking a look at an extremely rare
German inter-war submachine gun,
this is a Vollmer VMP Model of 1930.
And this is one of the guns in the developmental
sequence that would eventually lead to the Erma EMP, Erma
which actually saw significant service during World War Two with German forces.
So what happened here is of course after ... World War One
the Germans were barred from arms development, and in particular
barred from the production and use of submachine guns by the Treaty of Versailles.
Part of the limitations on the German Army.
But as the years go by after World War One the influence of the Allied Control Commission,
which is the organisation that was tasked with enforcing some of the arms limitations on Germany,
their presence slowly decreases in Germany.
Initially big parts of Germany are occupied by the French, and ... the Treaty is pretty heavily enforced.
But by the mid-1920s, there are fewer and fewer
Control Commission groups going around actually looking at what's going on.
And the German military starts to covertly work on rearming itself.
And in 1925 they hold the first of a series of
submachine gun trials at the Kummersdorf proving grounds.
Now at this initial trial, basically all of the big names in German arms design are there.
So Louis Stange is there with Rheinmetall.
... It's interesting, there's always like a key designer partnered
with a production company that they worked with.
So Stange would go on to be known for the FG-42 in particular, as well as a whole bunch of other stuff.
Louis Schmeisser is there with the Haenel firm. And then of course Vollmer is there.
And I believe there were some others, but those are the big three.
Now in 1925, the gun that Vollmer had was heavily influenced by the MP18.
It had a barrel shroud on it, it used a snail drum.
I'm not sure if it's the exact same snail drum as the MP18, but he used a snail drum for the gun.
It was distinctive for having a vertical front grip,
something that all of Vollmer's submachine gun designs would have.
But it wasn't good enough to win the competition, in fact nothing at that competition
was deemed good enough to be a winner. This is a competition to drive further development.
And in 1926 Vollmer comes back with a new and improved version,
and by this point he's now being directly funded by the German government.
They are putting money into R&D essentially, it's something that's actually not that uncommon.
And Vollmer was doing work in things other than just submachine guns,
he was doing work in light and heavy machine guns as well.
He came up with a disintegrating feed device for German belt-fed guns.
But today we're looking at his submachine guns.
So in 1926 he made some improvements, in particular he ditches the barrel shroud on the gun.
... The Thompson, one of the very first submachine guns, didn't have a barrel shroud from the beginning.
But a lot of the German ones did, a lot of the other European guns did.
And Vollmer was an early proponent of getting rid of that as not being necessary.
He keeps the vertical grip, keeps the snail drum at that point.
It would be with his 1928 version when he ditches the snail drum
and goes to a more conventional [32] round traditional double-feed box magazine system.
And then in 1930 we have ... this version right here.
And this is very similar to the 1928,
but he has also now added a self-contained recoil spring system.
So this gun is just progressively getting a little bit better
every time Vollmer comes back and reworks it.
So let's take a closer look at exactly what he had in the 1930 pattern.
Most of the controls here are pretty standard and typical for submachine guns.
This is an open-bolt firing gun, so that's the firing position.
We of course have a horizontal magazine well right there.
With a pretty typical double-feed double-stack [32] round box magazine.
The front sight is actually a very large squared-off post.
In this case we have a tangent leaf rear sight graduated out to all of 800 metres.
Sights were available in a variety of different styles,
so you could get a leaf like this or you could get multiple flip-up notches.
That was up to the customer's request,
that's something that's pretty easy for the company to do in different ways.
The magazine release is on the bottom of the mag well, right there.
We have a fairly heavy profile fluted barrel, although it tapers down quite a bit to the muzzle.
The only real marking here is on the very back of the receiver,
and that's VMP (Vollmer
That serial number is repeated all over the gun. So our bolt there is 810.
The magazine well is 810.
The barrel has some commercial German proofs on the top.
And on the bottom, barrel and receiver there are both serialised 810.
The firing controls are pretty simple, we have "E" for
And "D" for
And the way this works actually is this is set up with a progressive trigger.
So a short trigger pull,
you can hear it click, ... will release the bolt, fire a single round, and then reset the sear.
In "D" position you can pull the trigger a little further back and hold the sear down.
In the "E" position the trigger is blocked after that initial shot.
So in full-auto, ...
if I pull the trigger just a little bit the bolt will re-catch there.
If I pull it all the way, it will continue to fire until I release the trigger.
This lever in the back is for disassembly, we'll get to that in a moment.
But first, the sneaky hidden thing on this gun is the monopod.
Inside that vertical front grip is a collapsing monopod that just snaps down.
There are two very simple little spring detents here.
You just push that in, and you can collapse the monopod one position or both positions.
Nothing locks it in once it's collapsed, you just grab it and pull it to extend.
Now the practical use of a monopod on an open-bolt submachine gun like this,
especially a monopod right here in the middle of the gun, is of pretty questionable use.
Which is probably why this feature was removed
before they got into mass production of the EMPs, but it's a pretty cool thing.
This is one of those neat sort of features of inter-war submachine guns
when they were spending a lot of money to make things really nicely and put extra features in.
That would go by the wayside once ... "war were declared", so to speak.
Now for disassembly, we're just going to pull this lever back
and the trigger back at the same time.
And I can then take the entire barrel assembly and rotate it about 60 degrees counter-clockwise,
and then this just slides out as a unit.
The stock assembly here is really quite simple.
You can see the sear right there, when I pull the trigger it drops down.
In full-auto if I pull the trigger a bit more, it drops down completely out of the way.
There's the top of our collapsing monopod.
Going back to the barrel assembly, I can then pull the bolt assembly out of the barrel assembly.
So that's completely stripped here. This is a machined tube receiver.
The magazine well is slid on over it and then held in place, the barrel is threaded in here.
That's all you've got going on there.
We have an ejector fixed in position right there.
And then we have the self-contained recoil spring system of the Model 1930.
This would carry over into the EMP as well.
And it's kind of interesting that there is a bit of a debate in particularly nerdy scholarly circles
about who actually came up with this concept, because both Vollmer and Schmeisser used it.
Now it appears Vollmer was the first to actually
put it into production, in this particular gun in fact.
Schmeisser would have it appear a few years later in one of his guns,
but he actually patented it, and his patent was published in [1931].
So he actually submitted the patent in '28 ... and it was published in 1931.
There's no specific direct proof, but it appears that
Vollmer and Schmeisser each independently came up with this system
and apparently came to some agreement about using it.
There doesn't appear to have been a big fight between them over it.
At any rate, I can further disassemble the bolt by pulling out this locking screw.
And then I can unscrew the front half of the bolt assembly.
Oop, there we go.
Once this is apart, we have the spring right there.
The spring runs onto a removable firing pin.
So this ... has a fixed firing pin in practice, but it is a separate part, right there.
And then the housing tube has a little collar on it, so it'll slide out the front of the bolt
which can only happen once the bolt head has been taken off.
So this is just a hollow tube. That's the sear surface that the sear holds onto when the bolt is cocked.
We've got our extractor up on top here, a little slot for the ejector.
Hole for the firing pin. German commercial proof mark there.
There you go, there are the bolt components of the VMP 1930.
And in fact there are all of the components of a field-stripped Vollmer VMP 1930.
After 1930 Heinrich Vollmer's government funding supply was shut off.
There are a couple of reasons given, the ones that make the most sense are:
one, by that point his company really was successful and self-sustaining.
He didn't need the government money just to keep operating.
And two, the Great Depression hit.
The Great Depression of course was a major impact on everyone throughout the world really.
But in particular the German government, which hadn't really had a ton of spare money
to begin with in the 1920s, has even less once the Great Depression hits.
And there are things that they need to spend that money on
more importantly than speculative small arms research.
So the Vollmer submachine guns were, as I said, a self-sustaining product by that point.
This did go into serial production. There were about 400 of these made apparently,
with most of them going on contract to Bulgaria.
Then the design would continue to be iterated a bit more,
and it would go into production with Erma in Erfurt as the EMP submachine gun.
And those, as I said, ... saw service in World War Two, they were made much larger numbers than the VMP.
This is a registered, fully transferable example of the VMP 1930.
It is extremely rare as such, it's the only one I know of in the country.
It might actually be the only one in the country, there are very few of these floating around.
So it was very cool to get a chance to look at this one. It's a beautiful example of the gun too,
not just transferable, but in ... beautiful condition.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.