Today we are in H&K's Grey Room in Virginia, taking a look at the XM-8 program. The rifle evolved form the kinetic energy carbine portion of the doomed XM29/OICW program, and eventually became the G36 rifle. In between those two, however, it was the XM-8, and it came close to adoption by the US m...

Larry Vickers has the closest thing most any of us will ever have to a true XM-8 rifle, and has more than a little trigger time on the original XM-8 rifles. So, I asked him to explain what the rifle was and why it failed to become the new American service rifle. It's a fascinating story that will...

Today we are looking at two suppressed CZ-27 pistols, one Polish and one German. The Polish one was issued by the Ministry of Public Security, an agency which only existed from 1945 until 1954. It uses an aluminum suppressor with 5 baffles and 5 rubber wipes, threaded onto an extended barrel. It ...

After the Mp44/StG44 Sturmgewehr was starting to see substantial production and field use, the German military and the Mauser company began working on a way to simplify production of the weapon. The design for the Gerät 06H actually began with the Gerät 03, an attempt to make a roller-locked G43 ...

The Mauser Karabiner 98k began production as an excellent quality rifle, with every nuance of fine fit and finish one would have expected form the Mauser company. World War Two had barely begun by the time a few compromises began to be made to maintain production, however - and by the end of the ...

This 4mm “Zimmerstutzen” conversion kit was patented by one Karl Weiss in 1921, and produced by the RWS company in Germany. Versions were made for several different types of pistol, but the Mauser 1914 was a particularly suitable base thanks to its very easy removed barrel. The kit consists of a ...

Korth is a boutique firearms manufacturer in Germany generally known for their very fine and very expensive revolvers. In 2015, they decided to introduce an automatic pistol as well, which they called the PRS. It is a combination of a 1911 frame and a roller-delayed, fixed barrel slide assembly. ...

The 5cm 5CM Leichter Granatwerfer 36 was the standard German light infantry mortar going into World War Two. It was designed by Rheinmetall-Borsig in the mid 1930s and adopted in 1936. It fired a 0.9kg / 2 pound mortar bomb with a range of up to 550 meters. In theory, it occupied the same role as...

In the aftermath of World War One, every military force immediately began to assess what they thought was most important to improve in their arsenals for the next war. For Germany, one thing they felt lacking was a light howitzer that could be organic to infantry units, mobile enough to remain wi...

Some collectors hunt for firearms which look perfectly new form the factory, and others prefer arms that show lots of evidence of use and history. Well, this is definitely one of the latter type - this 1943 production MP40 submachine gun has a terrible finish, most likely as a result of being bur...

This pistol is one of just a couple surviving from a development project run by Walther in the mid to late 1930s. The goal was to produce a compact sidearm for pilots and officers using a more potent cartridge than the .32ACP or .380. To do this, Walther split the dimensional difference on case l...

The H&K SR9 was a the version of the H&K G3/91 designed to comply with (or avoid, if you prefer) the Bush Sr. 1989 import ban on “assault weapons”. About 4,000 of these were imported between 1990 and 1998, and they featured a bare muzzle and plastic thumbhole stock and handguard. The first 1000 o...

The German military first encountered American Bazookas in Tunisia in 1943, and quickly put in place a program to copy and improve on the design. At that point, the latest German antitank weapons was the Raketenwerfer 43 “Puppchen”, which was a locked-breech rocket launcher built on a carriage li...

When the German Army wanted a new semiauto service rifle in 1941, it received submissions from two companies; Walther and Mauser. Walther’s design didn’t strictly meet the criteria set forth, but it was clearly the better rifle and would eventually win the competition. This involved conducting tr...

These two Gewehr 98 rifles were converted by the Mauser factory to be used as naval line-throwing rifles. The exact nature of the line and lead projectiles is not clear, but they are clearly original military conversions and came form the Geoffrey Sturgess collection. Entirely new stocks were mad...

Police in inter-war Germany used a variety of submachine guns, and sometimes added a distinctive extra safety mechanism to them. No patent or documentation ha been uncovered (that I am aware of, anyway), but the exact same device is found on gun from the MP18,I through the MP40, including the MP3...

In the aftermath of World War One, the Treaty of Versailles strictly limited the number of machine guns that the German military could keep in inventory. The main type that the Germans chose to keep was the MG08/15 (although a substantial number of MG08 guns were kept as well). Through the 1920s ...

Heckler & Koch's "Operational Briefcase" is a clever system for covert carry of a submachine gun without the need to conceal such a large type of weapon under bulky clothing. By putting the gun into a briefcase, they gave security personnel a way to blend right into the business and executive typ...

The OICW - Objective Individual Combat Weapon - was part of a program in the 1980s and 1990s to replace the whole lineup of uS small arms with a consolidated group of new high-tech ones. The M4, M16, and M203 would be replaced by the OICW, the M240, M2, and Mk 19 would be replaced by the Objectiv...

Developed in the 1980s in response to a need for new West German police sidearms, the H&K P7 is one of the most mechanically unusual pistols to have been commercially successful in recent decades. It incorporates a number of features which are rather polarizing; brilliantly innovative to some, an...

One of Paul Mauser's lifelong projects was the design of a semiautomatic rifle for the German military. He would go through a multitude of different designs searching for something that would be sufficiently reliable, durable, and simple - and ultimately he would never fulfill the goal. But his e...

When the German military first requested rifles in the new 8x33mm Kurz cartridge, there were two companies that provided designs. One was Haenel, who would eventually win the competition. The other was Walther, who submitted this rifle - the MKb-42(W). Where the Haenel gun fired from an open bolt...

The hype? Yeah, it's real. The FG42 is the nicest full-auto full-power rifle I have yet fired. This is a recut of a previous video that YouTube decided to squash.

Gustloff was a large industrial concern in Germany which made many different weapons for the military. In addition to these, its attempted to market a small-caliber pistol for police or SS use. This pistol used an alloy frame (with steel inserts for durability in crucial areas) and steel slide, w...