When Mauser began development of the HSc pistol, it was intended to be a pair of guns - a simple blowback gun in .32 or .380 caliber for civilian and police use and a larger locked-breech type in 9x19mm for military use. Mauser had tried this before with their 1910 pocket pistol, but in that effort they tried to make both sizes blowback, which did not work well. This time, the designer - Alex Seidel; later a founder of H&K - looked at what technology Mauser owned, and chose Josef Nickl's rotating barrel patent to use in the 9x19 version of the HSc.

This pistol is number V1001, the very first prototype HSc, and it's one of the rotating barrel locked breech guns. Ultimately this gun suffered the same fate as the Mauser 1909; it was not accepted by the military, and saw no commercial production. The German military would decide that it required an exposed barrel, which the HSc did not have. Mauser would develop the HSv for military trials, but it would be defeated by the Walther HP, which was adopted as the P38.