The Germans really loved submachine guns, adopting them in the last part of WWI and by WWII had masses of MP38 and MP40 room brooms in service. However, one design that has faded to the background of use is the Bergmann MP-35 and its variants.
Bergmann’s backstory
Theodor Bergmann, born in Bavaria in 1850, started a company to make bicycles and later early automobiles that bore his name in the factory town of Suhl.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Later, in 1893, his Bergmann Industriewerke started making semi-automatic handguns as a side business (Waffenbrink) that saw limited success. However, they sold better than his cars did and he sold that branch of his factory to a young man named Carl Benz (yes, of Mercedes-Benz).
In World War I, Bergmann himself designed a light machine gun, the MG 15nA, which saw limited service during the conflict and some later overseas sales.
Clik here to view.
The MG 15nA as used by the Danish military in the 1920s. Note the design of the barrel cooling fins as the follow-on M32/34/35 would mimic it.
However his company was best known for the 9mm Maschinenpistole Bergmann 18/1 (MP18) designed by the later-legendary Hugo Schmeisser towards the tail end of the conflict.
MP18
In April 1918, the Imperial German Army placed an order for 50,000 of the new firearm. Envisioned to equip six stosstruppen per infantry company fewer than 12,500 were produced before the end of the war of which only an estimated 70 percent of those ever made it to the Western front.
Clik here to view.
Bergmann’s first sub gun
It was the first practical production submachine gun to achieve widespread service with any country. While the German police kept a handful of these, most were turned over to the victorious Allies in 1919.
Unable to keep making these guns in Germany on account of the Versailles Treaty, Bergmann licensed production in Switzerland to SIG who produced an estimated 30,000 of the weapons in both 9x19mm, 7.63x 25 mm and 7.65x 21mm between the two world wars for Japan, Spain, Finland, China and a number of Latin American countries. Nationalist China, hungry for weapons to feed its Civil War, made unlicensed copies in its Jinan Arsenal in the 1920s.
When Hitler came to power in 1932, Germany started a quiet and then later very public rearmament and the Bergmann works in Suhl went back to work– although with a different design.
The MP35/I…
Clik here to view.
Recognize the barrel?
Read the rest in my column at Firearms Talk
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
