Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I'm here again today at the Rock Island Auction House taking a
look at some of the guns that are coming up for sale in their April of 2015 Premier Auction.
One of the ones that they have is a very cool, and very rare and unusual,
prototype early World War Two German pistol.
Now at the beginning, I think this is pretty much universal, when it seemed like a war was breaking out,
a lot of companies jumped at the opportunity to try and get military contracts for their arms.
And World War Two and Germany were certainly no exception.
The German military in particular contracted for a very wide variety of handguns.
And one of the companies that tried to get in on the handgun game in Germany was Gustloff.
Now the Gustloff Company was run by a man named Fritz Sauckel. He was the Gauleiter of the district
where the company was located, so he was both an industrialist
and a political figure, one might say fascist. Kind of the definition of fascism.
Sauckel was also a pretty reprehensible Nazi.
His plan with these pistols was to come up with this design, and then
manufacture it largely with slave labour from the Buchenwald camp.
So in 1939 he came up with this design, or his engineers did, and circulated it to a bunch of different political groups.
He was hoping for, well, obviously he was really hoping for a military contract, but also
he wanted to get this gun potentially used by police groups, by prison guards,
anyone in a formal capacity that you could sell a large number of pistols to.
It's an interesting gun. Technically it's .... not a bad gun by any means.
But he was unable to get any real contracts for it, so not very many were made.
It's a little bit interesting, most of the reference material says that about 100 of these were made,
but the serial numbers kind of do some weird stuff.
I suspect that the total number is more like 200, possibly over 1,000.
At any rate, there are a number of different varieties and some cool details,
so why don't we bring the camera back here and take a closer look.
And we can go over some more of the history of this piece.
So let's just dive right in. I've already disassembled the Gustloff here,
so we can get a close look at all of its internal workings.
Now to begin with, you can see here it's marked calibre 7.65mm.
It was of course in 7.65 Browning, aka .32 Auto.
That was a common small calibre sidearm cartridge for the German military and police.
Makes sense he would have used that cartridge.
This is a pot metal, zinc/aluminum frame, you can see it has this interesting kind of bluish tinge to it.
You'll also notice that the trigger guard is ... a second component.
So ... you can see
a mark here where it connects underneath
just in front of the trigger.
And then of course it's very obvious here that this is two different components.
Now these are all sort of prototype pistols.They were made for various police trials, and demonstrations, and giveaways.
And there's a lot of variation between the different examples when it comes to some of the smaller elements.
For one thing you will find some of them that have steel frames, and every once is a while,
I believe if I recall correctly, I've seen pictures of one that actually had
a pot metal grip frame and a steel trigger guard assembly. So a couple of different possibilities there.
The grips have this squared off "G", that's the Gustloff corporate logo.
Sometimes these pistols will have wood grips, this one has plastic Bakelite grips.
Magazine, very standard. A little unusual that it has this curved base plate, but there you go.
The action is a simple plain blowback, very similar to the Walther PPK, and every other straight blowback pistol out there.
The recoil spring sits on the barrel, and then the slide drops over the top.
We'll reassemble that once we're done taking a look at everything in here.
So probably the most unusual element, distinctive element to the Gustloff is this safety lever on the side.
And when the grip's on you can't really see anything except that it's an awfully long throw for a safety,
and it's a very stiff lever to press.
Well, when you take the grip panel off you can see why. We have this dogleg arrangement
like this.
... It's a pretty unusual idea. And, you know, it kind of works. What this does
is move the bottom connection of the mainspring. This coil spring is the mainspring that powers the hammer.
And when I move this dogleg back this piece is lifted up, and so there's no tension on the hammer.
It also has a little safety mechanism here that will prevent the gun from firing when the lever's in the rearward position.
If I override that with my finger here, and just manually fire the gun, you know of course, normally with something like this
you'd never want to dry fire it and let the hammer slam onto the frame.
In this case I have let all the tension off the mainspring, so if I do that the hammer
just barely can go anywhere.
There's no tension on it, virtually,
and it can't fire.
So it's a very unusual safety mechanism, but you know what? It actually kind of works.
If I press that forward, now this has
extended the mainspring. So now there's a lot of tension on it.
You can also see that the front leg here is pushing on this little catch.
So that safety has been disabled and we can fire. This time I am definitely going to hold on to the hammer because it's under
much more tension now.
This one's a little gummy because it's got some preservative oil in it, but it's got
(there we go ), far more spring tension to it. And now it's in a position where it could actually fire.
So, a very cool element of the Gustloff pistol that you don't see on anything else.
Now let's go ahead and reassemble this.
We do of course have a frame mounted magazine release, which is nice.
It's a little bit atypical, European pistols often went with heel releases.
Put that on.
I can put my recoil spring on there. This lug is what locks the barrel in place, so this is our disassembly lug.
If this is up it prevents the slide from coming far enough back to allow removal.
This disassembles just like a Makarov or a PPK. I'm going to put the recoil spring into the front,
and it just comes all the way back
to there, so.
In regular service, as long as you don't mess with this lever, the slide only comes back to here.
Once I pull the lever down, now the slide can come back a little bit farther,
and disassembly is done just by pulling it off the front.
Mechanically, other than this unusual safety mechanism, the only major difference between this and all the other
hammered blowback pistols is that the hammer is shrouded underneath the back of the slide here.
Presumably that would be so it didn't catch on anything, makes sense.
So Gustloff was never able to actually get any contracts for these pistols.
He farmed them out to a lot of different places in hopes of getting contracts, nothing ever materialised.
In total, probably 200 to 300 of these were manufactured.
They have an interesting serial number range that seems to jump. Goes from 1, or very low numbers, up to
about 120. And then it appears to jump to 1,120 or so, and then ... the numbers go up from there.
I suspect, although I cannot prove, that he decided after 100 or so that it would look better if it appeared to be selling better.
So they tacked an extra digit onto the serial number. This particular one is a very early one.
Take a look at the serial number there, this is number 13.
(There you go.)
These were never issued to anybody, so none of them really got destroyed in combat.
And although only a relatively small number were made, most of those seem to have survived.
... For the number made, they seem to have been reasonably common pistols for American servicemen to bring back from World War Two.
And that accounts for pretty much all the ones that are in the country today.
So very small production, they're very scarce pistols don't get me wrong,
but not as scarce as they would have been had they actually seen military service.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video. Get a chance to take a look at another
German World War Two pistol that you really don't see very often.
If you would like to buy this and see it every day in your own personal collection,
it is coming up for sale here at Rock Island in April.
If you click the link below that'll take you to their catalogue page for it. You can take
a look at their high-res pictures, their catalogue description and
get everything you need to create an account and place a bid on-line, or place a telephone bid,
or frankly, just come here to the auction house in person.
Thanks for watching.