Hi, thanks for tuning in. Today we're going to take a look at
a pair of German experimental rifles that were manufactured
late in World War Two. They never saw combat action, but
they were heavily influential on a series of firearms designs that would have
repercussions for decades after the war. These two guns were called the
Gerät 06 and the Gerät 06H. 'Gerät' being a German word for experimental, or device. Our story really starts with the
Sturmgewehr, the StG44. This rifle had started seeing active service in the field in
1943 and it was an instant hit with everyone who used it. It was a pioneer of the actual assault rifle,
using an intermediate, fairly small cartridge, a large magazine and the capability for
either single shots or full automatic fire. It was very effective in combat, and it was in
extremely high demand with the German army. Now the Mauser company hadn't
had a hand in developing the StG44. What they had been concentrating
on instead was the Gewehr 41 which was a semi-auto rifle
in the full-size 8mm Mauser cartridge. They thought that's the way that the
German army would end up going, and so that's what they put their
efforts into. And ultimately it failed. The Gewehr 41 ... contract was won by the Walther
company, and that kind of left Mauser in a lurch. They went looking for a new R&D project,
and decided to focus on the 8mm short cartridge that had been used by the very
successful up-and-coming Sturmgewehr. What they ended up with was this rifle.
They called it the Gerät 06, and the idea was to build a substitute for the StG44. Something that would fill the same function, in
fact used the same magazines, the same cartridge. But they wanted this rifle to be lighter and easier,
cheaper to manufacture than the Sturmgewehr, because they were a business and they
wanted to sell rifles to the German army. Well, this rifle looks very similar to the
Sturmgewehr, externally it has a lot of similarities. Same basic configuration. We have a pistol grip. We have a buttstock that's in line with the
barrel which makes for pleasant shooting. We have the same style of sight, etc. Under the skin though, this is a fairly
different rifle. The StG44 uses a tilting bolt, which was a well proven concept and a
successful design, just a bit expensive to make. The Gerät 06H was tested by Waffenamt Prüfwesen,
which was the German Ordnance testing authority, in June of 1944, and it was rejected. Ordnance didn't like a number of features about the
gun. They thought it might be too difficult to clean because access to the receiver is a little tight. They
didn't like the metal pistol grip for use in the winter. They didn't like the fact that it ejects
cartridges straight up out of the gun, thinking that that might give the
enemy an easy way to spot soldiers. But ultimately, the major problem with this rifle
was that it wasn't enough cheaper and easier to manufacture than the Sturmgewehr. The StG had finally gotten into mass production,
it was a big hit, it was sorely needed, especially on the Eastern Front, and for
a 10% reduction in cost it wasn't worth taking the time to retool factories to
put this rifle into mass production. So the Gerät 06 externally looks
very much like a Sturmgewehr. It uses the same 30 round magazines,
it uses the same 8mm short cartridge. The similarities don't quite end there, it has
a stamped sheet metal receiver like the StG44. Similar sights, grip, a lot of this looks familiar.
The differences lie in the internal construction. Let's take a quick look inside
and see how the gun works. We're going to start by removing the
butt-stock. There's a single pin holding this in, Pull the pin out, ... the butt-stock
and recoil spring come out, the recoil spring is housed inside
the back. And take off our dust cover and now we have the basic receiver
assembly, we can pull the bolt out the back. Alright, this is our bolt
and bolt carrier assembly. When we view it as a complete
unit we can see the bolt head here with the two locking lugs on either side. When the gun fires, this part of the bolt body comes back which allows the rollers to retract into the bolt head.
The way this functions, we have several pieces. Our main component here is the
bolt head and then we have this component, which has two angled surfaces on it
and then a flat section on either side. What this does, these two angled
surfaces push the rollers out which forces them into the receiver. When ... the bolt is all the way closed like this,
these rollers are resting on the flat area right here, and so, no matter how much we push on the
front of the bolt, the rollers can't go anywhere, and that effectively locks the gun
and prevents the bolt from opening. The gas piston on the Gerät 06 was
basically taken whole from the Gewehr 43. It's a three piece unit, so it comes apart fairly easily. We have the middle out first. Then we can take out the front portion. And then we have the back and its spring. This gas piston allows the rifle to fire cleanly and
very reliably. Gas is only contained in this front section, which runs on these two sealing rings and only travels a fairly short
distance back with each firing. Having had the rifle rejected,
Mauser went back to the drawing board. One of the engineers working in the R&D department,
a Dr. Karl Maier, had noticed something unusual when he was testing this action
in a full-size 8mm round. What he found was that when the
bolt closed it tended to bounce slightly, the first time. It would hit the trunnion,
bounce open, and then lock itself closed. If the rifle were fired during that very brief instant
where the gun was slightly open it would unlock itself, albeit at an unsafe high speed. So he took this idea
and ran with it and started doing some calculations and figured that if he changed the
angles of the locking wedge in the action and changed the location of the rollers, he could develop a gun that would automatically open itself, but it would delay long enough to open at a safe velocity. That idea was extremely interesting to Mauser
because what it would allow them to do is get rid of the entire gas piston assembly on the rifle,
simplify some of the bolt components as well, and really reduce the cost of this gun to a
point that it could easily compete with the StG44. Now as we were saying, German Ordnance had
rejected the Gerät 06 because it wasn't cheap enough to justify manufacture. So Mauser had gone
back to the drawing board and Dr. Karl Maier had come up with a way to make the gun
self-opening without the need for a gas piston. By August of 1944 they had a prototype built
and test firing, and it was this, the Gerät 06H. The 'H' signifies half-locked, meaning that
it was basically a delayed blowback gun. So let's take a look inside this and
we'll see how it differs from the first version. Disassembly begins the same
way as with the other gun. We're going to take a pin out
... and remove the butt-stock. This area remained pretty much unchanged.
We again have a dust cover. Pin comes out and the bolt assembly
comes out the rear of the gun again. So a lot of the bolt here looks
fairly similar. The difference is we now have the firing pin as an
integral part of this wedged locking piece, and it has a significantly different
shape ... than that of the Gerät 06 because this is designed to automatically unlock itself. When the bolt is assembled together it has
about a quarter inch of travel forward and back. When it's fully locked into place the
recoil spring pushes on the body of the bolt. It pushes it forward, and the locking wedge
pushes these two rollers out into the receiver. On recoil, the whole thing pulls backwards
and as the rollers push on the inside of the receiver they travel on that wedge, come together
and ... slightly open the back of the bolt. Once they're fully retracted like this,
then the bolt can retract backwards. Bolt-head disassembles easily, and you can see
the two planes here that those rollers travel on. In addition, the receiver was simplified on the 06H. Where before it had one piece for the
firing assembly, the pistol grip assembly, it then had a second piece that held the front
and rear trunnions and the magazine well and a third piece that comprised
the main tube of the receiver. When they developed the Gerät 06H here,
they redid that as a single stamping. So it was made in two halves that run the
whole length of the gun from back here ... ... all the way up to the front of the handguard. There was one major problem with
this design that had to be worked out. A problem that didn't exist in the first
version. The problem is extraction. In the original gun, the Gerät 06,
there was a gas piston and so the cartridge case was
pulled out of the chamber fairly slowly. When they moved to a delayed blowback action
here the problem is that's putting a lot more stress on the cartridge case when it tries to pull it out
of the chamber, because pressure is higher during the extraction process. The problem this
led to was that the gun failed to extract cartridges or would rip the rim off
the casing in the process. They tinkered with a number of
different potential solutions for this and what they ended up settling
on was fluting the chamber. This is an interesting procedure where they actually
pressed small grooves into the inside of the chamber. What these did was allow some of the pressure
from the barrel to work its way inside the chamber and sit between the chamber itself
and the outside of the brass case. That gave the case the effect of actually floating in the
chamber, so that when the extractor went to pull it out, there was a lot less stress
trying to hold the case in. So when the Gerät 06H was presented to
German Ordnance they really liked it. This was a much better, much
more practical gun in their eyes. Production time had been reduced
to in the order of 3 to 5 hours, compared to 12 to 14 hours
for a 98k bolt-action rifle. The Gerät 06H would have cost about 50%
as much as a Sturmgewehr to manufacture. and that kind of savings was enough
to bring it up as a major priority, so they went ahead and ordered 30 more
of these guns as prototypes to be tested. Mauser went ahead and made all the parts
for these guns and by this time it was March / April of 1945 and Germany's
capitulation in the war was just around the corner. So, after the parts had been made but before
they were actually built into functional guns, all the important aspects of the Mauser factory
were packed up on a train to be evacuated to one of the the hidden caves up in the Austrian alps
where Hitler thought they could go on producing guns. The train was loaded up, it took about
11 days, by the time it arrived in Austria everyone pretty much knew the war was completely
over. Nobody bothered to unpack the train and it was found in early June. None of these guns
had actually been assembled before the war ended. But the engineers who were involved in
the project, and all the parts, were captured. And it's up to some speculation how many of the
guns were actually built under US or British control at the end of the war by former Mauser employees. But we know that at least one was. It's serial number 2, and it was studied and inspected at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, and to this day it remains in the collection
of the Springfield Armoury Museum. So what is the legacy of these two rifles since they
never saw the light of combat during World War Two? Well, the engineers who designed the Gerät 06
and 06H first went to France for a brief time, and then ended up in Spain where they designed
a rifle called the CETME. Spanish rather liked it. And ... by the 1950s, when Germany was
allowed to start building munitions again, several of these engineers moved back
to Germany and started working for a company called Heckler & Koch,
where they made the G3 rifle. This is very directly the
descendant of the Gerät 06H. In fact we're going to take apart this one, and take
a look inside and see just how similar they really are. Alright, so couple obvious similarities: the
recoil springs are in the butt-stock of both rifles. And when we look at the bolts, the only difference
here is that H&K put the rod out on the front and connected the charging handle to it, where the
Gerät 06H has a rod on the back to act as a spring guide. The bolts, the bolt faces look extremely
similar and work the exact same way. As you can see it was German World War Two
research and development at the Mauser Corporation that really paved the way for the entire line of
Heckler and Koch firearms, from the G3 to the MP5. Weapons that have had a significant
impact on small arms development today. Special thanks to those
who provided the rifles!
