Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at Legacy Collectibles taking a look at "party leader" PPKs. This is an example of the Walther PPK, a sub-variant of the PPK, that is in tremendous demand by collectors and very highly valued and very easily faked. So I have the opportunity today, through Legacy, to show you legitimate, proper, correct examples of all three types, and also of some of the fakes. So that you
can get an idea for what's right and what's wrong. Now, before we go into this, I want
to touch on briefly what is the history, like, what are these things to begin with? Because what a lot of people see is,
"Oh, it's a PPK with a swastika on it." Well in some ways it is. The specific
history of these is the initial batch of about 30,000 of these guns was
manufactured in 1934 and 1935. And it was something that was available
at a special discounted price only to, not necessarily leaders, but employees,
active members of the Nazi Party. So, ... a lot of people in Germany were
members of the Nazi Party because a lot of professions required party membership
once the party came into power. But for those people who held, say,
government jobs actively working for the party, ... politicians, bureaucrats, local town
mayors, provincial governors, the Gauleiter, as well as, you know, all sorts of other
functionaries within the Nazi Party. One of the perks of being a party member was you
got access to this nice status symbol of a PPK pistol. So, the initial batch, as I said, were made in '34 and '35,
... and those actually don't have a swastika on them at all. Those are the "RZM" type, which
we'll take a look at in a moment. They then changed things around, and
in 1938 they decided to offer them again, but this time it would be a standard gun
that had a nice special Nazi Party grip on it. And so ... you know, there are some new party
members by that point who hadn't been involved in '35. Some of those people bought new
guns, and then some people also had the option to just buy a grip and put the
fancy new grip on the gun that they already had. This continued for a little while, and then by
late in World War Two, the small sort of trickle of party leader guns that were still being offered
and sold, started being made with a black grip. So those are our three main variations. The RZM,
the red grip (or brown grip), and the black grip. Now, let's take a close look at these one at a time. Alright, we'll go ahead and start with the RZM version. This is the earliest, there were about 30,000 of
these made in 1934 and 1935. And they're called RZM because they have this round RZM marking on
the slide. That stands for "Reichs Zeugmeisterei", which is basically the the party quartermaster
company or party supply authority. This was the organisation that was set up to
purchase stuff of all sorts, uniforms, weapons, all sorts of just equipment for the
Nazi Party, the NSDAP organisation itself. ... So when they decided that Nazi Party officials
ought to be able to get this nice badge of rank sort of pistol at a special price, that
contract was all run through the RZM. In addition to the marking on the slide, these
can be identified roughly by serial number. They'll run from about 820,000 to about 844,000. Although ... unfortunately, there are some
examples outside of that serial number range as well, because there were about 30,000, and
that [range] covers about 26,000 guns. Now in 1938 they went back and looked at this,
and decided to make the gun a little bit fancier. Because if it's supposed to be a badge of special rank and authority,
and, you know, your position in the governing body of the country, well, it ought to look the part. More than
just having a special price tag for you. So, they introduced a party leader gun that
had this fancy swastika and eagle grip on it. On both sides of the grip in fact.
And so this came out in 1938. However, you could also just buy the grip. So there are
some guys who had maybe already bought an RZM gun because they were an official in the party back in '35. They could just buy this grip and put it on
their pre-existing gun to make it look better. This makes sense from the time period, but it also
significantly complicates authenticating these guns. That's the biggest issue with these is
trying to figure out if they're real or not real. Because there are a lot of reproduction versions of these grips. ... A reproduction grip is maybe a couple hundred dollars, and an
authentic party leader gun is maybe just shy of 10,000 dollars. So there's a ... huge difference in price that comes
from putting an authentic grip on an authentic gun. Now one tool we have at our disposal to
help authenticate is the serial numbers. We know that the party leader grip was introduced in 1938, and
most of these guns were made in 1938, or were sold in 1938. So a 1938 serial number range would be
174,000 to about 250,000 with a "K" suffix for PPK. That of course doesn't mean that every
gun made in 1938 was sold as a party leader, but it does mean that if you are presented
with one of these guns and the serial number falls outside of that range, well,
you should be a little sceptical. It doesn't necessarily mean it's fake, because as I said, you
could buy just the grip and put it on a pre-existing gun. You could also have gotten one
of these and decided to, you know, maybe your gun gets damaged and you take
the grip off and put it on a later production gun. Both of these things are perfectly plausible,
and they make authenticating really difficult. Now when you bought this gun, this was
by the way something you had to purchase, just because you're in the party and, you
know, an official town mayor or something, they're not gonna give you a pistol, but they will
give you the opportunity to pay some money for it. And this is what it's going to look like when you get it. ... The label changed a bit, but in this case it's a green label.
Our serial number here is 223,000, so this again is 1938 production. Inside we've got a cleaning rod, we've got our original manual that comes with the gun.
And then you're gonna get a pistol and a couple of accessories. So the gun came with one magazine with the
finger extension, and with one magazine without. These magazines are not serial numbered. There
are actually some serial numbered ... magazines, those are for special contracts outside of the
norm. So that's a subject for another video. Then you also got this little aluminium tin. The early
ones had a picture of the Walther factory on top, later they would go to just a big Walther banner. And inside we have some horsehair for cleaning the
gun with, and what's called a little "milk crate" for oil. So that is what your brand new, in the
box, party leader pistol would look like. (Put that back the right way.) And maybe counter-intuitively, a lot of surviving
party leader guns are actually in beautiful condition. Maybe not quite as good as this one, but a lot
of them are in basically unfired mint condition. And that's because these
guns virtually never saw combat. This was often a gun for a bureaucrat, or a functionary,
or a politician. These didn't go to the Eastern Front, they oftentimes sat in their box, just
like this, in a desk drawer or in a closet. As, you know, "I bought this because it was
the thing to do as a party member but, you know, I don't actually carry it, it just sits there." And then when the
war ends, it gets found and ends up in the hands of a US GI. Alright. Now the biggest thing is how do
you identify a fake grip from a real grip? So I have a real party leader grip, worth, I don't know, 7,000
dollars? And a fake party leader grip worth 200 dollars. Part of what makes this difficult is the
colour patterning on these grips is unique, these are like fingerprints. Every single one of them is a little
different. There's varying amounts of black that goes into this. So this is real, this is also real. These are all of course regular,
you know, standard production grips, not party leader grips. But these were all made in the same process, ... not quite
the same mould because they had to add the decorative bits, but the same materials went into all of these grips,
whether they were standard guns or party leaders. This is a particularly early one, before they
had nearly as much black in the mixture, but there's no special pattern
to these, they're all different. But all is not lost. There are a couple of features that you can
look at to at least get a good start on authenticating one of these. So, this is our real one, this is our fake one. First thing you'll notice is that the real ones have a
piece of ... thin sheet metal in the bottom of the grip. And that's to reinforce it so that
this doesn't bend closed and crack. You can actually see a little bit of a bump
right there, where the metal's inside the plastic. Now, the earliest of the fake grips didn't have that
metal reinforcing, so that's a pretty good giveaway. ... The second batch, once they
realised that they needed to improve that, went to a very bright shiny piece of metal, when in
real ones this is kind of matt and dulled in colour, so. This one however is past those two, this
one ... is from the point where they've actually started getting the right sort of metal insert
into the grip. So that's not going to help us here. One of the best tell-tales that's still there is
this little cutout lip on the left side of the grip. That's cut down because that's where
the safety lever comes down over the grip, and so it has to be a little thinner. And on
the fakes it's thicker than it is on the real ones. You'll notice this is, right here, this is really
thin. In fact, it's actually kind of bowed in because it's thin enough that
it's gotten deformed over time. That looks like a problem, but that is
actually an indication that it's original. If we go through and look at our non-party leader
authentic grips. Again, look at this little section right there, very thin, a little bit bowed in. This one again, very thin, and that
one's definitely got some bow to it. This one isn't bowed, but again you can see it's
much thinner than the fake one is right up in here. If you just look at the eagle and
swastika, they did really good job. The workmanship, the detail is just a tiny bit
better on the authentic ones, but they're really close. And if you don't have two side by side to compare,
it would be really difficult to spot the difference. You can see a few little things like, if you
look at the chest feathers on the eagle. They're a little bit different, they're nicer here,
they're a little more 3-dimensional on the real one. If we look at the front, you can see that the
workmanship is a little bit better on the original. Look at these locking tabs compared to these. You can't always count on that, because it's easy for an original
to have gotten worn a bit and look a little less professional. And by the way, you can't count on the amount of
plastic covering that metal insert to be indicative, because that varies widely among real ones. You can also see just a little bit of difference
in the thickness of the side panels. So this guy on the left is our fake, this one on the right
is an authentic party leader and compare this to that. You can see that the one on
the left is just a little bit thicker. This, by the way, is one of the best fakes out
there that Tom at Legacy has found yet. So if you can see the differences between these two,
you should be pretty well equipped to go out there and properly identify one that you find anywhere else. There is one more version that we need to take
a look at, and that is the black coloured version. These were introduced relatively late in the war
and the grips transitioned from this cool mottled reddish-brown to a solid black on all of the
standard production guns late in the war as well. Now there's a little bit of debate about
the authenticity of the black grip guns. However, there are a couple that have absolutely been
verified as coming back with veterans from the war, and there are some out there.
However, there are clearly not very many. There's certainly a lot fewer of these than
there are of the red-brown style of party leader. ... Well, let me start by saying that these will ... have
to have late-war features, so relatively late production. You can see that the finish on this gun is much
cruder than on the early production pre-war guns. You know the general fit and and polish of the gun is
going to be commensurate with a late-war example. Identifying a legitimate grip however is tricky, because
without the some of the colouring to be a guide, it's a lot harder to differentiate
this fake one from this real one. And, in fact on this one you can see that sidewall
... that I was just telling you is a good indicator, you can't really, like that's a thin
side wall, that looks authentic. On the black one here there's not much difference
in wall thickness, this gets really, really difficult. Because this is about a 200
dollar reproduction fake grip. So, how are you supposed to figure out which ones are real?
Well, this is a situation where it really comes down to provenance and other circumstances, do you trust
the person who has it? Is there a viable, rational explanation for where it came from,
how it got into this person's possession? You know, we're getting to the point where the original veterans
who brought these guns back, very few of them remain alive today. And so 20, 30 years ago the solution would have
been find the guy who actually brought the gun back, and buy it from a veteran if you want to be really sure that
it's a real thing. Today you really don't have that option, so it comes down to, do you have
documentation? Do you have provenance? Do you trust the seller? And I think for a lot of people
this is the sort of gun that can very easily become, "I want one, but I'm just not gonna buy one because I'm not
confident that I can properly authenticate it as being real. And it's a tremendous amount of money to spend
on something that might be indistinguishably fake." Alright, that is a lot of little fine detail to go over.
But we have one more element of the party leader PPK to take a look at before we are complete,
and that is the holster that went with them. Because, naturally, this was a political
party that put a lot of emphasis on iconography and symbolism and
decoration and looking really smart. And so naturally they embellished
the holsters to go along with the guns. Now the very first batch, the RZM party leaders,
just used standard holsters made by AKAH, A-k-a-h, without really any distinguishing features. When they brought out the fancy swastika eagle grip,
they went ahead and embellished the holster to match. So, you'll get a holster like this that has
the same eagle and swastika stamped on it. It is otherwise a standard PPK holster.
You've got a space for a spare magazine. Now inside here you would usually have an ink stamp of "PPK", and
you can just barely make out the remnants of that on this one. Then you have a couple little
markings here on the cover flap. D.R.G.M. indicates [German registered design],
and then this little symbol below it is a pair of crossed rifles,
that is the AKAH company logo. So all of AKAH's holsters have the symbol,
only the party leaders are marked D.R.G.M. [?]. And lastly the little locking tab here is
cut square at the top and stitched down. Standard holsters have a longer rounded tab. Well, that is simply unacceptable on a party leader
holster, because it would obscure the swastika. So for just these they cut that down. In fact,
you can see where that had been rounded, they cut it off, folded it over, and stitched it so that
it doesn't obstruct your nice party iconography. The belt buckle, of course was the
same thing, eagle and swastika logo on it. And this was another accessory
that was sold only to party officials through a little catalogue, along with
the pistols and the grips and the holsters. In fact, kind of interesting, while the party
leader guns by 1938 were not marked with RZM, RZM as an organisation remained in existence until 1943,
continuing to handle procurement for the Nazi Party. And quite a lot of various goods
will have an RZM stamp on them, including the back of this belt buckle,
which has a little RZM moulded into it. So hopefully you guys enjoyed this video.
This is a subject that I have been loath to cover, for fear of not having legitimate authentic examples.
And so I really appreciate that Legacy has unassailably correct versions of these,
because they are so easy to fake. So if you are actually looking to
get one of these, if you find one ... Tom at Legacy is happy to do an
authentication on it as best he can over the internet. If you send him some pictures to info@legacy-
collectibles.com, he's happy to assess it as best he can. This is one of those things that if it's fake it's often something that
he can spot as fake and tell you, "No, that's definitely a fake one." Proving that something is authentic, especially from
pictures, is a little more difficult, but for free of charge he's happy to do that as a service to the
collector community. Which is really cool. So, if you're interested, definitely check out Legacy. And thanks for watching.
