Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today filming on Malta through the generous invitation of the Association of Maltese Arms Collectors and Shooters, AMACS. They have put together a selection of some really cool guns from Maltese private collections that we're going to be taking a look at. And today we have a Gerat or Gerät O6H or, as this could I think actually
legitimately be called, a Sturmgewehr 45(M). This is the gun that was intended to be
the replacement for the MP44 or StG-44. The StG was a tremendously successful
gun, but it was developed very quickly and it was kind of in a continuous
process of very slight modifications and if there was one major problem with it,
it was that it just wasn't cheap enough. The German military was able to put
them into definitive mass production and get a lot of them out on the
battlefield, but not as many as they wanted. And so the Mauser company was working
on a simplified, less expensive, version of basically the same fundamental gun.
And this is what they ended up developing. Now this story actually starts in late 1943 when Mauser, and by the way Mauser at this point
has really quite a large R&D department, something like 500 people in Mauser's
R&D department. Which is part of why they were able to come up with, when we look at
German small arms, Mauser is a big part of it. They had all sorts of like crazy, cool, weird,
guns going on. More than most other companies. Well, that's largely because they had a huge
R&D department working on this sort of thing. Anyway to get back to our story, in late 1943
Mauser was experimenting with converting the G43 or K43 to a roller locked system,
so getting rid of the flapper locking and simplifying it to a roller locked system. And, in
theory, this was going to be the Gewehr 44(M). They never ended up adopting that because really, by
the time that they were ready to to adopt something new, I think the emphasis was much more heavily on
the 8x33 short cartridge. So that never happened. However, what they discovered in the process was
bolt bounce could occasionally lead to full-auto fire or I think they had a full-auto
converted gun as part of their testing, and what they found is with the roller locked system
it would occasionally fire, through bolt bounce, when the rollers weren't fully locked
- and it didn't completely fail. And so the engineers looking at it, in
particular a guy named Dr. Karl Maier, started thinking about this and
realising that if you could get rid of ... if you could simplify the roller locked system,
if you could make it a half-locked system, sort of a delayed blowback.
In fact exactly a delayed blowback. That would allow you to get rid of the gas piston
entirely and simplify the bolt system. So he started experimenting with this, in particular with
the 8x33 short cartridge, and this became the Gerät 06. There was ... (Gerät is the German word for, like, item, it
is used effectively as 'prototype' or 'experimental model') and there was a whole series of them, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Number 6 was basically the simplified
Sturmgewehr with a roller delayed blowback system. And that actually worked remarkably well, and by
April of 1944 in the German documentation they reported that they were
experimenting with this idea and then by late 1944 it had
actually gotten substantial traction. In, I believe it's February, sometime between,
like, December '44 and February '45, the Mauser plant actually puts one of these
guns through a 5,000 round endurance test. And it works. It's light. It's very simple. It's really
a remarkably impressive mechanical system. And they communicate this back to the military
and the military is suitably interested and in February of '45 they order production of
... an initial run of 30 guns for user trials. Of course at this point, they're kind of
getting into the desperate last days of the war. Had they gotten these 30 guns they probably would
have gone to some, you know, frontline company who would have shot the bejesus out of them
and reported back on any problems that they had. However, the guns never quite got to that level
because of course the war ended in May, and by April, by the middle of April, the Mauser
plant was in serious danger of being overrun. And so in a last-ditch effort to maintain production,
Hitler ordered basically the whole contents of the Mauser plant, all the tooling, all the
prototypes, all the drawings, data, everything, loaded into a big train and shipped into
the Austrian Alps where they were hoping they could set up production
like a hidden cave in the mountains. Really, really, last-ditch sort of stuff and ... this plan
was put into action and the train actually departed on the night of April 19th and 20th 1945. So the exact same time that Hitler is
committing suicide in his bunker in Berlin, this train leaves Oberndorf for Austria. US troops liberate the Mauser factory,
overrun and capture the Mauser factory, and when the intelligence guys coming behind
them started searching through the factory they realised that ... like none of
the juicy interesting stuff was there. So they put out a wider search and on the first of
June 1945 they discovered this train up in Austria. And ... in fact it is discovered by a joint
group of US and British military intelligence and then they start going through this train, they find
the engineers from Mauser who are accompanying it, and that's when they find all the really interesting
stuff, including the sets of parts for these guns. So 30 were ordered. No guns were actually completed.
... There were some prototypes completed like the one that did the firing trial, but of that
30 gun production series, all they ever managed to make were basically parts sets. So the
receivers, the barrels, in fact almost all of the parts. They didn't have stocks and
they didn't have fire control parts. Those just hadn't been manufactured by the time
everything had to be packed up and shipped out. So they got some Mauser engineers,
who were being held as POWs in the area, and a bunch of these were actually completed
by former Mauser employees [in the Netherlands] for several of the Allied powers: the US and
Britain and France and ... I don't think Russia, because the Russians weren't
really involved in that area. But a number of the guns were actually
put together and so you will find these in a few major arms collections around
the world held by national governments. So the the Springfield Armoury Museum
collection has one of these. And that tends to make people think
that the Germans actually built them. Well, sort of I guess, they were German
parts built by German Mauser engineers, but they were done after the war. And
some of the parts, like the fire control pieces and the stocks, all had
to be manufactured new. Now, let's take a closer look at this one, and then when we're all done with that, I'll tell
you the specific story of this particular gun. Obviously you can see that this fits
the basic profile of a Sturmgewehr. The Germans didn't want to change any of that. However, they did want to simplify things. So... Actually before we start let's
... I want to cover a couple quick things. First off, we have this little short magazine and this is
what you will generally see in pictures of these guns. You'll also see these I think occasionally
in some Volkssturm pictures. But, the intent was that the Sturmgewehr
45 was going to use the standard MP44, MP43, StG-44 magazine.
Completely interchangeable. You see these magazines because
these were designed for use on test racks. When you've got this thing bolted into a fixture for
test firing in the factory, a long magazine like this, just doesn't really fit in the fixtures.
A very basic mechanical issue there. So instead, they cut down some magazines to, like,
ten rounds. That was perfectly sufficient for their test firing. And as a result, when the guns were captured or,
in the case of things like this that were all parts, when they ... pulled out the parts sets,
these were the magazines that were around because this is what the factory had been using. So people think that they were going to be issued
sometimes with short magazines, they were not. So that's the last we'll see of this little guy. Speaking of those magazines, in fact, let's take a
closer look at this one that's in this particular rifle. This is an MP45 magazine,
which is pretty rare as you might expect, and you might think that that's the perfect magazine,
or the appropriate magazine, to go with the StG-45 rifle. Well, actually not quite. If we flip this over you can see the three-letter
manufacturer code there, 'gqm'. This was a Czech [oops, West German] factory that had been making StG
magazines since basically the beginning of production. And they went through the whole range of production,
starting when they had been marked 'MP43' and then around 1944 they were told to
switch to 'MP44' markings for the magazines because the designation of the Sturmgewehr
had changed, and then when 1945 rolled around the factory just assumed that they were supposed
to change to the next year at the same time. So they started making 'MP45' magazines.
As it turned out, they were not supposed to. The previous change had been
because the rifle designation changed. So they, I assume, got an angry letter from
someone in the German Army Ordnance system and then they went back to either MP44 or StG-44
whichever was appropriate at that point, but not before they had produced a reasonably
substantial number of 'MP45' magazines, which are a cool collector's item today. However, they're not quite what people think they are. So the magazine doesn't actually have a
specific relation to the very late war pattern guns, but it's a pretty cool story. Now then, as for the rifle itself.
We have a selector lever here on the side. So they have gotten away from the Sturmgewehr's
system of having a push button for one function and a lever for another function. Instead we
have one lever that is safe, semi and full-auto. And it actually kind of falls under your thumb. You can
access this from a firing grip. It's a pretty cool design. We have the magazine release button here.
And if you're shooting it right-handed this is designed to be ... you grab the magazine
like this, push the button, and pull the magazine out. So not intended to be done with the firing
grip, these are not drop free magazines and they were never intended to be. We have a
dust cover up here on the top, which is pretty cool, because, of course, since there is a bolt handle
you have a big open slot in the side of the gun, which will let dirt in. So instead
we put on this dust cover which ... (It's a little tight here.) There we go. We can rotate that dust cover closed. It seals up the gap very nicely, and then it has this
reinforced section right here so that when you fire the bolt handle is going to come back, hit this
sloped cover, and actually rotate the dust cover open. Because this one is a little bit stiff, I'm going to do it
manually, but you can see how that would function. The receiver and grip assembly
are all one continuous piece. They're stamped in a left and right half and then welded
together. You can see the overlap here with a spot weld. More of those spot welds right up in
there and the front of the grip assembly. There are no separate grip panels. These are grooves that are actually
stamped into that shell component. By the way, these little perforations are limiters.
So, unlike say the MP44, which had a very complicated integral fire control group built into this pivoting
grip assembly, the StG-45, the Gerät 06H here, has a drop-in box, very much like what you will
find in a modern HK, or rather an early HK firearm. And these little projections are stamped in
there so that you push the trigger box down until it hits there, you push the the
selector lever through to lock it in place, and that's what keeps everything
in the proper configuration. The rear end of the gun is very much like an
MP44, the recoil spring goes down into the stock and we just have a simple push pin
going through the side to lock it in place. (This pin there's something a
little wonky about the locking spring so it doesn't want to go all the way in,
so I'm just leaving it like that.) At the front end we have a bakelite handguard. Those of you who have shot an MP44 or
read about German soldiers who did, will know that the hand guards on the MP44 got very hot rather
quickly, because they had no insulation of any kind. So the MP45 was going to have a nice
bakelite insulating handguard there. There is nothing under this, so the reason it's
this diameter is because the receiver stamping continues all the way forward
up to here at this same diameter. So then, these two pins hold the bakelite handguard
in place, and we're not going to take that off. The rear sight is on a nice elevated tower,
so you have a good sight picture while still having the axis of the bore right
directly into your shoulder to prevent climb. Sight is graduated out to 800 meters and this is a
very typical, very standard, German style of sight. Front sight is a little bit
different in that it is a straight post. However, I can't guarantee you that the front
sight was actually one of the original German parts. It would probably more likely have been
a barleycorn front sight under that hood. And, being a very late war gun, they dispensed
with the need for muzzle threading. They weren't worried about trying to make
these compatible with grenade launchers or silencers or anything elaborate like that. So just a plain simple muzzle, pinned on front
sight block, quick, easy and inexpensive. Originally these guns had no markings on them at all
because, of course, they weren't actually completed guns. This one however is marked 'V-20' and has a Mauser
banner logo on it. We'll touch on why that is a little bit later. Now for anyone who has disassembled an HK,
you will immediately recognize how this works. Pretty simple. We're gonna pull the rear pin, right there, and then we can remove the buttstock, the spring. Well the spring is more StG like, the spring goes down
into the stock. You'll notice the flathead screws there. That is clearly not wartime German production. This whole assembly would
have been manufactured after the war. It appears some of the parts kits
had end caps with them, some did not. Now we can take out what is actually
the extension tail for the recoil spring. This is a bit unusual, we'll take
a closer look at that in a moment. We can then pull the bolt handle back and
we're going to have to take the dust cover off in order to get the bolt out and just slide this back and that comes off.
That's just a nice sheet metal stamped part. Then we can pull the bolt back to here, the bolt handle comes out, and then the
bolt and bolt carrier ... come out the back. And that is complete disassembly of the Gerät 06H aka StG-45. By the way 'H' is for this long German word
that I can't pronounce, [Halbstarr - not so long] but I'll print at the bottom of the
screen, that means, like, half rigid locked. So where the roller locking
was a solid locked action, this is a delayed blowback and they indicated
that with the 'H' suffix on the design. Anyway, you can see just how simple this is. It's very
much like an HK because it is a delayed blowback system. There's no gas piston. There's
no moving barrel. There's no gas port. There's nothing under this except a
receiver shell and a barrel and a trunnion, which in fact looks very much like an HK trunnion so ... this is the original trunnion from this gun, unfortunately ... well, we'll take a look at this in just a moment. Now, of course if you're not already aware,
this is the gun that became the HK G3. So many of the engineers involved in this,
guys like Vorgrimler and Alex Seidel and Maier would go on to be involved with HK. They would go first to France, where they worked
on some roller delayed prototypes for the French, they then moved on to Spain where they
created the CETME rifle for the Spanish military, which really took this and turned
it from a prototype concept idea into a finalised and militarily
accepted mass-produced firearm. And that's a cool story on its own, but of
course, that's a story for another video. After CETME, these guys were
finally able to return to Germany and do arms development work in Germany, which
had not been allowable immediately after the war. So, Seidel in particular would go on to be one of the
founders of Heckler & Koch, where they created this ... Well, they turned this into the G3 and it became a
remarkably popular rifle worldwide using this system. So that's the historical relevancy
of the Gerät 06H, the StG-45. I want to point out at the back of the rifle here,
you can see that this is not a tubular receiver. Like, you have guns like the Suomi
where there's a tubular receiver and then a square grip assembly,
secondary bit that's attached to it. This was made with two pressings, and you
can actually see where they overlap here and you can see where they overlap right back up here. So a left side and a right side
pressing that are then welded together. There are fake reproductions of these out there
and some of them you will find actually have a tubular receiver with a ... second
square piece attached down here Those are easily recognizable by having this
round section, having actual metal right right here. So, something to be aware of if you
are in the market for one of these, not that there are a whole lot of them floating around. One other change that was made between the
initial prototypes and this production of parts sets, was location of the charging handle. On the parts
sets the charging handle is horizontal in the side. There are a few pictures of some of the early
prototype guns, or their parts, and on those the receiver wall comes up substantially higher
and those had a charging handle that came out at an angle upwards. Not so
much horizontal, but tilted up like so. You can see the fire control group down here. I'm not going to go so much into detail on this
because I can't really take this out, unfortunately. But it is hammer fired, we have,
I believe, a disconnector up there. There are some ... if you get the book
'Full Circle' by Blake Stevens, that goes into... it has has some very good exploded
views of all the component parts in here. The bolt carrier and bolt head are
obviously extremely similar to HK designs. This, if you look at this closely, you can see
it has kind of a rough finish under the paint, or a rough metallic surface under the finish. This was obviously a forged part and then
it was machined where necessary to have the proper tolerances, clearances for riding on
the rails that are stamped into the receiver. And that's what these two are on each side.
Those are rails that the bolt rides in here. What this does not have, that HK does, is an anti-bounce
lever. So the HK will have a very strong spring here that locks this thing in place and
prevents it from bouncing when it closes. This can bounce when it closes, and that could
potentially be a problem, but of course remember, these were thirty prototype parts kits, so not
everything had been done on them developmentally. We can take this apart easily because it
doesn't have that lever and then the front half of that firing pin actually comes out. There's the
back half right back there, that gets hit by the hammer. It's not a spring-loaded firing pin. I don't want to spend a tremendous amount
of time on the mechanical system here, because you can find that very
well explained in videos about HKs, including some earlier stuff I've done. But the basic
idea of the roller locking system, a roller delayed system is that when this bolt is all the way
back, these rollers are pushed outward. They're pushed into two matching recesses
in the trunnion and that prevents the bolt from moving backward
when it fires. However, ... ... if you push in on these you can
actually push the bolt carrier backwards and that's what makes this a delayed
blowback and not a locked breech system. So, when the gun is in battery, those rollers
are resting on this angled section right here. Which means when you fire it, the forces pushing
backward on the bolt are split by this angled section and some go outward and some push backward and the reduction in force going straight
backward is what delays the opening of the bolt. So, during the development process for
this they did a lot of experimentation with the weight of the bolt carrier back
here, and also the exact angle of this surface up at the front
in order to get it to work just right. So this, ... on more modern HKs you'll see that
this angle, this system, varies for different calibres. Like the the HK93 in 5.56 versus the HK91 in 7.62. Now we can talk about this trunnion at this point. This
is the original trunnion that was made in Mauser in '45. And after Mauser assembled this particular
gun, which we'll talk about in a moment, they test-fired it and it went kablooey and
sheared off both of the locking recesses here. So, that is obviously not so good. So the gun was built with a replacement trunnion.
I presume this is probably a heat treating issue that led to this, and the replacement was heat treated
correctly and survives, was proof tested and survived. But it's kind of cool, normally you when
you see one of these rifles this piece is very solidly welded inside. You can actually see
where they have welded it around the back here, and then there are two dimples on the
side where steel was pressed in and a pin. The pin also held in place the barrel right there. So ... these dimples are rather like a Sturmgewehr, the welds are rather like an HK, it is of
course a perfect hybrid between the two. One other interesting feature, to me at least,
is this additional tail that holds the recoil spring. So, once this became more common as the HK
system, this tail was basically built into the bolt carrier. You have a stem on the back to hold the recoil
spring. But when Mauser was doing these in 1945 they had this as a separate part. So the
recoil spring is here, this pushes on this and they act separately. You'll notice
there is a cutout in the bottom, right here, that gives space for the hammer to swing
up inside and hit the firing pin in the middle. Again, some of the parts sets had these
when they were captured, some did not, so some of these have been
manufactured at other times and places. I should also mention that
none of these parts were actually ... had a finish on them, a bluing or
any other sort of finish, Parkerizing. When they were captured in the
train they were all in the white, so any finish that you will ever find applied has been
done after the war by whoever assembled the guns. So this particular gun has a really cool backstory to it. These were all assembled, like I said (well like
I corrected myself earlier), in the Netherlands and once ... even while the assembly
of some of these was going on, a few of the parts kits did manage to work
their way into private hands, even back then. So, you know, officers involved in the program
may have traded one off to someone here one off to someone there. And eventually, I
don't know if it was right then or if it was later, one of the sets of parts came into the
possession of a guy named Henk Visser, who is a really quite notable, famous
firearms collector in the Netherlands, unfortunately passed away several years ago. And, he was not just an arms collector, but
also heavily involved in the arms industry. So in the 1960s Visser had an ownership
stake in Mauser, as well as H&K, and he had one of these part sets and
through apparently about 15 years of slow work and bribes and other,
you know, whatever else it took at the time, he managed to get from the British some of
the original drawings that had been salvaged, and he had his parts set, and then he had Mauser actually
complete and assemble this set of parts into this rifle. Because well, when you have an ownership
stake in the company, you can get them to do things like that for you. It's kind of cool. Now, Visser, at the time, was under the impression
that 19 guns had been assembled in the Netherlands right after the war. And so he decided to serialise
this one as number 20 to be the next in that batch. In retrospect, however, today we don't think that 19
number is accurate, but no one really knows for sure. So that's how this one ended up with the
serial number of V-20 (V for trials in German) and that's why it has a Mauser logo
on it, it was actually built by Mauser. And then of course the original
trunnion that was in the gun failed. Mauser, of course, when they assembled this gun,
they are a legitimate factory, they proof tested it and kablooey. So there is a new manufactured trunnion in the
gun that Mauser made after the original one failed. So, other than that trunnion and the stock and the fire
control parts, which were made to original blueprint, the rest of these parts are original German production,
wartime Mauser production, StG-45(M) parts, making this one of very few ... In fact given
that it was made with the original blueprints and most of the others were not, those blueprints
hadn't been necessarily located or were used when the guns were being initially
assembled in the Netherlands, this is probably the most accurate reproduction,
or completion, of an StG-45 that's out there. So, there were never more than 30 to begin with,
all as parts, and only a few of those got assembled and this is probably the best one
of the bunch. So very, very, cool. I really appreciate the collector who let me take
a closer look at this and show it to you guys. If you enjoy seeing this sort of thing on-line, please
do consider supporting me directly through the website membership program or through Patreon. It's
funding from viewers like you that makes it possible for me to travel to places like Malta here
and take a look at really cool guns like this. And of course if you're looking for a
new place to live in the European Union with particularly good gun laws,
well, maybe you should consider Malta. Thanks for watching.
