ZF-41: Germany's Worst Sniper Scope

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Reddit Comments
  • Let's make a scope that is basically the same as iron sights but you are going to look through several glass lenses.

  • why would we do this?

  • because the scope is going to look good on the rifle.

👍︎︎ 83 👤︎︎ u/leto78 📅︎︎ Feb 09 2021 🗫︎ replies

I admire that they blur the swastika- a lot of militaria and gun stuff is just a swastika fest.

I’ve gotten shit for complains about the parade of swastikas on Reddit subs- but I just get sick of it.

👍︎︎ 17 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Feb 09 2021 🗫︎ replies

Have a ZF k98, can confirm the scope is barely better than iron sights sometimes.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/Bigblocknova 📅︎︎ Feb 10 2021 🗫︎ replies

Sad german noises :C

👍︎︎ 11 👤︎︎ u/Xwhite_power_rangerX 📅︎︎ Feb 09 2021 🗫︎ replies
Captions
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to be taking a look at the German ZF-41 scope. I hesitate to say sniper scope for reasons that we will get into. However, this was the most widely manufactured and widely issued German optical sight for the infantry in World War Two. And so there's actually, relative to the other German scopes, there's quite a lot of these floating around. Now before we go any further, I want to make it very clear that this rifle setup here is fake. The rifle's real, and we'll excuse some of the weird sporterisation that was done to the stock. The rifle's a real Gewehr 41 made by Walther. The scope on the rifle here is a reproduction ZF-41, which were on the market for a little while. This one is by the way entirely authentic, as is the case. So these are the ones we'll be looking at in detail. The mount for this repro scope on this real rifle is unfortunately totally fabricated and not historically correct. However I wanted to show it here because the ZF-41 is an unusually small optic, and it has an unusually long amount of eye relief. And I wanted to show it in context on a rifle so you can see how big this really is, and where it's actually mounted on a gun relative to how a typical scope would normally be mounted. So the thing to keep in mind is that this is very short. Without the sunshades this is like 5.25 inches long. It is very small in diameter, even the final versions were just under one inch in diameter at the wide end. And it's mounted with between 12 and 15 inches of eye relief. Which is to say the distance from the rear lens to the shooter's eye when you get a proper sight picture. So you're not intended to get your eye up here, this actually focuses your sight at the proper position to have your proper cheek weld on the rifle. So where did this thing come from? Well it has its origins in the early blitzkrieg as far back in World War Two as the German invasion of Poland. There are a lot of sort of lessons learned from the Wehrmacht in its first real major operation of the war that come back to general headquarters. And among them is that there is a lack of precision marksmanship available to front line units. They don't necessarily need fully trained snipers, but what they decide they want to have is every infantry squad to be equipped with basically its best marksman having some sort of optical sight. And the idea was this guy is then sort of the go-to man in the squad for engaging a small precision target. Something like, for example, the shooting ports on a bunker or turret, machine gunners who are bunkered down in a machine gun nest, that sort of high-value precision target. You don't need a full-on sniper to do it, but it would help if you had something better than the kind of "ehh" Kar98k iron sights. So with that in mind, what is originally actually designated the ZF-40 scope goes into development in early 1940. And we're pretty sure it's the Emil Busch ... optics company that does the development work on this. Now the idea is ... it doesn't have to have a lot of magnification, it's not meant for use at very long range. It's meant for use at basic 100 to 200 yard combat ranges, but giving you an optical sight so that you have a little bit of magnification to get your target better, and you have a nice single field of focus. You just put the pointer on the target and fire, instead of having to deal with sight alignment. So by making it a long eye relief, very lightweight design like this, they reduce the amount of weight that it's adding to the guy's rifle. They mount it forward far enough that the rifles can still be reloaded with stripper clips without any interference with the scope. On a Kar98k the bolt can be operated without any interference. You don't have to change the safety. On the typical, more traditional style, Mauser snipers they typically had to add a different sniper safety that was extended so that you could actually use it under the scope. Didn't have to do any of that stuff with the ZF-41. And the idea was we'll just make a different rear sight base that has a little rail, and you can slide the scope onto the rail, locks in place. When you're not actually using it, it can go in this nice small little carry case to be protected. The idea has some real merit. The problem was ... before it was fully developed, before they were ready to issue it, the purpose got side tracked. As the Germans invade Russia they run into the Russian sniping program. And the Russians took sniping a lot more seriously than basically anyone else in World War Two. And the Germans discovered that they're taking serious losses from Russian snipers, and boy, they'd kind of like to have a lot of snipers of their own in Russia. And the problem they run into in a sort of logistical-industrial sense is they don't have enough scopes to do this. They try to start up sniper training programs, but they just don't have enough of the physical equipment to do it. Well, we've got these ZF-41 scopes. They were meant to be kind of a basic squad marksman piece of equipment, but it's now seen as more important to get snipers out there in the field. And so they start equipping snipers with these guys. And so for ... really the first couple of years of production the ZF-41 would be issued to snipers, and this caused it to be really pretty well hated by most of the guys who had it, or at least a lot of them. The problem was you'd get guys who would go through their sniper training with a proper 4x power, modern (for the time), traditional rifle scope, and then they get sent off to combat with this 1.5x power, like 1.5 angle field of view. It's a really narrow field of view on this, it's very low magnification. And it's like, "All the benefits of a proper scope that I trained with, I no longer have." But it was the optical sight that was actually available, and so it got used primarily for snipers. And that would last until - technically it would really last until July of 1944. So to put the time frame in context here, early 1940 this goes into development. It's formally introduced in July of 1941, but they don't have very many of them for a little while. It would go through a couple of iterations and developments, which we'll get into when we take a closer look at the scopes. And it was finally in the summer of 1944 that the sniper program put its foot down and said, "This ZF-41 thing is just not acceptable." And new doctrine was issued that units would report their available armaments such that ZF-41 equipped rifles were just lumped in with regular Kar 98 carbines. They were not included as scoped rifles. And so that's the point where ... it actually becomes the designated marksman thing that it was intended to be like three or four years earlier. Now, I also want to mention, because we do have this out here, that the first intended use of the scope ... (as designated ZF-40), was going to be an optical sight for Germany's new semi-automatic rifles. And the idea was, "We're going to replace all these bolt-action rifles with semi-auto ones anyway, because the Russians kind of did that and ... their semi-auto rifles are pretty impressive. And the Americans did it, their semi-auto rifle is pretty impressive. Let's just give everyone the best possible equipment, let's give everyone a semi-auto rifle with an optical sight." Now the problem was this didn't go as planned, it turned out ... the initial rifles were not up to expectations. The G41s had some real problems. And the mounts that were designed for them, which were these like sheet-metal saddle mounts, were also not sufficient. They weren't sufficiently accurate, and virtually none of them were made. And so the ZF-40 intended for the Gewehr 41 kind of never became a thing. And the ZF-40 marked scopes, as best I can tell, were actually never issued. They were kept at the factories as they were being made, and they would eventually be rebuilt as ZF-41/1 scopes, which is exactly what we have here. So I think that's a pretty good point to get in closer with the camera, and show you some of the details of this particular ZF-41 itself. These things are just downright adorable little scopes. To look at a few of the features here. We have a clip-on sunshade on the front. This is one of the patterns that has its actual military stock number both embossed in it here, and engraved in the front. A few of them are like this, most of them don't have those markings. And there are several different subtle variations of sunshades. And you can see this gives you a little bit of protection, both for shade and also to prevent like rain or snow from getting onto the lens itself. There is a similar shade on the rear lens, we can pop that off. The theory is that this open box is for letting in a little more light, I don't know if that's actually true or not, but no one appears to know for sure why that's on there. The mounts were all made by Berlin-Lübecker, and are marked "duv" and a Waffenamt 214 on there. So this is ... an original mount on an original scope. The way that these actually worked is they have two little spring-loaded rollers in here that slide onto a rail. And then a spring-loaded catch here at the end, rather like a bayonet lug catch, that locks into the end of the rail and holds the scope in place. So the whole thing is very easily detachable, and you push the button in, and you can slide this off the rail. While we're looking at that mount, let me pull out the reproduction here and show you probably the easiest way to tell a reproduction mount is that the originals are milled, and the reproductions were cast. And so there are a number of casting marks, you see these circles, on the reproduction mount. If you see those it's definitely a reproduction mount, the originals have no such markings on them. The reticle style inside the ZF-41 (and we're looking at the reproduction here), is basically a simple German post, with a single pointed centre post, and then a pair of horizontal stadia lines. In the ZF-41/1 pattern that vertical post was made thicker as you see here. For a while the rifle serial number was marked on the scope mount to keep the two together in case they got separated. And you'll notice this ends in 53, and the rings here have been electro-pencil marked 53 to also match. As for the scope itself. On the scope here behind the BDC you'll see a series of markings. There is a three letter code identifying the manufacturer. The only time you will see an actual manufacturer name is ... Busch, which made a small batch of the ZF-40s apparently with their actual name engraved, the rest are all codes. And there's something like 15 different companies that manufactured these. The little blue plus is an indication of cold-weather lubricant being used. And then we have the actual designation, so this particular one is a ZF-40. The 40 has been crossed out and replaced with a 41/1. The three main variations that we'll get are the ZF-40 and ZF-41. ... Well, the [original] ZF-40s ... had a slightly smaller objective out here, it was 22mm, where the later versions bumped it up to 24mm. And they also had like 9 lenses inside this tube. ... The design of the scope was improved over time and this was reduced ultimately to either 5 or 7 lenses. So the ZF-41 is an improved internal design. The 41/1 also has a widened reticle post, the vertical post in the reticle was made wider for better target acquisition. So not that much change. You'll also find on the ZF-41/1s that the overall scope is the same length, but this rear section that houses the rear lenses has been made longer. So on the earlier patterns this little raised area doesn't start until something like here. So what we have basically with these is they were ZF-40s intended for Gewehr 41 rifles. They were never actually issued, and they were all retrofitted to 41/1 at the factory before ever being issued. And that's for this specific pattern with the later style back here. Ah, let's see, a couple of other practical matters. There is an 800 yard BDC on here that you can rotate. ... This is like I said the original one, and this is frozen up and doesn't want to rotate, and I'm not going to force it. But the idea is you've got your little dot there, this one's set to 300 metres. 800 metres is really kind of laughable with this, you probably rarely go beyond three. I can show you on this reproduction one, it rotates quite easily, like that. And we've got the little spring-loaded clip here that locks it in its various notches. ... One of the other production variations you will find is the early production ZF-41s have this knurled section the exact same diameter as the rest of the BDC. And the second and third patterns are enlarged like this one. So the reproductions are a reproduction of the third pattern of this scope. You will see ... the reproductions are "cxn" codemarked, all of them, and ZF-41. And serial number 130505, the reproductions all have the same serial number. So they're really not that hard to spot once you know what you're looking for. One of the least convenient aspects of the ZF-41 is actually zeroing it. So to do that you take the front cover off, you have to actually loosen this front bushing, and then you take this and rotate it back to here. And what we have are a pair of basically eccentric cams. And there are a pair of basically little sticks that go into these holes and you rotate these two dials back and forth. You would do this while using a prismatic little lens that mounts on the end of the scope, so that you can look in the side and a mirror will show you what the reticle is looking at. You do this to a rifle that is clamped into a rest, because ... you would think that like one of these is elevation, and one of them is windage. But there's not enough space inside the body of this scope tube to have a traditional style of windage and elevation adjustment. So instead, what they have is eccentric cams that kind of rotate your aiming pointer in ... a figure eight pattern. And so you kind of just doodle with these dials until the pointer, the top of the aiming post, is pointing at the place where you want it to be on your target. So the idea is you fire a couple of rounds while the rifle is clamped, and then you adjust the scope to be in the middle of that group. So this was something that was only allowed to be done by the technical sergeant of a unit. Individual soldiers were strictly prohibited from messing with this, for a very good reason. This is really kind of a nightmare of a scope to zero if you don't have a proper bench clamp setup to do it on. Despite there being like 15 manufacturers of scopes, there was only the one company, Berlin-Lübecker, that made the scope mounts, and there was also only one company that made the scope cases. This is a company called Wessel & Müller, and their ... factory code was "jvb" and Waffenamt 542. And let's see, we have the serial number to go with the scope or rifle here, and there's our jvb and our Waffenamt stamp. There are just a couple of different variations of the scope cases. They originally used a leather strap, they later changed that to a webbing strap. This is supposed to have a little webbing pull tab on it. It's spring loaded up in here to snap it shut. The webbing pull tab has rotted away at some point. They did later replace that with a D-ring instead of webbing. If we open this up inside, we have space for the scope itself to sit right like that. You can see the hole down there, that is for the handle of a little horsehair brush to wipe off the lenses. The very early patterns actually have a tube attached to the inside of the case up here to hold that brush. And then there is also a little spring-loaded compartment here which was to hold a wipe cloth, which I don't have. So this is also an original case, this is what they ought to look like. I believe there are reproductions of these made as well. I should also say, a variety of colours were used, ... some were painted green. There were Afrika Korps ones painted a desert sand colour. There were Luftwaffe ones that were painted blue. Some of them were painted camouflage patterns in the field. It's a matter of being able to identify original paint, and you can see from the wear on this that this is pretty obviously original paint. I should point out before we call this one quits, the accuracy standard for a ZF-41 mounted K98k Mauser was you fired 5 shots at 100 metres, and 3 of them had to fall within a 2cm square, which is about three quarters of an inch. But any shot that cut the line of that square counted as being in, so it's approximately something like a 1 inch group at 100 metres. Which sounds pretty good, except that it's kind of that internet marksman standard of shoot 5, arbitrarily call the worst two as fliers, and then measure your remaining 3 shots and that's your actual group. Now keeping in mind that the ... accuracy standard for a Kar 98k in general was basically four minutes of angle, they were in fact choosing some of the better rifles to put these scopes on, so. It was starting in late 1941, early 1942, that they started supplying basically in-the-field kits to mount these scopes onto existing rifles. Prior to that, and continuing throughout the war, these would be made as factory rifles with the ZF-41 mounts. The problem they had with doing it as an in-the-field retrofit was that the rear sight block had not originally been designed with any sort of quality standards sufficient to mount a scope on. Because why would you bother? Why would you bother making the rear sight block arbitrarily perfectly machined for no good reason. It's only after the fact you come back and go, "Oh, we need that surface to be perfectly parallel with the bore in order to mount this scope on it." So in practice it was something like 1 in 5 rifles could actually successfully have a ZF-41 mounted on it. The rest of them would end up ... pointing too far off in any given direction to be able to be zeroable. And so throughout the war rifles would be manufactured by Mauser Oberndorf, and Mauser Borsigwalde, as well as Berlin-Lübecker made K98ks with ZF-41s. You will find the ... scopes originally mounted on other rifles, and ... those were the field kits. So, if you would like to know more of the really eye-watering level of detail about all of the variations and developments and iterations on the ZF-40 and ZF-41 scopes, I would very much recommend a website run by a fellow named ... Ken Tomonari. It is a website that is in both English and Japanese, and has a tremendous amount of information on it. I will link to that in the description text of the video. So, hopefully you guys enjoyed this, learned something about the ZF-41. Thanks for watching.
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Channel: Forgotten Weapons
Views: 319,708
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, zf41, scope, scout, scout scope, long eye relief, mauser, k98k, zf40, zf41/1, Busch, due, lubecker, rifle, Wehrmacht, ww2, world war, sniper, dmr, marksman, precision, zf4, g43, g41, g41m, g41w, saddle mount, collector, collectible, rare, original, scope case
Id: sBstpqUAniw
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 21min 11sec (1271 seconds)
Published: Tue Feb 09 2021
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