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.
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.
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.
Have a ZF k98, can confirm the scope is barely better than iron sights sometimes.
Sad german noises :C