Origin
Germany
German states and the unified Germany produced some of the most technically advanced weapons in history. The Dreyse needle gun, Mauser rifle, Luger pistol, MG 08 and MG 42 machine guns, MP 40 submachine gun, and Tiger tank are among Germany's most influential military designs.
German Arms & Weapons
Overview
Germany (including the German states before unification in 1871) has an extraordinary weapons heritage. German swordsmiths and gunsmiths were leaders of their craft from the medieval period; the city of Solingen became the "City of Blades" producing swords, knives, and razors of European renown. German firearms manufacturers — Mauser, Walther, Heckler & Koch, Carl Zeiss for optics — have shaped weapon design globally.
Medieval and Renaissance
- Solingen swords — Solingen craftsmen produced longswords, sabers, and military blades for markets across Europe from the 14th century onward
- Zweihänder — The massive two-handed sword of Landsknecht mercenaries; used by elite Doppelsöldner to break pike formations
- Fechtbücher — German fencing masters (Joachim Meyer, Hans Talhoffer) produced systematic manuals documenting longsword, dagger, and wrestling techniques
- Wheellock — Invented in Germany c. 1500; the first self-contained ignition system; expensive but weather-independent
19th Century
- Dreyse needle gun (M1841) — The world's first bolt-action military rifle; paper cartridge; gave Prussia decisive advantages at Königgrätz (1866)
- Mauser M1871 — First Mauser bolt-action; subsequent Mauser designs (M1893, M1898 Gewehr 98) became the global standard for military bolt-actions
- Krupp steel artillery — Breech-loading Krupp guns destroyed French fortifications in 1870 and set the standard for European artillery
WWI
- Gewehr 98 — Standard German infantry rifle; Mauser action; 5-round internal magazine
- MG 08 — Water-cooled heavy machine gun; on a sled mount; the defensive backbone of the Western Front
- Luger P08 — Iconic 9mm semi-automatic pistol; toggle-link action
- Stielhandgranate (stick grenade) — Distinctive handle-mounted grenade; longer throwing arm; widespread use
- MP 18 — First practical submachine gun; 9mm; 32-round drum
WWII
- Karabiner 98k — Refined Mauser bolt-action; the standard German infantry rifle
- MP 40 — 9mm folding-stock SMG; the iconic German WWII weapon
- MG 42 — 1,200 rounds/minute; the fastest-firing standard MG of the war; its "buzz saw" sound was immediately recognizable
- StG 44 — The world's first assault rifle; 7.92×33mm Kurz; directly inspired the AK-47
- Panzerfaust — Disposable anti-tank launcher; cheap, effective; produced in millions
- Tiger I / Panther — Heavily armored tanks with powerful guns; technically superior but produced in insufficient numbers
Post-War
- Heckler & Koch G3 — 7.62mm NATO; West German standard rifle; widely exported
- HK MP5 — 9mm SMG; the world's most widely used police and special forces SMG
- HK G36 — 5.56mm assault rifle; replaced G3 in Bundeswehr
- HK416 — Gas-piston AR variant; used by US special forces, French Army, Norwegian military
This article is a stub.
Battles & Operations
Weapons
-
Frankish Francisca
The francisca is the throwing axe of the early Franks, the Germanic people who overran Roman Gaul in the fifth century and gave France its name. A short-hafted axe with a curved, forward-angled head, it was hurled in a volley just before the Frankish line charged, to break shields and disorder the enemy at the moment of contact. Found in warrior graves from the Rhine to northern France between about 450 and 700, it was so closely tied to the Franks that later writers believed the weapon was named after them — or they after it.
-
Gothic Plate Armor
Gothic armor is the name collectors give to the full plate harnesses made in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire from roughly 1460 to 1500, the high point of the medieval armorer's art. Slender, pointed and fluted, with rippled edges and cusped borders echoing the architecture of the age, the Gothic harness enclosed its wearer entirely in articulated tempered steel yet weighed no more than an infantryman's modern kit. Made by the great workshops of Augsburg, Nuremberg and Landshut, it was the rival of the rounded Milanese style and the ancestor of the fluted Maximilian armor.
-
HK MP5
The Heckler & Koch MP5 is the submachine gun by which every other has been judged since the 1970s. It shrank the roller-delayed blowback action of the G3 battle rifle to the 9mm Parabellum cartridge and, uniquely among its contemporaries, fires from a closed bolt, giving it rifle-like accuracy in a compact package. Adopted by German police in 1966 and made famous by the SAS at the Iranian Embassy in 1980, it armed counter-terrorist units, police tactical teams and special forces in more than forty countries and remains in service today.
-
HK MP7
The Heckler & Koch MP7 is a personal defence weapon: a machine pistol the size of a large handgun that fires a small, very fast 4.6x30mm cartridge able to defeat the soft body armor that stops every conventional submachine-gun round. Introduced in 2001, it uses a scaled-down version of the gas-piston rotating-bolt action of the G36 rifle, weighs about four pounds, and can be fired one-handed or shouldered from its extending stock. It serves German forces, the SEALs and special units in more than twenty countries, and was carried on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
-
HK416
The Heckler & Koch HK416 is a 5.56mm assault rifle and carbine that keeps the ergonomics, magazines and accessories of the American M4 but replaces its direct-impingement gas system with a short-stroke piston derived from the G36, so that no combustion gas enters the receiver. Developed from 2004 at the request of Delta Force, it runs cleaner, cooler and more reliably with short barrels and suppressors than the M4, and it became the weapon of American special operations, the rifle that killed Osama bin Laden, the Marine Corps' M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle, and the service rifle of Norway, France and other armies.
-
Landsknecht Zweihänder
The zweihänder was the great two-handed sword of the German Landsknecht mercenaries: up to 1.8 meters of steel with side rings, parrying hooks, and a leather-bound ricasso for the second hand. It was carried by the Doppelsöldner — 'double-pay men' — who earned that pay fighting at the front of the pike square, guarding the banner, and hewing into the opposing pike hedge. It is the largest sword ever carried into European battle in numbers.
-
Longsword
The longsword is the two-handed knightly sword of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance: a straight, double-edged blade of roughly 33 to 43 inches on a grip long enough for both hands, with a simple cross guard and a heavy pommel that balances the whole. It was a cut-and-thrust weapon carried by men-at-arms in war, by gentlemen in the duel, and by the students of the great German and Italian fencing masters, whose surviving manuals make it the best-documented sword in European history.
-
Luger P08
The Luger P08 is the toggle-locked semi-automatic pistol of the German military through both World Wars, and for many the most recognizable handgun ever made. Georg Luger refined Hugo Borchardt's clockwork toggle action into an elegant, naturally pointing service pistol and, in 1902, necked his cartridge up to create the 9mm Parabellum — today the most widely used pistol round on earth. The pistol itself has been retired for generations; the cartridge it introduced rules the world's holsters still.
-
MG 42
The MG 42 was the German general-purpose machine gun of the Second World War and the most influential machine gun of the twentieth century. Designed by Werner Gruner at Grossfuss from stamped steel to replace the expensive MG 34, it fired 7.92mm Mauser from a recoil-operated, roller-locked action at 1,200 rounds per minute — a rate that produced the ripping sound Allied soldiers called Hitler's buzzsaw — with a barrel that changed in seconds. Some 400,000 were made, and as the 7.62mm NATO MG3 it is still in service and production eighty years later.
-
MP 18
The MP 18 was the first practical submachine gun to go into service: a light automatic weapon firing pistol cartridges, designed by Hugo Schmeisser for the Bergmann company and issued to German assault troops in the last year of the First World War. It fed from the 32-round snail drum of the artillery Luger and fired about 450 rounds a minute. It came too late and in too few numbers to change the war, but it created a new class of weapon and was the ancestor of the MP40, the Sten and every submachine gun that followed.
-
MP40
The MP40 was Germany's war-production submachine gun: 9mm Parabellum from an open bolt, a plain tube receiver of stampings and welds, no wood anywhere, and the first folding stock ever standard on a service long arm. Issued to squad leaders, paratroopers, and vehicle crews rather than whole units, its controllable 500-rounds-per-minute cyclic rate and modern manufacture made it one of the most influential small arms of the Second World War — and, wrongly, 'the Schmeisser' to every Allied soldier who met one.
-
Mauser C96
The Mauser C96 is a German semi-automatic pistol that entered service in 1896, designed by the Feederle brothers at Mauser's Oberndorf works. Its round grip earned it the nickname 'Broomhandle'. It loads from a stripper clip into a fixed ten-round magazine ahead of the trigger and takes a hollow wooden holster-stock that turns it into a light carbine. Over a million were made, and it served for half a century with armies and officers from the Boer War to Winston Churchill at Omdurman, Germany's 'Red 9' of 1916, and China's warlord and revolutionary armies.
-
Mauser Gewehr 98
The Gewehr 98 is the definitive Mauser: the 1898 pattern bolt-action whose controlled-round feed, dual front locking lugs, and massive claw extractor made it the strongest and most copied rifle action ever designed. It armed the German Empire through the First World War, evolved into the Karabiner 98k of the Second, and sired the sporting and military bolt rifles of half the world — the pattern against which every bolt action since has been measured.
-
Maxim Gun
The Maxim gun was the first true machine gun: a weapon that used the energy of each shot to load and fire the next, and would keep firing as long as the trigger was held and the belt kept feeding. Invented by the American-born Hiram Maxim in London in 1884, the water-cooled, belt-fed gun fired about 600 rounds a minute. It conquered African empires for Britain in the 1890s, and in its German MG 08 and Russian M1910 forms it dominated the battlefields of the First World War.
-
Mk25
The Mk 25 is the United States Navy's designation for the SIG Sauer P226 as carried by the Navy SEALs: a standard P226 in 9mm with a phosphate-coated barrel and internals, a corrosion-resistant slide and frame finish, a rail for a light, and the fouled anchor of the Naval Special Warfare command engraved on the slide. The SEALs adopted the P226 in 1989 after slide failures on their Berettas, and it was their sidearm through the Gulf War, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan, including the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
-
Mondragón Rifle
The Mondragón rifle was the first semi-automatic rifle adopted as the standard service arm of any army. Designed by the Mexican general Manuel Mondragón and built in Switzerland by SIG, it was adopted by Mexico in 1908 in 7x57mm Mauser, years before any great power fielded a self-loading infantry rifle. Only a few hundred reached Mexico before the order collapsed, but Germany bought the remaining stock in the First World War and issued it with a drum magazine to its aircrew as the Fliegerselbstlader-Karabiner 15.
-
Pickelhaube
The Pickelhaube is the spiked leather helmet of the Prussian and Imperial German armies, adopted by King Frederick William IV in 1842 and worn into the trenches of the First World War. Made of molded, lacquered leather with brass or steel fittings, a spike on top and an eagle plate on the front, it marked its wearer's state and regiment at a glance. It gave almost no protection against shell fragments and was replaced by the steel Stahlhelm in 1916, but it remains the most recognizable symbol of Imperial Germany and a cornerstone of militaria collecting.
-
Schöningen Spear
The Schöningen spears are the oldest complete hunting weapons ever found: about ten wooden spears, most of spruce, excavated between 1994 and 1998 from an open-cast lignite mine at Schöningen in Lower Saxony, Germany. Long dated to about 300,000 years ago, and more recently argued to be closer to 200,000, they were made by archaic humans — Homo heidelbergensis or early Neanderthals — and lay among the butchered bones of more than twenty wild horses. They proved that humans hunted large game with carefully made weapons far earlier than many scholars had believed.
-
Sig Sauer P226
The SIG Sauer P226 is a full-size double-action service pistol introduced in 1984 for the United States Army's XM9 trials, which it lost to the Beretta 92 on price alone after matching it in every test of reliability and accuracy. A double-column development of the Swiss P220, made by J.P. Sauer in Germany and later in New Hampshire, it has no manual safety, relying on a decocking lever and a long first trigger pull, and it became one of the most respected sidearms of the late twentieth century: the pistol of the Navy SEALs, the SAS, the FBI and police forces worldwide.
-
StG 44
The StG 44 — Sturmgewehr, 'storm rifle' — was the first true assault rifle: select-fire, stamped-steel, and chambered for the intermediate 7.92x33mm Kurz cartridge that split the difference between pistol and full rifle power. Fielded by Germany from 1943 despite Hitler's early obstruction, it gave a single infantryman controllable automatic fire to 300 meters, and every assault rifle adopted since — the Kalashnikov first and most famously among them — walks the doctrinal path it opened.
-
Wheellock Pistol
The wheellock was the first self-igniting firearm: a spring-driven steel wheel spun against pyrite to shower sparks into the pan, no burning match required. That mechanical trick — clockmaker's work, plausibly connected to Leonardo's sketches — made the pistol possible: a gun that could wait, loaded and ready, in a holster or a coat. It armed the first pistol cavalry, provoked the first firearm bans, and produced some of the most lavish objects of the Renaissance.