In the fall of 1944, the Mauser company was given a contract to develop drawings of a direct copy of the British Sten gun (code named Gerät Potsdam), and to manufacture 10,000 of them. In fact, they were to make two different sets of drawings; one suitable for large factory use (like their own) and one for use with distributed small shops making parts for final assembly elsewhere (which is how much of British Sten production was done). The contract was fulfilled and 9972 guns in total were produced and accepted by the German military in November and December of 1944.
Why would Germany was a copy of the Sten? Well, they actually had a decent number of them. The Allies were air-dropping Stens all over Europe, and a lot of those drops were captured by German troops, not the resistance fighters they were intended for. By the end of the war the Germans were in desperate need of arms, and the Sten was both simple and already in some German use with the Volkssturm…so it actually was not a totally unreasonable idea to produce more of them.
Today, the Potsdam is an extremely rare gun to find. The two visible identifying features are the magazine well and barrel shroud, which are both made with a folded and spot welded seam. The barrels are also identifiable as they have 6 groove rifling, which the British did not use in the Sten.
Before the Potsdam production was finished, Mauser began working on further plans to simplify the design. That would be the Gerät Neumunster, aka the MP 3008. For that part of the story, see my video on the MP 3008:
The Germans already had a stamped 9mm SMG in production. Of course it had numerous German overcomplications, but it seems like if they wanted cheap and simple (not just configuration, but production, training, and logistical support) it would have made more sense to begin with the MP40 and simplify (using STEN ideas) from there.
If you need sub-machine gun akin to MP40, but stamped then use Bezruchko-Vysotskiy https://modernfirearms.net/en/submachine-guns/russia-submachine-guns/bezruchko-vysockij-eng/
Next time you’re in VHU Prague, Ian, go to the exhibition and count how many Potsdams they have on display (including ones with British silenced bbl, marked with a HUUUGE Broad Arrow). Or ask Honza S. about it.
Was the German military industrial complex really so out of control that it’d result in the issuance of a contract like this? I could accept that Otto Skorzeny thought it might be nice to have some extra Stens for special projects, but not that many. Even if the basic design is sound and not tainted by hasty manufacturing, Germans had way too many better options to need this. This is nothing but pork and I’m complaining to Reichsminister Speer about it.
I like that insight :p
it’s probably only the deep fear of getting called names that keeps people from seeing all of the pork, backhanders and jobs for the boys that are present in every day politics
with it being obvious to all but the blind that the war was going to be lost, and only a question of when, and how many Soviets were going to rape anyone they caught… so hardly a situation of everyday politics
it would therefore clearly make sense to siphon off as much as possible for the future life in Argentina or Namibia
Production of this German Sten gun didn’t stop there. The German sect “Colonia Dignidad” in South America had apparently access to blueprints of this gun, and manufactured them with a magazine facing downwards.
(I don’t know if Colonia Dignidad is well known outside Germany, but the US reader could imagine “Jonestown with Nazis but without mass suicide” to get a rough idea about it.)
Colonia Dignidad I knew about; the connection to the “German STEN” I did not. I’d heard they were manufacturing their own weapons, but what was related to me was that they were STEN copies via the US marketplace…
My informant must have been misinformed, on that count. A lot of his other info has checked out, over the years, and I bet he’d have been fascinated to learn the actual provenance for those guns. Unfortunately, he’s no longer with us; he had this obsession with “Adolf Hitler in South America”, and were he around to hear some of the stuff coming out right now? He’d be crowing “I told you so!!!” to everyone.
Germany was losing the war.
low cost.
Why not
The interior of the Nazi “system” looked a lot like any other organized crime “bust-out” operation. A lot like USAID, as a matter of fact… There just had to be enough credible physical bits to make it look like something was happening, and then the money could be siphoned off to go to Argentina or a Swiss bank account.
This is one of the hallmarks of any “revolutionary totalitarian” system… You can likely find the same pathologies, the same techniques, within the “movements” running Venezuela and North Korea. Do remember that our supposedly “sainted” Adolf H. was running extensive fiddles wherein the German government was buying copies of Mein Kampf to gift upon German citizens, and that he was charging the German Post Office for use of his likeness on all the stamps and so forth that another hand of his “government” was mandating have said images…
It was all fiddles, all the way down. Note how little economic sense was made by a lot of the Wunderwaffe… It cost more, proportionately, for the V2 system, than the US effort to build the B-29 and nuclear bomb. They were growing huge quantities of potatoes, in order to get the alcohol to put in the missiles, in order to deliver somewhat less than a ton of payload. How, exactly, was that supposed to “win the war”?
The whole thing was economic fiddles, all the way down. Mostly benefiting the small-time party members that formed the base of the pyramid, and who we didn’t do much to punish after it was all over.
There are good reasons I think we should have kept the various death camps open, and run anyone with a Party card through them. They talk about the “banality of evil”, but the reality is even more prosaic and disgusting. People didn’t support Hitler and his upper-echelon minions because they wanted world conquest; they wanted free ham, confiscated from starving Dutch and Danes. They sold out their morals not for glory and world conquest, but for tatty linen and some luxury food.
Hitler’s base thrived on that stuff, even while having their cities bombed flat. You look at the economic underpinnings, and the petty nature of most of the looting across Europe becomes quite clear. As well as demonstrating why you shouldn’t care about German cities being bombed, and civilians being “dehoused”. They were all in on it, and they were bought off for truly miniscule amounts of money. Hell, they were paying their taxes to pay the wages of the soldiers who were sending the cheap goods home; they’d have been rather better off keeping those taxes and their sons home, and building something for themselves.
The way they actually did, after the war.
If you think this was just a “thing” with the Nazis, go have a look at the UNWRA in Gaza, and how much “foreign aid” is going to prop up the Hamas criminal conspiracy, as well as how many of their “elite” are multi-millionaires off the back of it all.
Follow the money; it’ll take you some illuminating places. Like, who in Congress profits the most from all the BS like fighting for ten years in Afghanistan, and never actually addressing the issue of “safe haven” for the Taliban in Pakistan…
The whole thing is a massive fleecing job by the usual suspects. I want public forensic audits on all of them, around the world.
And the vaunted German “intellectual class” were too busy being obsessed with the occult, Horbiger’s “Eternal Ice” theory of the creation of the solar system (Which later by way of Gurdjieff became the Velikovsky “Worlds in Collision” nonsense) and the supposed suppression of the Irish harp (?) to do the due diligence academia is supposed to do before signing on to trendy “theories”.
Of course, they got their cut of the pie, too.
One of the best books on all this BS is The Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pawels and Jacques Bergier (1960). Its center section, “A Few Years in the Absolute Elsewhere”, is a detailed dissection of this macabre silly season in German and European history.
Reading the measures taken to force every academic, news media type, and even schoolteachers and factory workers in Germany to affirm their belief in the “Eternal Ice” theory, one is irresistibly reminded of the modern mania for “Anthropogenic Climate Change”, which is based on remarkably similar pseudo-scientific “concepts”. Right to “The science is settled” and “This is the only way to Save The World”- yes, they used those arguments, too.
Pawels and Bergier called Nazi Germany “A theosophical debating society- with tanks”. Mostly, it was what happens when pseudo-mysticism and a con artist’s mentality end up flying formation.
Ironically, both of the authors were themselves devotees of Gurdjieff. Well, they do say it takes one to know one.
clear ether
eon
Those connections are ones I hadn’t made, as of yet… But, they’re there.
Longer I live, the less faith and trust I have in the people who set themselves up as the “elites”. Most of them that I’ve actually met were incapable of pouring piss out of a boot that had the toes pre-cut out and equipped with written instructions telling someone what to do.
It all just goes to prove that “common” sense is the rarest thing in the world, and that those who possess it are cursed like Cassandra.
Isnt this the gun that has the infamous record of being the most expensive ever in germans military, as they aimed of making 1:1 copy along with all the british markings
Yes, AFAIK. By comparison, the MP3008 was probably the cheapest, basically a Sten MK II with everything unnecessary left off it.
Yes, cheaper to make than the Sten MK III.
clear ether
eon
I meant to say, these arguments by Ian why this gun came to be sound shoddy at best.
However, I do agree of “nazi” chaotic procurement plans and ideas of military R&D and production. Also, hard to know without documents and witnesses.
Id’d say Grease gun was the cheapest when all the machines specialized for its receiver production were set up and made (which costs millions) and it started being churned in hundreds of thousands. You do not need to lose production steps in attaching all the ancillary parts on receiver.
Mp3008 the cheapest when you make it mostly with classic lathe-milling machine-welding on receiver, very good for cottage industry.
I’ve commented it before, but russian pps43, maybe also cheapest by account of not paying workers german or USA wages (or in practice, paying anything at all 🙂 At least you get a nice communist plaque of “Top Shift Worker”
MP3008 was practically the grand-pappy of all the homemade SMGs around the world today. Pretty much every one made starting with a hunk of Schedule 80 5cm ID tubing for a receiver, a chunk of steel barstock for a bolt, and a heavy-duty shock absorber helper spring for a recoil spring, had its origins in that very basic, almost mule-stupid “redesign” of the Sten. Check out Small Arms Survey, notably Ian’s own work there, for examples.
Yes, partly it’s the “there are only so many ways to build an SMG” thing, but inside that envelope there are a few good ways to do it and a lot more not-so-good ones.
MP3008 represents one of the “any shade-tree mechanic with a lathe, a drill press, and an arc welder can do it in one weekend” ones.
It won’t be pretty, but don’t bet it won’t work when the trigger is pulled.
clear ether
eon
@Eon
there’s another rabbit hole that I haven’t ventured into yet
Martin Heidegger, who wanted to be the philosopher of National Socialism.
and (?one of the) student(?s) he was shagging;
Hannah Arendt, chronicler of Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem and pontificator on banal evil.
according to lamestream history, those two hopping into bed together again after the war, would seem inconceivable
but (allegedly) it seems like they did.
contradictions cannot exist, therefore one or more of the premises must be incorrect.
the deeper I look, the shallower national socialism and the stories around it appear to be.
was it ever anything more than the self contradictory political day dreams of an arty school boy, mixed in with a bit of Karl Lueger’s populist jooooo baiting?
It was mostly composed of the pipe-dreams of a bunch of disaffected intellectuals of the “We demand to be taken seriously!” sort.
Probably the most “important” was one Rudolf Steiner, who was largely responsible for the Nazis’ attitudes on…architecture. (?) He somehow convinced everybody else that Black Forest Gingerbread and Bauhaus Minimalism were not only non-contradictory but also “racially healthy”. I’m sure he would have absolutely hated Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, incidentally a very good book and funny as all get-out.
The rest of the crowd, like von Liebenfels and von List, really weren’t entitled to the “von”, which meant minor nobility. In fact, they both claimed kinship to Junker families who had never heard of them, not an uncommon scam in Germany from Bismarck’s era on.
Nazi dogma was a weird-ass cross between pre-Christian Odinism, Islamic theology and Persian poetic pretensions, all strained through the filters of the German Romantic movement of the 19th century. And heavily leavened with the kind of “back to nature” stuff that afflicted Thoreau over here and Rousseau elsewhere. (And afflicts “ecologists” worldwide to this day.)
When they talked about a “Thousand Year Reich”, they meant that after 1,001 years it would all be gone, leaving their grandiose monuments (like the Zeppelin Field) as crumbling ruins for future archeologists to ponder. “Who were these mighty men of our past who could create such marvelous things?”
I believe they were the only empire in history that was literally designed to “self-destruct”. After they’d whacked everybody else first, of course.
I think the rest of humanity, right down to us, are lucky it only took them twelve years to go down in flames- even with the full attention of the Allies.
As Ian Hogg said, it could have taken a Hell of a lot longer and cost us a Hell of a lot more than it actually did.
clear ether
eon
I’m definitely going to steal some of that
I’d not thought of Steiner as one of the forebears of National Cuckery.
A former gf had been sent to a Steiner Schule. She absolutely detested everything about the man and described his movement as a cult.
I do have friends who occasionally quote Steiner’s esoterica, so perhaps he wasn’t all bad, or at least not as bad as trying to make sense of Hegel, Thomas Carlyle, Antonio Gramsci and then the various race fanatics through Madison Grant to Oswald Spengler.