Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another 
video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction
Company. I'm taking a look at some of the guns
that they are selling in their upcoming
February of 2016 Regional auction.
And I have a very cool one here today to take a look at.
We've looked at a number of German last-ditch
World War Two firearms, and this is another of them.
This is an MP3008, which was also known as the Gerät Neumunster.
A lot of these late war German projects were named after cities.
Two in particular that are relevant to this story.
Now, this is basically a simplified 
German copy of the British Sten gun.
The Sten itself was pretty simple to begin with, but 
the Germans managed to simplify it even further.
So, from the records we know that Heinrich Himmler 
was actually interested or aware of the Sten gun,
taking a note of it and interest in it as early as 1942.
The British actually dropped a fair number of 
Sten guns into Europe for resistance groups,
and the Germans captured a lot 
of those. That's kind of a given
when you're dropping supplies behind enemy 
lines, ... the enemy will capture a lot of them.
Well, the Germans actually captured 
a substantial number of Sten guns,
and by 1943 they were actually sending 
captured Sten guns to various units.
Not typically frontline combat units, but things 
like anti-partisan groups operating behind the lines.
Now the first German production of 
Sten guns occurred in the autumn of 1944.
Things were getting ... kind of desperate for Germany,
and the German government contracted 
with the Mauser company to make
10,000 copies of the Sten gun. 
Basically just straight copies.
Horizontal mag well, barrel shroud, all of that stuff.
... They were made by Mauser, it only took them about 
six weeks to do in November and December of 1944.
And those are actually recognizable because, 
among other things, the magazine well is a
single piece of metal that was wrapped 
around a mandrel and then welded into a tube.
Where the British used a 
seamless tube for the magazine well.
So, there are some ways to tell those apart.
At the same time that Mauser was 
manufacturing this order of 10,000
(and by the way, the exact Sten copy 
was called the ... Gerät Potsdam),
at the same time that Mauser was manufacturing 
those, they were also looking into simplifying the design.
And one of Mauser's R&D engineers, a guy 
named Ludwig Vorgrimmler, who you may recognize
from his work on ... roller delayed blowback,
 which eventually led to the HK91 series of rifles.
Well, Ludwig Vorgrimmler was the engineer 
who was tasked with simplifying the Sten gun.
So Vorgrimmler made ... 
two major changes to the design.
The first one is that he made the 
magazine vertical instead of horizontal.
That doesn't change the mechanics of the gun all 
that much, it's kind of a matter of personal preference.
Obviously German troops were used 
to the MP40 vertical magazine well.
This may have been a little bit better for 
friendly fire identification and prevention.
And just more in line with what 
German troops were used to.
He also welded the magazine 
well straight onto the receiver tube,
which was different than how the Stens were.
The other major simplification he made was 
to completely get rid of the barrel shroud.
Deemed it unnecessary, with a vertical 
magazine well that you can use as a front grip
you don't really need a barrel shroud out 
there. And if you're trying to manufacture
the guns as quickly and as cheaply as 
possible that's an easy thing to get rid of.
There are a couple very minor 
modifications to the trigger group
just to make things less expensive to manufacture.
But that's it, mag well and the 
barrel shroud are the main items.
Now, between those two and 
getting this thing tooled up at Mauser,
they were able to get the net production time for one of 
these guns down to a single man hour of labour in total.
Which is really a pretty significant ... that's a very 
quick, very cheap, very simple gun to manufacture.
So, just as Mauser was starting to make 
Gerät Potsdam Sten copies in November of 1944,
the German government ... placed its first 
order for the Gerät Neumunster, this guy.
And they wanted a million of them, 
which was only slightly, ludicrously optimistic.
There is no way Mauser was going to be able to 
manufacture in anything like that kind of quantity
at the very end of 1944. It was 
ludicrous... But they made an attempt,
and like many of the Volkssturm projects at the 
end of World War Two, manufacture of these guns
was divided up amongst all sorts of small 
industrial shops that could handle individual tasks.
So, I don't know the exact details, but you would 
have for example, one small shop making stocks,
you could have a shop making receiver 
tubes or bolts or other components of the gun,
and then they would typically ... those parts 
would be brought together at an assembly centre
and built into complete guns either by a major company 
like Mauser or by yet another mid-level of subcontractor.
So, because of the chaos in Germany as 
these were actually being manufactured,
like at this point we're talking like early 1945,
there is very little hard evidence of where 
these guns were actually manufactured.
We know not more than a few thousand of 
them ended up actually getting produced,
and ... some of them have no markings at all. 
Some of them have production code markings
that are recognisable as being from various German 
production plants, and some of them have three-letter
identification codes that have remained a mystery. 
The records were destroyed at the end of the war,
and there's just no way of knowing what shop a 
specific code refers to. This gun is an example of that.
This is marked "TJK" here on the magazine 
well, which is a recognized maker's mark,
but nobody knows who exactly that refers to.
Probably some small ad-hoc shop that ... had 
a few machine tools and was able to produce
some of the major components here. They 
might have just been making magazine wells,
or they might have actually been 
assembling guns. We just don't know.
The one other item that we do see stamped on here 
is a large letter H, which stands for Heer (H E E R).
Which ... signifies that this went to the 
German Army which is a little bit unusual.
A lot of these sorts of guns typically would go to 
the Volkssturm, which was an arm of the Nazi party,
and not the formal German military. But this appears 
to have actually been issued out to the Wehrmacht.
Couple things I want to point out here. For one thing 
our selector markings are different on the German version,
we have a "D" on this side, which is 
for "Dauerfeuer", or multiple firing.
And an "E" on this side for "Einzelfeuer", which is single shot.
So, like the Sten, this could be switched 
between single shot and full auto.
But the markings refer to German 
words instead of English ones.
Also the magazine release is slightly different 
on these guns than they were on original Sten guns.
So this is pinned in location right here at the 
bottom of the magazine well, and it actually rotates
around that pin in this direction.
So there is a coil spring here and this end is 
actually not attached to the mag well at all.
The spring in this one is 
... pretty much given up the ghost.
But there is a notch that comes through the 
magazine well here which holds on to the magazine.
... And the idea was that spring is 
pulling this piece ... this direction.
So it's pulling it like that, which holds the magazine 
in place. When you push it in, the magazine
... the catch here comes out and releases 
the mag. These did use MP40 magazines.
But despite the small production numbers relative 
to everything else, these did actually see service
at the end of the war. There is some 
documentation of them being used in combat.
Probably not for very long. It's probably a 
pretty good incentive to go find the Americans
and surrender to them before the 
Russians overrun your position.
This particular example, if you are interested in having 
it, is of course coming up for sale here at Rock Island.
It is registered as a DEWAT, 
the barrel has been plugged,
and in addition to that, the firing pin has been 
ground off of the bolt. So ... it's not a firing gun.
It could be legally reactivated if you wanted 
to put in the work for that, but I think as it is
it's a pretty interesting, pretty good example, 
of last-ditch German firearms manufacture.
If you check the link in the description text below, 
you will find Rock Island's catalogue page
on this weapon, and take a look at 
their description, their pictures,
and place a bid right there 
on-line if you're interested in it.
Thanks for watching.
