Walther: The Company That Invented the Modern Pistol, Armed Both Sides of WWII and Got Nearly Erased

In 1886, a twenty-eight-year-old gunsmith opened a workshop in his parents' house in the Thuringian Forest of central Germany. He made hunting rifles. He had a vise, a forge, and one apprentice. His son Fritz took over in 1915 and invented something no firearms manufacturer in the world had built before: a semi-automatic pistol with a double-action trigger. The Walther PP, introduced in 1929, was the first commercially successful double-action/single-action semi-automatic pistol ever produced. Every feature it introduced — the DA/SA trigger, the safety-decocker, the loaded-chamber indicator — became standard on military and police sidearms for the next century. The PPK followed in 1931. The P38 replaced the Luger as the Wehrmacht's standard sidearm in 1938 and remained in German military service until 2004. Then the Soviets took everything. In 1945, the factory in Zella-Mehlis was dismantled, its machinery shipped to the Soviet Union, and the buildings demolished. Fritz Walther escaped to the American zone with nothing but his patents and his drawings. For eight years, there was no Walther factory. He rebuilt from nothing in Ulm, West Germany. The Bundeswehr re-adopted the P38. A British gun enthusiast wrote a letter to Ian Fleming. And a pistol designed for German plainclothes detectives in 1931 became the most famous fictional firearm in cinema history. This is the story of the company that invented the modern pistol, lost its factory twice, and kept building. —— Sources and further reading: Carl Walther GmbH — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Wa... Walther PP — Wikipedia (design history, DA/SA mechanism, production): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_PP Walther P38 — Wikipedia (Wehrmacht adoption, Luger replacement, Bundeswehr service): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther... "A Look Back at the Walther PP" — American Rifleman (NRA): https://www.americanrifleman.org/cont... "Walther Arms: Beyond A Century In Business" — American Rifleman (NRA): https://www.americanrifleman.org/cont... "James Bond's Walther PP & PPK" — Shooting Illustrated: https://www.shootingillustrated.com/c... Geoffrey Boothroyd and Ian Fleming correspondence — The James Bond Dossier: https://www.thejamesbonddossier.com/l... Walther company history — Carl Walther official site: https://carl-walther.com/company/hist... https://carl-walther.com/company/hist... NRA National Firearms Museum — Walther P38 (Soviet seizure, Ulm relocation): https://www.nramuseum.org/guns/the-ga... Neuengamme concentration camp slave labour — KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme: https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-neuengam... Umarex — Wikipedia (1993 Walther acquisition): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umarex "Home of the PDP and PPK: Factory Tour of Walther's German Plant" — Guns.com: https://www.guns.com/news/2024/06/09/... —— #Walther #WaltherPPK #WaltherP38 #PP #PPK #P38 #JamesBond #007 #Luger #Firearms #GunHistory #MilitaryHistory #Documentary #Engineering #Wehrmacht #Bundeswehr #Umarex #ColdWar #GermanEngineering #Pistol