Tag Archives: Berlin Wall

My Favorite Walther

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While visiting Walther’s state-of-the-art factory in Ulm, Germany earlier this year, I came across my favorite pistol that carries the company’s iconic banner.

Walther has been around in one form or another, and one location or another, to the 1880s. Whenever you say the company’s name in a conversation, the immediate Pavlovian response is typically PPK, PDP, P99, or P-38.

However, my favorite Walther is the seldom-seen, and almost unheard-of, P4 (also seen as “P38 IV”).

A factory cutaway of the P-4 in Walther’s Museum in Ulm, Germany. (All photos: Chris Eger/Guns.com)

A shortened version of the P1– which itself was an updated P-38– the P4 was adopted by the West German Border Protection (Bundesgrenzschutz) and Customs (Zoll) agencies during the chilliest days of the Cold War.

So what makes it my favorite? Check out the article in my column at Guns.com.

P-38 101

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I’ve always had a soft spot for P-38s (the guns, not the can openers, as I find the longer P-51 type a much better form of the latter and don’t even get me into the P-38 Lightning) since I was a kid.

With that, I had the great opportunity recently while in the GDC Vault to find examples made by all three WWII makers– Walther, Spreewerk, and Mauser– as well as some Cold War-era West German Ulm-marked guns.

There you go…

For insights into how to tell them apart and what to look for, check out my column at Guns.com. https://www.guns.com/news/2019/12/04/the-world-of-german-p-38s-walther-mauser-spreewerk-and-otherwise

Berlin Wall, now gone for 30 years

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As the “Iron Curtain” descended across Europe, the tensions along the border between the two new Germanys escalated until 1961 when construction began on a wall surrounding West Berlin from East Berlin. Dubbed a means to keep fascism out of the People’s Republic (antifaschistischer), the Berlin Wall was more of a mechanism to keep East Germans from escaping the soul-crushing misery that was Communism by fleeing to the West. It is estimated that more than 3 million Germans fled from East to West between 1949 and 1961. If they weren’t stopped, eventually all the workers would have fled the worker’s paradise and the country would be empty!

The guns of those two forces, with the DDR’s heavily indoctrinated Grenztruppen on the East, and the FGR’s Bundesgrenzschutz to the West, were interesting.

In 1975-76, Walther produced a limited run of 5,200 P38 P4 pistols, a shortened version of the P1, specifically for use by the West German Border Patrol and Customs agencies. The above, in the author’s personal collection, is one of those former BMI guns. (Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)

More in my column at Guns.com