A design sandwiched between two of the most iconic pistols in history, the oft-forgotten yet still very collectible Walther P88 gets overlooked.
Developed in the early 1980s as a double-action/single-action 9mm duty pistol with a double-stack magazine to compete against just about every other big handgun maker in the world for the U.S. Air Force (and later Army) pistol trials, the gun that ultimately became the P88 has a distinctive profile.
A circa-December 1986 P88 prototype with wood grip panels and an extra safety behind the grip. The P88 entered production in January 1987. Photo taken at the Walther Museum in Ulm, Germany. (All photos unless noted: Chris Eger/Guns.com)
A circa-1988 cutaway Schnittmodell of the production variant of the P88, complete with the now familiar decocker lever. Photo taken at the Walther Museum in Ulm, Germany.
When introduced, the P88 was billed as a more full-sized companion to the P5 Compact. The banner reads, “Self-loading pistols: over a century of experience in handgun manufacturing.” (Image courtesy of Walther.)
The most common P88 variant has the fixed front sight milled into the top of the slide and a large frame-mounted decocker lever that doubles as a slide catch.
Note the ambidextrous controls to include left and right-side push-button magazine release and decocker/slide catch. The pistol borrows the Walther P-5’s double-action trigger and safety system.
Compare the pistol to the final variant of the P38, the P4. Introduced in 1974, Walther only produced a limited run of 5,200 P4s, with most used primarily by the West German Border Protection (Bundesgrenzschutz) and Customs (Zoll) agencies during the chilliest days of the Cold War. The follow-on P88, which debuted 50 years after the single-stack P38 was adopted, was billed as the metaphorical heir to the throne.
The standard full-sized P88 uses a 4-inch barrel, which gives the pistol a 7.4-inch overall length and a 5.92-inch sight radius.
With its 15+1 shot double-stack magazine, it stands 5.61 inches high.
The width over the slide is a trim 0.93 inches, akin to the Browning Hi-Power. Note the milled sight trench with the integrated front sight blade and the peaked barrel hood inside a flared ejection port in the slide.
The width at the pistol’s widest point over the He-Man polymer grips and ambi controls is a beefy 1.5 inches.
The unloaded weight is 31.5 ounces, which bounces to 38.3 when loaded. Using a Duralumin alloy frame helps save a few ounces over an all-steel gun. Walther had lots of experience with alloy-framed service pistols, going back to the post-WWII P1 (updated P38) series, which debuted in the 1960s.
Peeking at the inside of the pistol is easy, as takedown is toolless and familiar to many other common designs. Of note, the P88 was Walther’s first modern locked-breech pistol to abandon its traditional locking wedge design, instead opting for a Browning-style cam system.
Note that the slide rails are full length. The pistol just glides through its cycle.
The textured polymer grip includes a recessed lanyard ring, a must for handguns being shopped around for military and police contracts.
The Walther P88 had the distinction of being the company’s final production hammer-fired DA/SA 9mm with a decocker.
This specimen shows the Ulm proof house’s antler proof mark and a 1990 date. Like most Walthers from that era, this one was imported and sold through the now-defunct Interarms company. For reference, Interarms folded in 1999.
An exceedingly accurate design, the P88 shipped from the factory with a 25m proof target serial numbered to the gun, as seen to the left. Right is an example of rapid offhand fire from the 25, with all rounds keeping inside the 5-zone of a B27 silhouette.
Walther later debuted several additional variants of the P88, including the Compact, Competition, Champion, and Sport.
Introduced in January 1991, the P88 A1 Compact uses a 3.83-inch barrel to create a pistol some 7.15 inches in overall length. It has a 14-round magazine due to its shorter 5.29-inch height. Unloaded weight is 29 ounces. This puts it almost the same size as the Walther P5. Note the slide-mounted P38-style decocker rather than the frame-mounted decocker as seen on other P88 models. It was also marketed in a 16-shot 8mm signal pistol format. Image courtesy of Walther.
The full-sized production P88, top, compared to the P88 A1 Compact, bottom. Photo taken at the Walther Museum in Ulm, Germany.
By 1993, the Compact spun off into the Competition. Photo taken at the Walther Museum in Ulm, Germany.
The P88 also evolved into longer-barreled Champion models such as this 5-inch circa-1993 specimen, complete with adjustable rear target sights and a muzzle brake/compensator. Note that the Champion is based on the Competition series with its shorter grip and slide-mounted safety decocker. Photo taken at the Walther Museum in Ulm, Germany.
And this Lang Champion. Walther also made a rimfire variant dubbed the P88 Sport. Photo taken at the Walther Museum in Ulm, Germany.
In all, Walther only made just under 10,000 standard P88s, which ended production in 1992, spanning six short years. The Compact variant remained in production until 2000 before the line shut down. In his book on Walther pistols, Dieter Marschall puts P88 Compact production at 7,344 pistols. The production numbers for Competition and Champion models are not mentioned in the book, but are likely much smaller.
The P88 line pistol was replaced with the smash-hit P99series, which was introduced in 1997 and has enjoyed a more than quarter-century run that is only now ending.
The P88 proved to be a bridge design, a link of sorts that took Walther from the legacy P38/P1/P4 series to the P99.
The P88 was popular for a minute in the early 1990s and is seen in both an installment of “Beverly Hills Cop” and in Antoine Fuqua’s “The Replacement Killers,” famously appearing in the “empty gun standoff” scene between Kenneth Tsang and Chow Yun-Fat,
The build quality of the P88s we have seen come through our warehouse over the years has always been excellent. A pistol that has gravitas to it for sure.
Interestingly, the P88’s nose and frame size are common enough to fit a wide array of holsters that are in circulation. For instance, this Galco Concealable 2.0 OWB holster, designed for a G48, fits it like a glove.
We’ve even seen the occasional flashier variant pass through our vault.
Suffice it to say that, should you come across a good P88, a gun that represents Walther’s old-world dedication to quality and craftsmanship, you’d kick yourself for not adding it to the collection.
We’d like to thank Christian Liehner from Carl Walther GmbH for his help with the research for this piece.
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.
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.
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)
If you’re a handgun hound, chances are you’ve set eyes on a whole line of imported European 9mm cop guns over the years. You know the ones, the Walther p1, SIG P6, HK P7 etcetera. But what you may not pay much mind to is that all of these guns get their ‘P’ designation from being adopted by the West German police back in the bad old days and, for students of history, that’s more than enough to raise an eyebrow at.
What is the ‘P’ designation about?
At the end of World War 2, Germany was divided into two separate countries. The US and her allies occupied the Western two thirds of the country, which became the Federal Republic of Germany, commonly referred to as West Germany. The Soviets occupied the easternmost portion of the land, and formed the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany.
In 1950, the new Republic of Germany needed guns for their police forces and went about setting a standard for these guns to be acceptable for service. As such, each of the guns that passed the testing was classified with a P-designation.
Because of these standards these pistols, stretching from the Walther P-1 to the HK P-10, have shared a number of common attributes…
