BACKGROUND: Among other restrictions, the Treaty of Versailles banned Germany from developing any type of general purpose machine gun. To circumvent this, German development of an all purpose machine gun was secretly being done in Switzerland in the early 1930's. By 1934 designer Louis Stange of the Rheinmetall armaments factory had made improvements to the secret machine gun developed in Switzerland and the MG34 was introduced as an all purpose selective fire weapon. In spite of the relatively high production cost the MG34 was accepted by the Wehrmacht Ordnance department and deliveries of the MG34 began in 1936. In 1937 due to the high cost and manufacturing time of the MG34 development began on another general purpose machine gun which utilized stamped and pressed components making it cheaper and quicker to produce. Further developments resulted in the introduction of the MG42 general purpose machine gun in late 1941. As with most weapons both the MG34 selective fire and the MG42 automatic fire, general purpose machine guns required assorted lubricants for efficient operation.

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Roughly, 5" tall, 2 1/8" diameter, blued, tooled steel construction, cylindrical lubricant container. The container has a screw off top lid with repeating, diamond patterned, grooves to the outside edge for ease of handling. The top of the screw off lid is well marked with the deeply stamped designation, "Petr.-Büchse f. Rückstoßverst. z. M.G. 42", (Petroleum can for a Recoil Booster for an MG42), and the manufacturer’s three letter code, "ddf", indicating manufacture by Lohmann-Werle A.-G. Of Bielefeld. The body of the container is also well marked with a waffen-amt stamp. The interior of the container still has a two cardboard washer intact. The container is in overall good condition and retains about 60% of its blued finish with spots of wear to the base steel with light surface spotting.

GRADE ***1/2                             PRICE $295.00