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.

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Roughly, 18 1/2" long, 3/4" diameter, coiled, twisted, steel wire MG34 main spring with forty-four open coils. The spring is in overall excellent condition being well oiled and is still quite taunt. The spring comes housed in its original roughly, 12 1/2" tall, 7/8" diameter, blued tooled sheet metal cylindrical carrying/storage case with a removable, friction fit top lid. The top lid has vertical grooves at its top edge for ease of handling and a small raised loop with a small "L" shaped cut-out to secure it to the case's body. The top edge of the case body has two small, evenly spaced, raised pins which would slide under the raised loop and fit into the "L" cut-outs on the top lid. The case retains about 85% of its original bluing with numerous small surface scratches and is well marked with a faint, stamped waffen-amt and the manufacturers initials and date, "G.G. & Co. 1939", indicating an unknown manufacturer in 1939. Nice MG34 accessory.

GRADE ****                             PRICE $405.00