Liliput pistol

The Liliput pistol is a very small semiautomatic handgun of the 1920s, built around a tiny 4.25 mm rimless centerfire cartridge that became known as the 4.25mm Liliput and is no longer manufactured. Its name comes from Lilliput, the fictional island of tiny people, and it is generally ranked just behind the Kolibri as one of the smallest semiautomatic handguns ever made. It was designed and popularized by the Austrian watchmaker Franz Pfannl. It is a simple blowback pistol with an unlocked breech, and the original model measured only about 4.25 inches overall with a barrel of roughly 1.75 inches. Waffenfabrik August Menz of Suhl, Germany produced it from about 1920 to 1927, alongside a similar .25 ACP model introduced in 1925, and Menz also took over the Beholla pistol and sold it as the Menta. The Liliput is one of the few pistols that can be owned in the United Kingdom without a licence. It appears in several novels by Alistair MacLean, though he gives its calibre wrongly, and an Allied report of 1945 records one being issued to members of the Werwolf resistance force.