Volkspistole

The Volkspistole, German for people's pistol, was an emergency handgun design of the last months of the Second World War in Europe. German forces had lost well over a hundred thousand pistols in the first half of 1944, and the Walther P38 factories could not replace them fast enough, so the authorities asked for a far cheaper pistol built mostly from steel pressings with a minimum of machined parts, meant for issue to the Volkssturm. Carl Walther, Mauser and Gustloff-Werke each built prototypes in 1945, and every one of the three failed to reach service. All of them reused the P38 magazine to keep production simple. Walther tried an unusual rotating barrel before turning to a milled slide, Gustloff-Werke submitted a 9 mm blowback redesign of an earlier failed pistol, and Mauser produced a simple blowback pistol that took about thirty percent fewer working hours and twenty percent less raw material than the P38 but showed trigger problems in late 1944 testing. Only prototypes were made before the war ended, so the weapon never saw combat.