sgt-leighton

Heres an interesting but hardly published fact, during the Blitz, German bomber crews carried these on board. A friend of mine was excavating a crash HE111, during the dig they dug out five small containers each containing a French MAS-38. Unfortunately the authorities where called and they where taken away never to be seen again!

Hi everyone, With over 40000 Bergmann MP35s produced you would think that the market would be awash with spare parts, right?.....think again! Over the years I have restored a lot of guns, sourcing parts from around the world to build and complete a gun, previous projects have included a WW1 Lewis, Vickers, MG08/15, 1921 Thompson, MG15, 1951 type 2 AK and a MP44. With past experience in mind I decided to take on my next project, a German Bergmann MP35 that was recently found in the Courland pocket, Latvia, not far from the find was an SS dogtag belonging to the 1st Latvian SS. The MP35 is fairly unique in that it was almost exclusively used by the Waffen SS and SD during WW2. Its my guess and it is just a guess that this relic MP35 belonged to a German SS officer or NCO attached to the Latvian Division, as was common practice to use German officers to command foreign SS volunteer units. Over the past few weeks Ive been hunting high and low for a Bergmann MP35 stock and magazine, a copy would be good for this but Ive had ZERO luck in finding anything! Zib Militaria sold a copy (currently out of stock) recently but they wont tell me who made the copy and a search through various web sites and speaking to people on replica gun forums draws a blank, so Im guessing that the makers of the copy where/ are a Chinese company. A Bergmann MP35 copy stock was sold on eBay in January, but the seller had no information on where it came from. A search for a magazine drew equally less results, one dealer told me that he had handled and sold loads of FG42 magazine but had never even seen a Bergmann mag, just to put that into prospective! So its looking like my relic Bergmann MP35 is destined to remain naked for the foreseeable future. All the best, and if you do happen to have a ilusive Bergmann MP25, i would love to know the measurements of the stock as I will probably need to get one made. Mark.

Front view. Seems to be a ton of brand new surplus Thompson 3-5 cell magazine and hardly any used pouches? Try finding a canteen pouch and 9 out of 10 will be falling apart.

Good question regarding Thompson and Reising pouches. Attached is a three cell USMC pouch, not sure if I like the markings on this one either.

No markings inside the belt loop.

Bought from ferromil_de on ebay. He has told me that he has sold loads of these with no complaints. All from depot apparently?

I think that it's one of the lead lease pouches from Russia that has been stamped!

This was the one advertised.

I bought a 5 cell USMC, 5 cell pouch. The stamping looks wrong and was not the one that was advertised!

Mark do you still have the buffer assembly? I have an original colt safety switch.

The only parts missing from my Colt 294 is it's spring, buffer and pilot! :-(

Hello Bob, as soon as I have worked out how to upload a picture on here I will post one. Mark.