Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 May 2015The model 1898 Schwarzlose was a self loading pistol definitely ahead of its time. It was simple, powerful (for the period; it was chambered for 7.63mm Mauser), and remarkably ergonomic. It used a short recoil, rotating bolt mechanism to operate, and very cleverly had one single spring which did the duties of primary recoil spring, striker spring, trigger spring, and extractor spring. Why it failed to become a commercial success is a question I have not been able to definitively answer — I suspect it must have been due to cost. Edward Ezell theorizes that it was unable to compete with the Borchardt/Luger and Mauser pistols because those were able to be made with much more economy of scale. It is really a shame, because the Schwarzlose 1898 is the best of all the pre-1900 handguns I have encountered.
January 17, 2025
Schwarzlose 1898 Semiauto Pistol
January 15, 2025
German democracy continues to reel under continued pressure from Elon Musk
Wasn’t it just the other day that the progressive legacy media in the US were accusing Elon Musk of being Hitler? Apparently his day job(s) aren’t keeping him busy enough because the German progressive legacy media are singing the same song:
The Christmas holidays are over, the politicians and the media have awakened from their winter sleep, and Germany finds itself in the thick of an election campaign. Almost every day there is a new poll, and in almost every new poll, Alternative für Deutschland gets stronger. An Infratest dimap poll published on 9 January (survey conducted from 6–8 January) pegs them at 20%; a Forschungsgruppe Wahlen poll published on 10 January (survey conducted from 7–9 January) has them at 21%; and the latest INSA poll, published today (survey conducted from 6–10 January) places them at 22%:
For the centre-right CDU and CSU, the story is the opposite – one of a steady decline from the low- to mid-30s in December, to around 30% or just below in the latest surveys. The right-leaning vote overall is holding steady, at around 51%. Support is merely wandering from the acceptable Union parties behind the cordon sanitaire. Every day the establishment loses a few more seats; they vanish into the abyss of the Brandmauer, and the hurdles to the lusted-after CDU/CSU-Green coalition grow ever higher.
Some of this is surely down to the Musk Effect. Musk’s endorsement of the AfD and his conversation with Alice Weidel on Thursday (however much a disappointment I found it be) has surely normalised the party for a small but significant number of German voters. The media vilification of the American tycoon is as unbalanced and hysterical as it is unconvincing …
The latest cover of Stern magazine: “Attack on our election: Fake news, cyber warfare and rabble-rousing – this is how Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin are manipulating the German election.”
… and it comes all too late. Until December, Musk enjoyed mainstream credibility in Germany; our rulers eagerly celebrated his Gigafactory in Berlin-Brandenburg as a sign that all was not so terrible for German industry after all. They made Musk into a symbol for the carbon-free, electrical-vehicle future that awaits us all. It is hard to turn around in an instant and reconstruct the man as literally Hitler.
January 12, 2025
Waffen SS T-34s Go into Battle! – Prokhorovka Part 5
World War Two
Published 11 Jan 2025A shocking twist at Prokhorovka as the Germans unleash a new weapon — captured T-34s! As Das Reich tries to hold the line, these iconic Soviet tanks turn their guns on former comrades. On the other side of the Psel, Totenkopf‘s Tiger tanks lead the drive forward.
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QotD: Kaiser Wilhelm II
Following the all-too brief reign of Frederick III, his son Wilhelm II, grandson of the first German Emperor, took power in 1888 (known as the “year of the three emperors”). From the start, the young Wilhelm was determined not to be the reserved figure of his grandfather and still less the liberal reformer that his ill-fated father had wished to be. Instead, Wilhelm believed it was his right and duty to be directly involved in the country’s governing.
This was completely incompatible with Bismarck’s system, which had centralized power upon his own person. With uncharacteristic focus and subtlety, Wilhelm sought to reclaim the power that his grandfather had ceded to the chancellor. This was not to prove especially difficult; Bismarck’s position had always relied upon his indispensability to the emperor. Thus, when Bismarck offered his resignation (as he often did during disputes) Wilhelm merely accepted it. The last great man of the wars of unification had now disappeared from the balance.
While the German Empire never became a true autocracy, Wilhelm succeeded in creating what historian, and biographer of the Kaiser, John C. Röhl called a “personalist” system.1 The Kaiser had significant power over personnel. Promotions in the officer corps required his assent. Advancement within civil service (from which civilian ministers were appointed) was also dependent on his favor. By exercising this power, Wilhelm was able to ensure the highest levels of the German government were men agreeable to his point of view. Though they were not mere “yes men”, Wilhelm ensured that they were knowingly dependent on his favor for their position. The Kaiser — even to the end of the monarchy — exercised considerable “negative power” (as Röhl termed it.)2 While Wilhelm’s ability to actively make policy was limited, anything he disapproved of was simply not proposed.
Wilhelm II’s reign marked a departure from the more restrained leadership of his predecessors, as he sought to assert direct influence over the German Empire’s governance and military affairs. This shift toward a more “personalist” system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps. The rigid adherence to the Schlieffen Plan and the technocratic focus on material advantages, such as firepower and mobility, overshadowed the need for adaptable strategic thinking. These failures in both leadership and military planning set the stage for Germany’s disastrous involvement in World War I, where an empire led by personalities rather than policies was ill-prepared for the complexities of modern warfare. Ultimately, Wilhelm’s influence and the culture of sycophancy he fostered played a pivotal role in leading Germany down the path of ruin.
Kiran Pfitzner and Secretary of Defense Rock, “The Kaiser and His Men: Civil-Military Relations in Wilhelmine Germany”, Dead Carl and You, 2024-10-02.
1. John C. G. Röhl, Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Concise Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2014).
2. Negative power refers to the ability of an actor or group to block, veto, or prevent actions, decisions, or policies from being implemented, rather than directly initiating or shaping outcomes.
January 10, 2025
Germany Votes – Rise of Hitler 09, September 1930
World War Two
Published 9 Jan 2025The September 1930 elections reshape Germany’s political landscape. With surging support for extremists like the Nazis and Communists, and declining votes for democratic parties, Weimar faces a deeply polarized future. This episode breaks down the results, voter shifts, and what this means for the Republic.
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January 5, 2025
Four Waffen SS Tigers vs 50 T-34s – Prokhorovka Part 4
World War Two
Published 4 Jan 2025A mass of Soviet armour charges at the Leibstandarte Division, it looks like they might smash through the German lines. Then, Michael Wittmann’s Tiger tanks go into action. Will the Waffen SS be able to turn the tide at Prokhorovka? Indy reveals all.
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German democracy hanging by a thread after vicious attacks by Elon Musk
German politicians are growing ever more desperate as evildoers like Elon Musk continue to undermine the political stage by calling for antidemocratic things like free speech:
Alice Weidel, the federal leader of Germany’s “far-right” AfD, has approximately the same policy prescriptions as Donald Trump. Chiefly they are to return to the bourgeois habits that used to make free market states prosperous. But she subscribes to these in mainland Europe, which has been easily spooked since the Nazis offered policies that were not bourgeois.
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” as the far-right poet, T. S. Eliot, wrote in Burnt Norton, now the better part of a century ago. (He was arguably plagiarizing the far-right German poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.)
One could recommend that my readers look her up on YouBoob, or better search for print, and form their own opinion on this Frau Weidel. (Who speaks English, and Chinese, fluently.)
Compare her, for instance, to the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, who rose to power as the prosecutor protecting Muslim “grooming gangs”, and now puts people in gaol who protest on behalf of their rape and murder victims. The idea that Mr Starmer should have a rôle in the government of a civilized country, is as absurd as the idea that the 14-year-old narcissist who has ruled Canada, or the 82-year-old senescent who has ruled the United States, are respectable members of the human race.
And closer to the scene of crisis, eugyppius reports on the latest Muskian outrage against peace-loving German politicians:
For days, the German establishment have been in an absolute uproar over Elon Musk’s profoundly antidemocratic election interference. You cannot turn on the television or open any newspaper without enduring all manner of wailing about the grave danger Musk poses to German democracy.
The naive and the simpleminded will say that all of this is crazy and that the Federal Republic has become an open-air insane asylum – a strange playground of political hysterics the likes of which the Western world has never seen before. That is because they don’t understand what’s at stake here. Musk did not just say the odd nice thing about Alternative für Deutschland, oh no. He also said various German politicians were fools and traitors, he called for resignations and he published an untoward newspaper editorial. It is amazing the German democracy has not yet collapsed in the face of this unrelenting campaign, and still the absolute madman shows no signs of stopping.
Elon Musk’s frontal assault on the German constitution began on 7 November, when he tweeted four antidemocratic words – “Olaf ist ein Narr” (“Olaf [Scholz] is a fool”) – in response to news that the German government had collapsed. Three days later, he tweeted the same thing about Green Economics Minister and chancellor candidate Robert Habeck, after Habeck gave a speech calling for widespread internet censorship.
Thereafter, all was quiet for a time. German democrats allowed themselves to hope these were but isolated indiscretions and that Musk would allow them to get back to their arcane business of promoting feminism abroad, changing the weather and eliminating “the extreme right”. Lamentably, the peace turned out to be a false one. Musk renewed his campaign against democracy with a vengeance on 20 December, tweeting in the wake of the Magdeburg Christmas market attack that “Scholz should resign immediately” and that he is an “incompetent fool”. That very same day, Musk tweeted for the first time that “Only the AfD can save Germany”, a sentiment he repeated also on 21 December and on 22 December, delighted at the nationwide freakout his casual remarks had incited.
In the course of this freakout, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier hinted darkly that “outside influence” constitutes “a danger for democracy”:
Outside influence is a danger for democracy – whether it is covert, as was recently apparent in the elections in Romania, or open and blatant, as is currently being practised with particular intensity on the platform X. I strongly oppose all external attempts at influence. The decision on the election is made solely by the eligible citizens in Germany.
The indefatigable Naomi Seibt, who appears to be Musk’s primary informant about German politics, brought these remarks to the evil fascist billionaire’s attention, and he promptly responded that “Steinmeier is an anti-democratic tyrant”. Musk then delivered his coup-de-grace the next day, with an editorial in Welt am Sonntag – the most devastating piece of political prose that Germany has witnessed since Hitler penned Mein Kampf.
By my count, Musk may have directed as many as 700 words against the noble if surprisingly rickety edifice of German democracy – an assault few political systems could withstand. The self-appointed guardians of our liberal order accordingly declared a five-alarm fire, and they have betaken themselves to their keyboards to defend what remains of our free and eminently democratic political system, where anybody can say anything he likes and vote for any party he wishes, so long as what he likes and those for whom he votes have nothing to do with major political parties supported by millions of Germans like Alternative für Deutschland.
January 4, 2025
Winning WW2’s Most Important Battle – Battle of the Atlantic
Historigraph
Published 15 Aug 2024The Second World War featured many important land battles on a colossal scale. They involved hundreds of thousands of participants, ranged across hundreds of miles and inflicted the most terrible destruction. But none of them were as long-running, as vast or as crucial to allied victory as that fought at sea in the Atlantic, where for four years Allied navies and civilian sailors fought a life or death struggle against Germany’s U-boats. This is the story of how it was fought, and how it was won.
00:00 – WW2’s most important battle
00:45 – The U-boat menace in the early years
08:53 – The massacre off the eastern seaboard
13:12 – American ship printer go brrrrrrrrr
19:31 – The Allies gain the upper hand
21:49 – Black May: the convoy battles of 1943
24:41 – The most important victory of WW2
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January 2, 2025
Why Germany Lost the Battle of Britain
Real Time History
Published 2 Aug 2024Summer 1940. The United Kingdom is gripped by the fear of a German invasion. Even if the Luftwaffe secures the sky over Britain, could Germany’s Operation Sea Lion ever really work?
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December 31, 2024
“Britzkrieg” – Did British Tactics Help Create Blitzkrieg?
The Tank Museum
Published 30 Aug 2024Where did Blitzkrieg, the tactics that enabled Germany to conquer most of Europe in the first years of WW II come from?
Throughout the 1920s and into the ’30s, the German Army was forbidden from developing tanks or experimenting with armoured warfare, but in the same period, the British Army was at the forefront of mechanization and the use of armour on the battlefield.
In this film, we will look at how British tacticians like JFC Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart developed a new and revolutionary way of warfighting and how these principles were taken up and used to devastating effect by the German Army in 1939 and 1940.
00:00 | Intro
02:14 | A New Form of Warfare
04:12 | Plan 1919
07:54 | New Technology – Better Tanks
14:01 | Trials and Tribulations
17:10 | Partly There
20:12 | Fuller’s ChildrenThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
#tankmuseum
December 29, 2024
Armies of the Soviet Union, Charge! – Prokhorovka Part 3
World War Two
Published 28 Dec 2024On the morning of July 12, 1943, the Battle of Prokhorovka begins! Pavel Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army charges into a storm of anti-tank fire from Paul Hausser’s Waffen SS divisions. As vehicles clash and burn, fierce hand-to-hand combat rages all around. In this episode, Indy takes you into the heart of the action as one of history’s most ferocious battles unfolds hour by hour.
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wz.35: Poland’s Remarkably Misunderstood Antitank Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published Aug 26, 2024In the 1930s, Poland decided to develop an anti-tank rifle, and the young designer Józef Maroszek came up with the winning system by scaling up a bolt-action service rifle he had already drawn up. The project was kept very secret, out of concern that Germany or Russia would up-armor their tanks if the Polish rifle’s existence and capabilities became known. This secrecy has led to a lot of misconceptions about the rifle today …
Interestingly, the ammunition for the wz.35 used a plain lead core. Polish engineers found that at its incredible 4200 fps (1280 m/s) muzzle velocity, the lead core had excellent armor penetrating capacity. When the German Army later captured and reused the rifles, they didn’t trust this, and reloaded captured Polish ammunition with German tungsten-cored projectiles made for the PzB-39.
Rather than explain the full story of the wz.35 in detail here, I will refer you to http://www.forgottenweapons.com/wz-35/, where I have posted a full monograph on the rifle written by Leszek Erenfeicht.
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December 23, 2024
Mark Steyn – “…the German state’s message to voters is: It’s all your fault and nothing’s gonna change”
At SteynOnline, Mark discusses the media reactions to the terror attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg:
Say what you like about Germany but their crack police investigators are second to none:
Prosecutor Horst Walter Nopens said on Saturday that the investigation was ongoing but suggested one potential motive for the attack “could have been disgruntlement with the way Saudi Arabian refugees are treated in Germany“.
Gotcha. So, two months before the federal election, the German state’s message to voters is: It’s all your fault and nothing’s gonna change. Nothing against the nine-year-old boy who’s dead or the four ladies – aged 75, 67, 52 and 45 – but that’s just the way it is. There will be a few empty chairs at the Christmas table, but diversity is our strength and a well-integrated psychiatrist driving a BMW is just the kind of high-skilled newcomer Mutti Merkel promised us. He could have gone to Canada or Ireland. To modify George W Bush, we need immigrants to do the jobs that Germans won’t do … like, er, psychiatry.
Are they putting this kind of bollocks in the Covid boosters? Not so long ago the most famous terrorist killer on the planet was a high-value German immigrant. At least a few readers I’ve had occasional email exchanges with over the decades may recall him flying through the window of their office building on a Tuesday morning in September: Mohammed Atta, the man who pulled off what they used to call “the day the world changed” … and a postgraduate student of the Hamburg Institute of Technology.
If you’ve been enjoying the expert class’s bewilderment at the citizenship and professional status of the perp, well, way back when, the grandparents of the current crop of media experts were all over the airwaves explaining why the real threat came from well-travelled middle-class westernised Muslims and that Mr Atta had become “radicalised” when he moved to Hamburg.
It certainly was “the day the world changed” — if by “changed” you mean accelerated Islamic migration to the west: Twenty years ago there were half-a-million Muslims in Canada; now there are two million. As to the “disgruntlement” of Saudis at the way they’re treated in the west, seventeen of Mohammed Atta’s accomplices were Saudi nationals who’d been admitted to flight school in America, where they told their instructors that they didn’t need to do the bit about learning how to land. Which raised not an eyebrow. To channel P G Wodehouse, few people have so much cause to be gruntled.
By the way, how did Mr Atta wind up at the Hamburg University of Technology? Because a nice tourist couple from Germany were visiting Cairo and, at a restaurant one night, struck up a conversation with Mohammed’s dad and said they ran an exchange programme for foreign students back in der Vaterland and would Mo like to come and live with them. Aw, that’s heart-warming. And, despite the three thousand deaths directly arising from that virtue-signalling, I’m sure they’d do it all over again.
In other words, this is where we came in: all the elements the cable experts profess to find “puzzling” we knew back on Day One of the soi-disant “War on Terror”. Even the allegedly newest wrinkle is not new:
December 22, 2024
Tanks Prepare for Battle! The Greatest Ever? Prokhorovka Part 2
World War Two
Published 21 Dec 2024In the early hours of July 12, 1943, the Waffen SS and the Red Army are ready for battle. SS General Paul Hausser has his armoured spearheads ready to strike at Prokhorovka while Soviet commander Pavel Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army readies his counterattack. Today, Indy walks you through the enormous armoured fleets deployed for the coming fight.
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December 21, 2024
German democracy tottering on the brink (again) after latest attack by Elon Musk!
Germany is, yet again, convulsed with political unrest as politicians react strongly to foreign interference in German affairs by … dun-dun-duuuuuun … Elon Musk:
German democracy, which has existed undeterred since 1949 but is somehow always shaken to its foundations whenever anybody sings the wrong song or holds a televised debate with the wrong person, is once again on life support.
Christian Lindner, head of the market-liberal Free Democrats, did much to trigger the present catastrophe on 1 December, when said that the Free Republic should “dare more Milei and more Musk“. Because there is little distinction between praising Milei and Musk and demanding the return of National Socialism, there ensued a brief period of establishment hyperventilation.
Less than a week later, CDU chief and probable future German chancellor Friedrich Merz, did his part to denounce Lindner’s political wrongthink in a statement to Deutschlandfunk:
So neither the Argentinian president nor, how shall I put it, the American entrepreneur Elon Musk – let’s put it plainly – are role models for German politics in my view. I don’t see where we can find similarities in German politics. What Christian Lindner meant will probably remain his secret.
The next day, Merz repeated the same denunciations, only more harshly, explaining to one of our extremely adult and far-sighted pantsuit talkshow hosts that “To be honest, I was completely appalled that Christian Lindner made that comparison“. Milei, Merz said, is “really trampling on the people there”.
Yesterday, all of this came to the notice of the (honestly rather tiresome) influencer Naomi Seibt, who posted a video statement to X rehearsing all of this old news to her largely American audience:
Elon Musk then brought down the hammer on the German democratic order, retweeting Seibt’s video and remarking that “Only the AfD can save Germany“.
Today a lot of very important and influential people got out of bed and took to their keyboards to denounce Musk’s election interference. His statement might be illegal, at any rate it is very likely fascist and certainly it is beyond the pale for an American to voice an opinion about German politics. Germans absolutely never, ever, utter the slightest word about American politics and certainly would never advance negative opinions about the American president in the middle of an election campaign. Our Foreign Office would never try to fact-check an American presidential debate! Our journalists would never depict President Donald Trump dressed as a Ku Klux Klan member or offering the Hitler salute or decapitating the Statue of Liberty! That’s just not done!
Like a great stream of green diarrhoea, the outrage is pouring fourth. Matthias Gebauer, who writes for Der Spiegel, observes that “Elon Musk … is openly promoting the AfD” and concludes that “Putin is not the only one who loves this party”. Erik Marquardt, head of the Green faction in the European Parliament, says that “The EU Commission and EU member states should no longer stand by and watch as billionaires misuse media and algorithms to influence elections and strengthen and normalise right-wing extremists”. This “is an attack on democracy”, and “has nothing to do with freedom of expression”. Dennis Radtke, CDU representative in the European Parliament, concludes that “Musk … is declaring war on democracy” and that “the man is a menace”. We are also under siege via “interference from Putin”; “the erosion of our democracy is being fuelled from both within and without”. Julian Röpcke, who writes for BILD, believes that “This is interference in the German election campaign by a tech billionaire who uses algorithms to decide what gets heard”. If Germany does not “respond with penalties, there will be no help for our eroding democracy”.
