In 2012, during the Syrian civil war, rebels from the Al Tawhid Brigade, then part of the Free Syrian Army, captured a government depot in Aleppo. Inside a steel shipping container, they made an extraordinary discovery: roughly 5,000 StG 44 assault rifles, all of them World War II-era German weapons still in very good condition. The sheer quantity was remarkable. The StG 44 is widely regarded as the grandfather of the modern assault rifle, representing a revolutionary step in infantry weapon design during the final years of World War II.
While German weapon quality and finish declined late in the war, the StG 44 remained accurate at long range and highly effective in automatic fire at shorter distances. Its curved 30-round magazine was a significant improvement over the five-round bolt-action Mauser rifles carried by most German infantry, and its 7. 92×33 mm Kurz cartridge was effective beyond 300 meters. German plans called for production of 4 million of these rifles, but only about 426,000 were manufactured before the war ended.
That makes the appearance of 5,000 of them in a single shipping container in Syria all the more exceptional. The story of how so many StG 44s ended up in Syria begins long before the civil war. In 1964, East Germany sold Syria a batch of around 4,500 captured World War II StG 44s, along with substantial ammunition supplies. East Germany later shipped additional StG 44s to Syria and to Palestinian militant groups, alongside Soviet equipment such as T-34 tanks and PPSh-41 submachine guns.
For the East Germans, this was a practical way to clear surplus stocks of World War II weaponry. Czechoslovakia also sold quantities of captured German equipment to Middle Eastern countries, including Panzer IV tanks and Jagdpanzer IV tank destroyers, which saw action against Israel in the 1960s. Czechoslovakia also agreed to send Syria more than 10,000 so-called self-loading rifles. Among those weapons were quantities of StG 44s, along with half a million rounds of ammunition.
Over time, the Syrian armed forces shifted toward Soviet-type weapons using a different caliber from the German StG 44s. The Syrian government consequently placed the StG 44s into long-term storage, where they remained for decades. When the Syrian civil war erupted, rebels captured government storehouses and found increasing numbers of these stored World War II rifles. But for the rebels, ammunition proved a major problem, and by 2017 the StG 44 reportedly began disappearing from frontline rebel service as ammunition stocks became exhausted.
These weapons are highly valuable to collectors. In the United States, StG 44s regularly sell for upwards of $40,000 or more. The 5,000 rifles found in Aleppo, if sold, would have raised enough money to buy ten times that number of modern rifles and machine guns. The Al Tawhid Brigade, which made the find, later left the Free Syrian Army coalition and joined Al-Qaeda.
The group no longer exists, and the rifles it once held have since dispersed across the region, including into Afghanistan. Most likely, many of those StG 44s have ended up back in storage, in private homes, or have been dumped or scrapped. Some may be rusting away in various places across the Middle East, while others will eventually find their way onto the open market.
Syria remains probably the last place in the world where substantial numbers of StG 44s can still be found, and collectors continue to regard them with intense interest.