For decades, a story has circulated among gun collectors and on the internet about an Allied commando mission to assassinate Hermann Göring, the head of the German Air Force, at his sprawling estate north of Berlin. The supposed evidence for this raid is a single object: one of the rarest German machine guns ever made, said to have been taken as a trophy during the operation.
The German MP 40 submachine gun is an icon of World War II. It evolved from its more expensive and better-made predecessor, the MP 38, and was originally designed to equip paratroopers and armored vehicle crews, though it became the standard submachine gun for squad and platoon leaders in the German Army and the Waffen SS. It was a light, compact, fast-firing 9mm weapon.
There was another version of these two iconic weapons, the MP 38 and MP 40, that actually existed. This version is the MP 36, a gun that is almost unknown today. It differs from the MP 38/40 in that it is a select-fire weapon, made of machined steel with wooden parts.
It shares many features with the MP 38 and MP 40, but it is also completely different. Its magazine catch is a protrusion type rather than the button found on the MP 38 and MP 40, and it sits at the rear of the magazine housing. The bolt assembly is similar to the other weapons, except that the front of the MP 36 bolt is a separate piece. The front sight is adjustable and unprotected.
The weapon bears no identifying marks except on the underside of the wooden foregrip, which carries the stamp "EMP 36," with "EMP" standing for the Erma Erfurt company. The magazine housing also differs from the MP 38 and MP 40, projecting forward at a 30-degree angle. No magazine specific to the MP 36 has ever been found, and the weapon uses MP 40 magazines.
The only example in the United States today bears serial number 014, has high-quality finishes, and is believed to be a prototype presented as a gift. Presented to whom? Well, to Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, head of the German Air Force, since Germany's paratroopers were part of the Luftwaffe.
And how did this weapon end up in Allied hands? Well, the story goes like this. In 1943, a group of volunteers was organized for a highly secret mission. The objective was to assassinate Reich Marshal Hitler and Air Force chief Hermann Göring.
The attempt on Göring was to take place at Carinhall, located about 40 miles northeast of Berlin. Allied intelligence sources reported that Göring would be at Carinhall and that the area would be lightly guarded. The Allied team parachuted quietly into the area at night without being detected.
Once they reached the grounds around Carinhall, they quickly discovered that the estate was guarded by a special army of Göring's elite Fallschirmjäger troops, all highly trained and heavily armed. After the German forces discovered the team, a firefight quickly erupted.
In the chaos, a certain American major managed to slip into the main building to search for Göring. While moving through the main hall, he spotted a strange, unfamiliar weapon hanging on the wall. Thinking it might interest American intelligence, he took it down and put it in his bag.
He then decided the mission had failed and chose to try to fight his way out of the rapidly deteriorating situation. He and a very small part of the original Allied team managed to escape and return to safety. The weapon remained in the major's possession for the rest of the war.
In 1945, when he returned to the United States, he brought the MP 36 home as a war souvenir. He stored the weapon away and got on with his life after the war.
That particular story comes from an article titled "MP 36, the Missing Link," published by Frank Iannamico in a magazine called Small Arms Review in 1998, and it generated a great deal of debate online. In my view, the weapon is entirely real, but the story of its capture is not, and I will explain why.
The first question is how, in 1943, a team of Allied commandos, or in this case American paratroopers, could have been successfully inserted this deep inside Germany. What kind of aircraft could have been used?
For example, the C-47 Skytrain, used for airborne operations throughout the war, could fly from eastern England to the Carinhall area and back without refueling. The distance, depending on the English airfield used, ranges between 1,150 and 1,250 miles.
However, when loaded to its full capacity of up to 6,000 pounds, the C-47's range was limited to between 1,026 and 1,180 miles. This would have left the aircraft short of fuel on the return flight over occupied Europe or the North Sea.
The Allies did not have air superiority over Europe in 1943. A slow, heavy, unpressurized, unarmed transport aircraft would have been highly vulnerable to fighter attacks, anti-aircraft fire, and radar detection.
So what if they did not use a C-47? Neither the B-17 nor the B-24 was equipped for airborne drops. Jumping was possible through the bomb bays, but it was dangerous and slow.
For example, German agents were dropped over England and Ireland from modified German bombers during World War II, specifically the Heinkel 111, but individually with a single supply container that was also dropped automatically by parachute.
The RAF's Avro Lancaster was not equipped to drop paratroopers, and it could technically accommodate up to 10 paratroopers sitting on the floor, who could jump from the bomb bay or the ventral hatch, but the process would have been very slow and dangerous.
Of course, there were alternative types of aircraft already used to drop paratroopers, such as the Halifax or the Stirling. In the case of the Stirling, up to 10 fully equipped paratroopers could be dropped, and it was actually used to drop them on D-Day, particularly pathfinder units.
But here we run into a problem concerning the size of the attacking force. Infiltrating a heavily fortified site like Carinhall, a large site surrounded by dense forest, would have required dealing with a garrison of about 200 heavily armed soldiers from the Hermann Göring Panzer Division.
These soldiers were permanently stationed at the site, and assassinating Göring would have been extremely difficult, as he was also protected by a small platoon of Reich Security Service (RSD) bodyguards, the same government unit that protected Hitler and other Nazi leaders.
Any form of attack would have required a large assault force and more than one aircraft to land that number of men and their equipment. Ten men dropped from a Stirling, or 18 to 22 from a C-47, do not constitute a large force for a mission that appears to lack precision compared with the known assassination missions carried out or planned by the British Special Operations Executive during the war.
The British had always worked with small teams on such dangerous secret missions. In the case of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942, only two agents were parachuted in to join an existing resistance network in Czechoslovakia.
The method of attack was to ambush Heydrich as he drove through Prague in an open Mercedes without an escort. Sten guns and hand grenades were used in the attack. The operation succeeded, although most of the assassins and their helpers were later killed in the German sweep operations that followed.
Another operation was Foxley, an SOE mission to kill Hitler at his mountain home in Obersalzberg. Again, the assassination team consisted of only two agents wearing German mountain troop uniforms.
The plan was an ambush, this time to shoot Hitler with a scoped Mauser K98k rifle from among the trees while he took his daily walk from his home at the Berghof to his favorite tea house on the nearby Mooslahnerkopf ridge.
The alternative plan was to attack the Volkswagen car he used to return home after drinking tea, using the British PIAT anti-tank weapon. The agents also carried Luger pistols with suppressors modified by SOE for personal protection.
Several examples of this modified British pistol exist in the Royal Armouries in Leeds and in the Combined Military Services Museum in Maldon, Essex, where I had the opportunity to examine one personally. I strongly recommend visiting this museum, which has a huge display on spies and special operations.
It is clear that a batch of these weapons was assembled as part of some kind of SOE assassination program inside Germany. Operation Foxley was canceled for well-known and numerous reasons.
For any assassination team to survive on the ground at Carinhall for any length of time, they would have had to wear German uniforms rather than American paratrooper gear and be armed accordingly. Think of the film "Where Eagles Dare."
Could they have been dropped from a captured German aircraft as in the film, which is also set in 1943? A Junkers Ju 52, for example. It is not impossible. The Allies captured some examples in various situations, especially in North Africa, although no evidence has emerged of such aircraft being used, for example, to drop Allied agents into German-occupied Europe.
Allied aircraft were always used for this mission. Also, the Junkers 52 could not have flown from eastern England to Carinhall and back without refueling. Its range is only 540 to 620 miles, depending on its payload.
And how would any team of American paratroopers be extracted from the Carinhall area after assassinating Göring? This was presumably not a suicide mission. There was no friendly resistance organization in Germany at that time to help.
If any assassination attempt against Göring at Carinhall were to be carried out, I would think an ambush of the marshal's vehicle would have been the best option, as he traveled between his heavily fortified home at Carinhall, deep in the forest, and the airfield he used to fly in and out of the area, which was located a few kilometers to the north.
The problem is that any such attack would have depended entirely on the agents' knowledge of Göring's schedule and travel arrangements, which means there would have had to be an actual agent inside Göring's headquarters capable of passing on this important information. As far as we know, there was no such information or secret agent.
So we have a rare and strange submachine gun of dubious origin, which is undoubtedly genuine and a very rare weapon of enormous historical importance and value, tied to a story that is, at best, fanciful and practically impossible to carry out in the manner published.
An attack by a force of American paratroopers on a large, well-fortified estate like Carinhall to get close enough to kill Göring. Alistair MacLean would have rejected such a scenario as utterly implausible.
So where did the MP 36 actually come from? As with many stories attached to objects linked to Nazi leaders, there is probably a grain of truth beneath all the lies and empty claims. Here is my theory, which I cannot prove.
The MP 36 was indeed a prototype presented by the Erma company to Göring, whose paratroopers were looking for a lightweight submachine gun that worked well in the type of operations they conducted. That weapon would ultimately be the MP 40, a much cheaper version to manufacture than the costly MP 38 and its wooden-parts relative, the MP 36.
In 1945, Göring ordered Carinhall evacuated as the Red Army approached, and all his possessions were moved by three trains to Berchtesgaden, where he owned a smaller mountain villa near Hitler's villa in Obersalzberg. Much of Göring's art treasures were hidden in a cellar beneath the Luftwaffe officers' club or casino in Berchtesgaden.
Meanwhile, a huge quantity of material, including his large weapons collection, remained in a freight train at the Berchtesgaden station. On May 4, 1945, American forces captured Berchtesgaden after SS troops withdrew. On May 5, paratroopers of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division took over garrison duties from the infantry in the area.
For example, Major Dick Winters, famous from the series "Band of Brothers," was one of the first American officers to find and explore Göring's art cache. It is easy to connect the fictional story of the American paratrooper raid on Carinhall with the discovery of the MP 36.
The weapon was likely among Göring's guns and aboard one of the trains partially looted by American paratroopers. I believe the creator of the Carinhall raid story is a U.S. 101st Airborne officer who took the MP 36 from a freight car in Berchtesgaden in early May 1945 and kept it.
He probably invented a good story about acquiring the MP 36, claiming that American paratroopers had dropped on Göring at Carinhall, and this myth took hold. Especially with the usual phrase "it is still secret" to cover up a mountain of fiction and fabricated stories used to justify World War II exploits.
This is my view on this myth or urban legend, whatever you call it, attached to the real MP 36, which is one of only two known examples of this rare German World War II submachine gun. It is difficult to determine how many pieces the Erma company made.
The weapon in the United States bears serial number 014. Another known example is in a military museum in Prague in the Czech Republic, bearing serial number 001. So at least 14 pieces were made. The example in the United States is valued at up to $40,000, and possibly much more.