They had in fact three divisions of Volkssturm which were actually…you seen pictures of the young boys, sometimes girls and older men, people who are not able to be in the army yet, they were called the Civil Defence League Volkssturm and they were told to defend to the last man. They of course had been told by the SS to fight to the last man.Įverybody was to sacrifice their life for the fatherland. But the first elements that came into the factory they said they were met by… as they went into the town of Zella-Mehlis, which was actually two towns that had been combined, Fritz Walther - the head of the Walther Factory and the Mayor of the town, I think they called him the Burgermeister, they actually met the Americans at the entrance of the town and told them that they surrendered. What I noticed, is nobody stayed there very long, that these troops were constantly on the move. There's letters from different people who came in. A lot of different units rolled in and rolled out over various times. So right at the end of the war, April 4th they rolled in. It was the 90th Infantry Division and the 11th Armored Division that rolled up to the Zella-Mehlis Town and Factory on April 4th of 1945. It was actually many buildings, it was a sprawling complex which became more and more busy during the war years and certainly toward the end of the war. You can see a picture here of the Walther Factory. It's an article online and this is…it's like, I don't know how many pages, but it's a lot of research that he put together about the Walther Factory. I'm going to go over some of that with you. So he gathered a lot of this research and actually got some of the vets to tell stories and write letters. And that really came out of the fact that his uncle was in the 90th Infantry Division and was one of the people who occupied the factory at the end of the war. If you look at the P38 Forum, he's a moderator on there and he did a lot of research on what happened to the Walther Factory at the end. It's a great story and actually I want to thank Ron Clarin, who is a moderator for the P38 Forum on the internet. The story is, what happened to the Walther Factory at the end of the war.
I'm going to tell you a story and then show you some guns, mostly Walther PPs and PPKs. I usually like to show you a gun and then tell you a story. This one is part of our educational series on Walther PPs and PPKs. WALTHER FACTORY AT THE END OF WW2 (1945) DIGGING into WALTHER PPs, PPKs, P.38s, PRE-1946 WALTHER PISTOLS
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