You’re looking at a Waffen SS soldier. He’s currently carrying one of the Red Army’s best weapons, which is the Soviet produced SVT-40. When the Germans invaded on the Eastern Front, their soldiers often captured it despite having their own version in the Gewehr 41, but that choice wasn’t by accident. So, why did the Wehrmacht prefer the Soviet design over their own? This is the story of the SVT-40.
So, let’s begin by explaining how the SVT even got into Soviet service to begin with. It all started with the Federov Avtomat. The Soviets had been using it during World War I and it taught them one key lesson, rate of fire prevails over almost anything in modern industrial combat. This was the first full auto battle rifle ever created.
The gun looked like a solution on paper and for a brief moment, the Russians hoped it could be what changed the tides of war. It delivered a much higher rate of fire than the Mosin-Nagant, but it was chambered in the 6.5 by 50 mm Arisaka cartridge since Russia did not have a suitable domestic round for controllable automatic fire at the time.
So, every rifle depended on Japanese ammunition, which complicated the supply chains. Production was also extremely limited with only a few thousand rifles ever made and because of that, the weapon was issued mainly to naval infantry. So, once the war ended, Soviet planners concluded that a semi-automatic rifle offered higher fire rates than bolt actions while avoiding the ammunition waste and recoil of full autos.
They therefore started developing a semi-automatic rifle in the early 1930s, way earlier than most of their competitors, but it would be the Americans who were the first to issue semi-automatic rifles as a standard issue infantry weapon with the M1 Garand in 1936. And that same year, the Soviet AVS-36 officially entered production.
It would be infrequently used during the Battle of Khalkhin Gol and during the Winter War as it allowed the user to fire in full auto or semi-auto, packing a heavy round. But, the AVS-36 was hard to keep running in the field because its operating mechanism was over complicated and dirt could get inside the rifle. The recoil made full auto impractical for ordinary infantry use.
Finnish forces captured many of them, but due to its tendency to jam more than the later SVT models, it was quickly ditched. And in 1938, the SVT 38 replaced it. This was the first highly produced semi-automatic rifle in the Soviet arsenal with plans to make millions every year. The man tasked with the design was Fedor Tokarev, who at the time had already designed the rugged Tokarev pistols.
He intended the SVT to be similar and used both at longer and shorter ranges. And in the hands of elite soldiers, it was capable of doing a lot of damage to opposing infantry since its high fire rate and detachable 10-bullet mag allowed troops to engage multiple enemies in a quick succession. But its magazine would literally fall out during fights and it suffered general reliability issues.
So the Soviets began to iterate on these issues and in its place the SVT 40 was invented. The new SVT had fixed most of the issues from the prior iteration and in the hands of non-commissioned officers and marines it would start to see action on the Eastern Front. The soldiers no longer had to work a bolt between shots, which reduced time lost to cycling rather than aiming.
And at the squad level, this increased how much suppressive fire could come from ordinary rifleman rather than only machine guns. But there was one major catch. The advantage only existed if the rifle was kept clean and the user understood its gas system since it was highly complex and tended to jam if the user didn’t maintain it regularly, which is the reason it mostly was handed to the elites of the army.
The first months of the war were disastrous for the Soviet Union causing them to lose hundreds of thousands of SVTs. So the Germans suddenly had tons of them while the Soviets went back to Mosins temporarily. Okay, so now how did the Germans react once they got the SVT in their hands for the first time? After securing the Belorussian town of Minsk on the 9th of July 1941, the Germans went into Ukraine with hundreds of thousands of SVT 38 and 40.
The SVT 40 got the name Selbstladegewehr 259 R, with the R meaning Russisch or Russian. Thereafter, the elites of the German army such as the paratroopers and Waffen SS were handed a 27-page manual on everything from the gun’s interior to how the mags worked. This was important since the SVT had a complicated interior that needed high maintenance or it would lead to all sorts of issues like stuck cases or shot dispersion, but it was also sometimes issued to particularly skilled Wehrmacht troops. The occupied cities of Minsk and
Smolensk had entire ammunition depots containing 7.92 by 57 ammo. The Germans could therefore continue their invasion without having to build supply lines for the gun. A soldier would simply take all the mags from a fallen enemy, and as the captured ammo was redistributed, one singular soldier might gather 100 to 300 plus rounds easily.
So now you can start to see the abundance of SVTs with ammo the Germans held, but this was only half the story. Now, the Germans were mastering the Soviets’ own weapons, and soon it would prove as a perfect addition to their arsenal. Ukraine’s dense forests and narrow villages demanded rapid follow-up fire, exposing the limitations of the bolt-action Kar 98k.
And as the Wehrmacht arrived at Kiev, the Ukrainians and Russians barely stood a chance. 400,000 Soviet men were ordered to defend the city with old rugged Mosins as their main rifle. Within a few months, the Germans used their Panzers to completely surround and capture the Soviet army, and this is where the SVT would turn into a beast.
The Germans quickly discovered that the SVT was unforgiving in untrained hands, but in the right ones, it would absolutely cook enemy troops. The gun in itself filled a spot that the Germans lacked at the time. They had the G41, but it was not particularly comfortable to shoot or carry, so it was rarely issued.
Instead, both SVT models had an effective range of up to 500 m with a lethal 7.62 by 54 bullet while still being operable inside buildings with its semi-auto capabilities. This image, for instance, shows an anti-Soviet fighter. The SVT around his shoulders has no stock, and this could have been a measure to shorten its length for narrow close-quarters purposes.
So, the SVT-40 proved as a versatile gun in German hands and a weapon that was expected to be treated well and used because at the time the Germans had no other choice. However, those strengths only tell one part of the story, so let’s quickly go over some of the more dark stories its flaws created. Across the Eastern Front, multiple soldiers died due to their SVT failing to fire when needed, and the few conscripts who were issued them started to struggle a lot.
Its inside was comparable to a mechanical watch but in the form of a firearm, so the conscripts would sometimes run around unusable gun until they could borrow or pick one up from a dead comrade. And this issue became particularly clear when the Soviets also developed a full-auto version in the AVT-40. It was similar to the Federov Avtomat in its way of firing, having almost uncontrollable recoil.
The gun only proved useful in niche situations such as clearing a corner or shooting through a wall, but most users switched off the full-auto mode almost instantly upon receiving it in their hands due to it being so imprecise. So, its production ended almost immediately. But then, in 1943, something unexpected happened.
The Germans invented their own response to the SVT-40, the Gewehr 43. We’ll refer to it as the G43 for the rest of the video. This was the gun that was meant to change the game on the Eastern Front as it was heavily inspired by the SVT-40 and was made lighter and more reliable than the G41. The rifle used a short-stroke gas piston system copied from the SVT-40, so it no longer relied on the flawed gas trap system of the G41 and that change alone made it far more practical in combat.
But that was not all. It fed from a detachable 10-round magazine loaded with standard 7.92 by 57 mm Mauser ammunition, so soldiers could reload much faster than with stripper clips. And lastly, it came drilled and fitted for a ZF4 scope. Among the most effective marksmen to use the G43 was Matthäus Hetzenauer, an Austrian sniper on the Eastern Front credited with 345 confirmed kills.
He would serve with the third mountain division and sometimes employed the G43 when conditions favored a faster follow-up shot. Operating in harsh winter terrain against Soviet forces, Hetzenauer became one of the highest scoring snipers of the war and was awarded the Iron Cross in 1945 for his battlefield effectiveness. But his most remarkable opponent was Lyudmila Pavlichenko.
She’d used the SVT in a similar fashion and would as a result be nicknamed the Russian [ __ ] from hell by the Germans. By the end of the war, had amassed over 300 confirmed kills with both the Mosin-Nagant and the SVT-40. But beyond the battlefield stories, the broader picture came down to production.
The Germans managed to make over 400,000 G43s by the end of the war because the design was simplified for mass output and used stamped parts where possible. So on paper, it finally gave German infantry a true semi-automatic rifle that could compete directly with Soviet firepower. But not long after a lot of issues would show up.
The Soviets, first of all, managed to produce far more SVT-40s with over 1.6 million in circulation by the end of the war. And the G43s were produced in a sloppy manner as it was primarily built by slave labor in concentration camps. Some of the guns were built without any heat-treated receivers causing it to blow up in the face of German soldiers when fired.
But even though the G43 was technically a more modern semi-automatic rifle, its actual performance in the field was mixed and often disappointing under combat conditions. It did fire 7.92 * 57 mm Mauser rounds from a 10-round detachable magazine like intended, and it was easier to reload than the older bolt-action Kar98k.
But the gas system and internal parts were overly complicated. Most German troops found it far less intuitive than the SVT. Many soldiers found the G43 awkward and hard to keep running on the harsh use. So on the Eastern Front, when troops compared it directly with more reliable and familiar rifles, confidence in the G43’s ruggedness dropped.
So soon after, many Germans all across the Eastern Front started ditching the gun, resorting to the classic and trusted SVT-40. The Soviet design at the time was just considered ahead of its time alongside the American M1 Garand. German troops had realized that rate of fire might actually matter more than pure precision.
But then, World War II ended. And suddenly, the Germans had invented far more groundbreaking tech with the STG-44. After the war, the SVT stayed in service until 1955. But as the Red Army got their hands on the SKS and the AK-47, its gas system and high recoil started to feel obsolete. However, it would still be used by Estonian partisans during the guerrilla war in the Baltic states as they were able to capture them quite easily, and ammo was far from scarce.
The newly released AK-47 had taken some parts from the SVT while primarily taking inspiration from the German STG-44. Since the Soviets would later come to fight on the dense mountains of Afghanistan, the AK-47 acted as a combination of the PPSh-41 and the SVT, but much better. With its select-fire capabilities and solid range, both the SKS and SVT-40 seemed completely outdated.
But the Red Army now had an abundance of these two semi-auto rifles that they didn’t need. The Soviet allies such as North Vietnam and North Korea were therefore equipped with tons of them. In Vietnam, it would often be given to rear troops since its long barrel was less than ideal in jungles and narrow tunnels.
This is a heavily modified version from Vietnam which was used for that exact purpose, but the Georgian army would be one of the last times it ever saw use. As the Soviet Union collapsed, the Georgians became independent and were able to loot thousands of them and during the Georgian Civil War, the gun was used as a makeshift sniper during urban fighting proving as a decent option.
It remained in the official inventory of the Georgian armed forces for years after the Civil War, eventually being retired and scrapped in the 2000s. Thank you very much for watching the video until the end. And if you would like a future in-depth analysis of other battles and horrors of war and politics, leave a like and a comment to let me know. See you in the next video.
