Mystery submachine gun at the Bundeswehr’s Defence Technology Museum

In November 2016, The Firearm Blog ran a piece about the Wehrtechnische Studiensammlung in Koblenz, Germany, which houses a sizeable collection of military ordnance. You can read the original article here. There’s a lot of interesting guns on display there, but of note is the pictured weapon, which is labelled as an “Experimental Model B” submachine gun.

The placard next to the gun, translated into English, reads as follows:

“The use of old components and a very simple design indicate it was developed towards the end of World War II, and did not advance beyond experimental stages. A fifty-round box magazine from the Lanchester submachine gun are used.”

So it seems the museum curators don’t really know what this gun is, other than that it’s British in origin and was made at the end of the war.

The gun is the work of Dr. Marian Karol Jurek, a Polish competition shooter who fled to the UK during World War II. Jurek did a stint in the British Army before working with Webley & Scott on some interesting handgun prototypes. He retired in the late 50s to produce workshop-made competition guns at his house in Birmingham and died in 1981 at the age of 77.

The Ordnance Board’s sketch of the Jurek Mk.II from January 3rd 1947.

Contrary to what the museum placard claims, these guns were certainly not made by RSAF Enfield, but rather hand-made by Dr. Jurek himself while stationed in Scotland and later Germany from 1942 - 1945. Some of the components were lifted from existing ordnance, such as the Sten and the SMLE. While the placard claims the weapon feeds from Lanchester magazines, it in fact was designed to use shortened 20-round Sten magazines.



The model pictured is Jurek’s second prototype, which was trialed at Cheshunt in October 1946. The trials were informal as there was no serious consideration for adoption, and the weapon was not entered into the British Army’s troop trials a year later.

Internally the gun was of a basic blowback design but had an interesting fire rate moderator that prevented the hammer from contacting the firing pin until the breech block was completely closed. This made the weapon extremely controllable but brought the fire rate down to 350 rounds per minute, which was well below the Army’s specifications at that time.

Dr. Jurek with two custom-made .22 target pistols in the 1970s.



The wireframe stock pictured on the museum example is not an original feature. It was added on much later by a Birmingham-based arms dealer who came into possession of the prototypes after the war. The original stock was a canvas-covered detachable stock that doubled as a holster, similar to that of the MCEM-2.



The prototypes eventually ended up in the US and there were plans by the new owners, the Services Armament Corp. to put it into production but this never came to anything. How a prototype has now made its way back to Germany after all this time is beyond me.

