Switzerland gave the world watches, chocolate, and banking secrecy. But another export was not mentioned in the tourist brochures. A rifle as tall as a man, weighing half his body weight, capable of tearing off a limb with a single shot or turning a tank crew into a bloody mess inside a steel box.
A neutral country in the heart of Europe traded death to anyone who could pay. The Dutch bought these weapons to defend themselves against the Germans. The Italians bought them to fight on the German side. The Fins obtained them through intermediaries because the Germans forbade direct sales. And the Germans themselves who had come up with all this burned to death one morning in their tanks on the bridges over the moose from shells born in German design offices and assembled by Swiss hands.
This is a story about how engineering excellence lost the arms race and how neutrality became a business model. And to understand it, we need to go back to Versailles in 1919 where the victors banned Germany from manufacturing weapons unaware of the loophole they were leaving open. On 28th of June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the German delegation signed a treaty intended to permanently deprive Germany of its military teeth.
Among the hundreds of paragraphs and subparagraphs, there was one that particularly troubled the generals of the Reichkes. Article 170 prohibited the development and production of anti-tank weapons on German territory. Anton inspectors were authorized to inspect any factory or design bureau. The victors had reason to be concerned.
In the final months of the war, German infantry men had already been using the 13 mm tank gouser, the world’s first anti-tank rifle. clumsy singleshot and with a deadly recoil, it nevertheless proved that a tank could be stopped without artillery. The allies did not want the Germans to develop this idea further. But tanks had not disappeared.
French Renault FT tanks rolled through the Rin region as a reminder of defeat. The British improved their vicar’s tanks and every year the armor became thicker, the engines more powerful, and the tactics of use more sophisticated. The generals of the Reich watched this evolution and understood a straightforward thing.
In the next war, an infantry man without anti-tank weapons would be meat. The question was not whether to create new weapons. The question was how to do it. When every German factory was under surveillance, Versailles had tied its hands. But German engineers found a loophole in the most unexpected place.
The answer was found in December 1928 at the headquarters of the Rhin Matal concern in Dusseldorf. Seated at the negotiating table were people united by a common problem and by a willingness to circumvent the law to solve it. Representing Rin Matal was engineer Hans Ela. Representing the Austrian partners was a man whose name was already spoken with trepidation in Vienna’s financial circles.
Fritz Mandal was 28 years old, the son of a Jewish ammunition manufacturer. By this age, he had already saved his family’s factory, Herenburgger, from bankruptcy, built a network of ammunition factories in Austria, Holland, and Poland, and earned the nickname King of Ammunition. A few years later, he married 18-year-old actress Haiti Kesler, notorious for her explicit scenes in the film Ecstasy.
Mussolini. And according to some accounts, Hitler would appear at his parties in the Vienna Palace. His wife eventually ran away from him, disguised as a maid, and became Hedi Lamar in Hollywood, where she invented frequency hopping technology, the basis of modern Wi-Fi between film shoots. But in December 1928, Mandal was simply a very wealthy young man with a proper proposal.
In the canton of Solathn in northwestern Switzerland, a cartridge factory had gone bankrupt. Mandal had already bought up its shares. Switzerland had not signed the Treaty of Versailles. Swiss companies were not inspected by the Anton. And the Swiss flag on boxes of weapons opened doors that were closed to the black, white, and red German eagle.
On April 6th, 1929, the parties signed a cooperation agreement. Ryan Matal acquired a controlling stake in Vaffan Fabri Solathn AG. 23,000 tons of equipment, which the concern had hidden in Holland after the war crossed the border and went to a quiet Swiss town. They were followed by engineers from the research center in Sumida led by Luis Stank whose patents already formed the basis of the German MG15 and MG17 aircraft machine guns.
On paper, Solathn was an independent Swiss company. In practice, it became a shadow of rhinmetal thrown across the border to circumvent the Versailles system. Later the factory would be taken over by Voldemar Pops, a former Frycore captain who in January 1919 personally interrogated Rosa Luxembourg at the Hotel Aiden in Berlin and gave the order for her murder.
A murderer ofrevolutionaries at the head of a neutral enterprise in a neutral country. Such was the underside of the Swiss arms business. 23,000 tons of equipment, an entire factory, and one man who would assemble the weapons of the future from it. What Stange created in Solathn was not an anti-tank rifle in the usual sense of the word. It was a semi-automatic cannon that could be carried by an infantryman.
In theory, because it weighed 50 kg without a magazine and ammunition, 2 m and 20 cm from the butt plate to the massive muzzle break, Stain took the Airhard 20mm aircraft cannon from World War I as a basis and turned it into a ground warfare weapon. The 20x 138 mm B cartridge, the same one that powered anti-aircraft guns and aircraft weapons, accelerated in the long barrel to 850 m/s.
At a distance of 100 m, the armor-piercing shell pierced 40 mm of steel armor at a right angle. This was enough to penetrate any tank from the early 1930s, most of which had a maximum of 15 to 20 mm of protection. The heart of the design was a rotating locking clutch, Stan’s own patent, a short barrel stroke when firing, rotation of the coupling, extraction of the cartridge case, and feeding of a new cartridge from a horizontal 10 round magazine protruding from the left side of the receiver. One shot per second
until the magazine was empty. For anti-tank weapons of that time, this was an unprecedented rate of fire. Stain added an optical sight with electric illumination for shooting at dusk. He provided a mount for an anti-aircraft tripod, turning the rifle into a light anti-aircraft gun. He thought through every detail with the obsession of a watch maker.
Weapons expert Ian McCollum of the Forgotten Weapons Project calls the S18/1000 the highest quality and most technically advanced anti-tank rifle ever created. Not the most successful or practical, but the most perfect in terms of engineering. It was the ideal machine for killing tanks. However, there remained one critical question.
What would the price be? Perfection demanded sacrifices, and the Solathn S18 demanded them in abundance. To begin with, it was impossible to manually [ __ ] the bolt after firing. The recoil spring resisted with such force that a special ratchet handle, similar to a car jack, was required to reload.
The soldier inserted it into the groove and turned it like a wellgate handle until the mechanism was ready for action. Without this handle, the 50 kg machine became a singleshot weapon. The tolerances between parts were measured in hundredths of a millimeter. Designed the rifle as a precision instrument, and a precision instrument required appropriate handling.
Sand, dirt, dust, everything that was in abundance on any battlefield turned perfectly fitted parts into a source of malfunctions. The mechanism jammed, the cartridges got stuck in the chamber, and the rotating coupling refused to turn. A twoman crew could not carry the weapon into battle. 50 kg of iron, plus ammunition, plus optics, plus spare magazines, was too much even for powerful men.
Therefore, each gun was accompanied by an S so- wheeled cart just like a mortar. The weapon that was supposed to protect the infantry from tanks itself required a cart for transportation. And then there was the price. Precision machining, highquality steel, optics, complex mechanics. All this cost money. One S18/1000 unit cost the customer an amount comparable to the price of a new car.
The Army could buy several conventional anti-tank guns for the same money, but the main flaw was not visible on paper. The S18 was designed for tanks from 1930 to 1933 with armor ranging from 15 to 20 mm thick. By the time serial production began, the arms race had moved on.
New tanks had armor ranging from 30 to 50 mm. The window of effectiveness was closing faster than Swiss workers could machine the parts. Theory is one thing, but on the 10th of May 1940, theory met practice on the bridges of Mustri. And yet there was a time when Solathn reigned supreme on the battlefield. On 10th May 1940, German troops crossed the Dutch border.
The Dutch army met them with outdated equipment, a shortage of ammunition, and only 125 Solath S18/1000 anti-tank guns out of the 662 ordered. The rest had not been delivered in time. On the bridges across the moose near Mastri, German Panza FK, light tank destroyers based on the Panzer Y encountered for the first time weapons designed to combat them.
20 mm shells pierced their 13 mm armor. Several vehicles were burned. The crews were killed by firearms conceived by German engineers, built with German equipment, assembled by Swiss hands, and sold to the enemy for Swiss Franks. The Germans captured the surviving rifles and adopted them under the cumbersome index 2cm Panzer Abverbuka 785H.
The letter H stood for Helendish, Dutch. Another irony of the story in North Africa Solith found a second life. TheItalian army purchased more than 500 units and issued them to elite units. Beraglier from Compani Alto Aio Saharan desert reconnaissance companies mounted the rifles on the turrets of their AS42 jeeps.
They carried out quick raids on British rear areas, hunted supply convoys, and destroyed light armored vehicles. The Solith worked perfectly against the British MK6 light tanks with 14 mm armor. It also worked well against armored cars. Even the sides of Crusader cruiser tanks were vulnerable at close range.
The Italians mounted the S18 on L3/35 tankets, creating Özat’s tank destroyers, designated L3 contraaro. Clumsy and vulnerable, but capable of hunting what standard machine guns could not destroy. The Finns, who had to resort to the most complicated tricks to obtain their weapons through Italian intermediaries, bypassing German prohibitions under the Molotov ribbon pact, used the Solathn against Soviet light tanks and armored vehicles.
The Hungarians set up licensed production. The Swedes purchased several hundred. Even the Americans tested a prototype under the Index 20mm automatic gun T3. Still, they refused to purchase it when Rhin Metal blocked the deal. For its narrow window of opportunity, the S18 was deadly. The problem was that the window would soon close.
In 1942, American tanks arrived in North Africa. the M3 Grant with its 50 mm frontal armor. Behind it was the M4 Sherman with armor ranging from 50 to 76 mm depending on the modification. The 20 mm Solathn shell bounced off these vehicles like peas off a wall. On the Eastern front, where some of the weapons captured by the Germans ended up, the situation was even worse.
The T34 with its sloped 45mm armor equivalent to 60 to 70 mm when viewed from the side. The KV1 has 75 mm armor on the front of the turret. Anti-tank guns of any caliber were powerless against these machines. Soviet 14.5 mm PTRD and PTRS could only hit the T34 in the side at minimum distances.
The Solathn with its 20 mm caliber had little more chance. The weapon created as a tank killer was relegated to auxiliary roles, sniper fire at pillbox embraasers. Destruction of unarmored vehicles, trucks, tractors, and staff cars. Hunting for tank optics and viewing devices attempting to blind what could not be killed.
from anti-aircraft tripods. The gun was used against low-flying aircraft, a worthy retirement for a weapon that had outlived its era by several years. And then the Panzaf appeared. The first samples of this disposable grenade launcher went into service in 1943. 3 kg, a cardboard tube, no precision tolerances, no optics, no rotating couplings or ratchet handles.
The soldier aimed, pulled the trigger, and threw away the empty tube. The cumulative grenade burned through 200 mm of armor, more than the frontal plate of any World War II tank could withstand. Everything that Louis St had spent years refining to hundreds of a millimeter and creating engineering masterpieces was now being done by a cardboard tube with a grenade at the end.
The arms race was won not by precision but by the physics of the cumulative effect. The fates of the people who created and sold these weapons varied. Lewis Stang, an engineering genius whose patents formed the basis not only for the S18, but also for the MG34, MG15, and MG17 machine guns and the FG42 paratrooper rifle appeared before a military tribunal after the war.
He spent 2.5 years in an internment camp. After his release, he disappeared into the small town of Hazllock in southwestern Germany. The man who armed the Luftvafa and the Vermacht ended his life in obscurity and the exact date of his death is unknown. Fritz Mandel, the king of ammunition, fled Austria after the Anelas in 1938.
Despite his connections to Mussolini and business relations with the Nazis, his Jewish origins made him an undesirable figure in the new Reich. He turned up in Argentina with a ton of gold, a Rolls-Royce, and an entourage of impoverished European aristocrats. He became an adviser to Juan Peron, invested in aircraft manufacturing, returned to Austria after the war, and died in Vienna in 1977, never having been punished for decades of trading and death.
His ex-wife, Hedi Lamar, who fled from him in 1937, lived a very different life. Between filming Hollywood movies, she worked with composer George Anthale to develop a secure radio communication system based on frequency hopping. The patent was granted in 1942, but the US Navy ignored it. However, the technology underlies modern Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth.
The woman who sat at dinner parties with Hitler and Mussolini as the trophy wife of an arms dealer made a greater contribution to military technology than her ex-husband. Wdemar Pops, the murderer of Rosa Luxembourg and manager of a neutral Swiss arms factory, outlived everyone. He fled from Germany to Switzerland in 1943, fearingarrest by the Gestapo.
After the war, he returned to Germany. He died in Dusseldorf in 1970 at the age of 89, never having been brought to justice for the 1919 murder or anything else. Waffan Fabric Solathn AG attempted to switch to the production of machine tools after the war. The attempt failed. By the early 1950s, the company had gone bankrupt.
The remaining stocks of rifles were sold to the American collectors market through dealers such as Interarmco at $200 a piece. Today, the same rifles, if you can find them, are worth tens of thousands of dollars. An independent commission of experts led by historian John Francois Berier established in the 1990s that 84% of Swiss arms exports between 1940 and 1944 went to the Axis countries.
Switzerland was not only a repository for Nazi gold but also one of the leading suppliers of weapons for Hitler’s war machine. The history of the Solathn S18 is the story of a narrow window between eras. There was a time when tanks were already deciding the outcome of wars, but had not yet become invulnerable.
When 20 mm of steel was enough to protect a vehicle from bullets, but not enough to stop a 20 mm shell. when an infantryman with a heavy rifle could still fight on equal terms with an armored monster. Stain and rhin metal engineers created the perfect weapon for this window. The problem was that the window was closing faster than they could work on it.
By the time the S18 went into production, tanks had already begun to get thicker. By 1942, the window had slammed shut. By 1943, the cumulative effect of ammunition had made the very concept of an anti-tank gun an anacronism. But there is another lesson in this story. A lesson about neutrality as a business model.
Switzerland sold weapons to anyone who could pay. to the Dutch who used them against the Germans, to the Italians who fought on the side of the Germans. The Finns who fought against the Soviets were allies of those who fought against the Germans. The Germans themselves who came up with the whole scheme. The HEG convention of 1907 allowed neutral states to trade arms with all parties to the conflict.
Switzerland took full advantage of this permission. What remains of perfect weapons when the war moves on? Museum exhibits under glass, collectible rarities in American gun safes, lines in historians tables, and a lesson that no one has learned. The arms race is won not by quality, but by speed, not by the perfection of engineering, but by the ability to change faster than the enemy.
The Solathn S18 was too good for a war that refused to wait for it.
