"The Robber Came with a Canadian Army Machine Pistol"
Why did German bank robbers and terrorists use Canadian Sten guns?
In February 1974, two members of the Baader-Meinhof gang were arrested in Hamburg. The German police searched the gang’s cache of weapons and found two Sten guns. The serial numbers on the weapons identified them as having belonged, previously, to the Canadian Forces.
Later that month, a splinter group of the Baader-Meinhof Gang robbed a bank in Hamburg. When the robbers were captured by the police, they also had a Canadian Sten.
Just days later, the police raided a man’s house in Heilbronn and found two more “intact machine guns of Canadian origins.” (Just to put these Stens in perspective, this fellow had a pretty big weapons collection, including “a tank and an armoured reconnaissance vehicle”!)
In early 1970s, the German police found a whopping 41 Canadian Sten guns in the hands of robbers, terrorists, and other collectors of illegal weapons.
And in 1975, this information, previously collected in a secret Federal Criminal Police Office study, became public.
The Canadian Embassy in Bonn scrambled to figure out just what was happening, and what they should say about it.
1975 was also the year that Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and other members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang — the Red Army Faction — were put on trial in Germany. In October of that year, Stern magazine published an article detailing the prevalence of these former Canadian weapons now in criminal hands.
The article began like this (I’ve typed out the text below for easier reading):
In Berlin; 37-year-old Willi Karl Schulz plunged into the branch of the Berliner Bank in Bartningallee (No. 5) a machine gun in his hands, and shouted: "Hand over all the money!" Before startled employees could react, a burst of gunfire hit the cashier's compartment and the hall ceiling. When police had subdued the gunman and examined the firearm, they made a surprising discovery. Officially, the machine gun should not have been able to fire a single shot anymore. That's because it was old military equipment, long since sold as scrap and on paper only an unusable decorative item for gun collectors.
The Canadian NATO units stationed in Germany, the CID learned, had sold some 3,000 machine guns of the “STEN MK II, caliber 9 mm Para” variety to scrap dealers. Inadequately welded shut in the cartridge chamber, the weapons of war were then put on sale as harmless mantelpiece decor. But some of them landed in the wrong hands.
The Embassy got word of the forthcoming article. Canadian diplomats expected this might cause a continuing series of investigative articles on the use of Canadian weapons by criminals in Germany, and perhaps a public relations nightmare.
No plastic!
In the Federal Republic of Germany, a law forbade the manufacture of replica machine guns, even those made from plastic. But it was legal to purchase real military weapons, as long as they had been altered or mutilated in a way that prevented the firing of bullets.
There was a booming trade of these weapons — what Stern referred to as “mantelpiece items” or “decoration pieces.” There was a whole lobby of gun sellers, and gun aficionados who bought up these weapons. In the summer of 1975 alone, about 4,700 “altered weapons of war” were sold.
In the late 1960s, Canadian Forces in Germany had surplussed thousands of Sten guns to an arm of the Federal Republic of Germany, VEBEG, that handled the sale of surplus equipment.
As with many of these weapons, however, the Canadian small arms had not been adequately altered in the first place, and subsequent buyers had found a way to return them to their original function.
Robberies yes, embarrassment no.
After the Embassy in Bonn learned of the article, it requested more information from Ottawa. Both the Department of External Affairs and National Defence Headquarters (NDHQ) urged the Embassy not to make a press release. But they provided a statement to be used, just in case:
A. 1 Air Div [Air Division] disposed of 2699 surplus Sten guns and fourteen Browning automatic rifles in 1969. Weapons were mutilated in accordance with Canadian regulations in existence at the time, ie. a blow torch was used to deform both ends of barrel.
B. They were then disposed of as contaminated scrap metal through VEBEG, a German disposal agency.
C. Investigation in 1971 subsequently established that certain of these weapons were reconstructed by various individuals for undetermined purposes.
D. In June of 1971 all disposal of surplus Canadian small arms by mutilation or sale outside Canada was stopped and in 1972 instructions were issued that all surplus small arms were to be returned to Canada to be melted down under direct supervision of Canadian Forces personnel.
E. From foregoing it appears that any weapons of Canadian origin that may have been reassembled and put into use were disposed of by Canadian Forces prior to mid 1971.
F. In summary it can be stated that at all times Canadian disposal actions in regard to small arms were designed to prevent their misuse and were carried out in cooperation with German authorities. As soon as there was reason to believe that these procedures were not/not completely satisfactory corrective steps were taken.
The Canadians, then, had known since 1971 that the surplus weapons were capable of being “reconstructed.” The Stern article explained that this was done by forcing open the cartridge chamber. (Ottawa said the barrels had been treated with a blow torch, but the Embassy thought a blowtorch would have been useless for this purpose.)
By whatever means the weapons had been “reconstructed,” their new “undetermined purposes,” it turned out, were bank robbery and terrorism.
Ultimately, the Stern article did not create the fuss the Embassy worried about.
The Canadian diplomats in Bonn sent a translated version of the full article to Ottawa, and noted that the piece focused on gun control rather than making a direct criticism of Canadian Forces.
In typical cable-ese, the Embassy reported “CDN interests do not/not seem to be threatened.” (Important qualifiers, like “not,” are always repeated in diplomatic cables to ensure no mix-up.)
“To the best of our knowledge to date the article has not raised any particular interest on the part of the German public and thus it has not had the adverse effect that was at first feared.”
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The documents cited above are from “Defence - Conventional and Nuclear Armaments = Defense - Armements de type classique et nucleaire,” 1963/10/24-1975/11/30, RG25-A-3-c, Volume number: 10334, File number: 27-11, File part: 1, Library and Archives Canada. A digital copy of this file is available at Canada Declassified.