My Favorite Walther, and How It's Tied to the Berlin Wall
While visiting Walther'sstate-of-the-art factory in Ulm, Germany earlier this year, I came across my favorite pistol that carries the company's iconic banner.
Walther has been around in one form or another, and one location or another, to the 1880s. Whenever you say the company's name in a conversation, the immediate Pavlovian response is typically PPK, PDP, P99, or P-38.
However, my favorite Walther is the seldom-seen, and almost unheard-of, P4 (also seen as "P38 IV").
A factory cutaway of the P-4 in Walther's Museum in Ulm, Germany. (All photos: Chris Eger/Guns.com)
A shortened version of the P1-- which itself was an updated P-38-- the P4 was adopted by the West German Border Protection (Bundesgrenzschutz) and Customs (Zoll) agencies during the chilliest days of the Cold War.
The P4 carries a 4-inch barrel as opposed to the P1 and P-38 which both run 4.9 inches. Like the P-1, it has an alloy frame but was updated with a strengthening hex-bolt above the trigger and a stronger slide design, features that were passed on to P-1s made after 1975. As such, the P4 was effectively the penultimate P-38 variant and remained in Walther's catalog until 1981.
Introduced in 1974, Walther only produced a limited run of just 5,200 P4s.
Relatively rare in the U.S., a small batch of a few hundred retired P-4s were imported to the U.S. via Interarms, complete with period holsters.
They make great shooters and were typically imported in excellent condition.
And it is my favorite Walther as, my grandmother, who was trapped in East Germany when "The Wall" went up and refused to live under Communist oppression, only managed to get out-- with my mother in tow-- through the subtle assistance of the West German border guards.
She soon legally emigrated to the U.S. and had an American flag in front of her house until the day she died.
So to me, the Walther P4 has a special place in my collection, and I was pleased to see the company had a couple in their museum.
