7.63×25mm Mauser

The 7.63×25mm Mauser is DWM’s 1896 refinement of Hugo Borchardt’s earlier 7.65×25mm round, built for the Mauser C96 “Broomhandle” pistol and distinguishable from its Borchardt parent by the small neck stab crimps DWM used to hold the bullet in place under the C96’s recoil. It was, for its time, an unusually powerful pistol cartridge, and the C96 built around it saw wide military and commercial distribution from Imperial Germany through Weimar and Nazi-era Germany, plus significant export and licensed use in China, Spain and the Soviet Union.

Its most consequential legacy is a cartridge it is often confused with rather than one it directly became: the Soviet Union used the 7.63×25mm Mauser, encountered in large numbers of imported C96 pistols, as the starting point for the 7.62×25mm Tokarev, developed for the TT-30 and TT-33 pistols and PPSh-41 and PPS submachine guns. The two rounds are dimensionally close enough that many Tokarev pistols can safely fire 7.63×25mm Mauser ammunition, but they are not identical loadings and the Tokarev is a distinct, later Soviet cartridge in its own right, already recorded as its own entry here.

Every dimension in this entry comes from the C.I.P. datasheet for “7,63 Mauser”. Its one recorded load’s bullet mass is Wikipedia’s own uncited infobox figure; no test barrel length is stated for the load’s published 441 m/s velocity, so no muzzle velocity or ballistic coefficient is recorded for this cartridge.