Heckler & Koch

Three Mauser engineers — Edmund Heckler, Theodor Koch and Alex Seidel — founded the company at Oberndorf in December 1949, in a country then forbidden to make weapons at all, initially producing sewing machine parts and precision tools. When rearmament came they had the Spanish CETME’s roller-delayed blowback to build on, and that mechanism became the house signature: the G3, the MP5 and the HK21 are the same idea at three scales. The later gas-operated designs are a deliberate move away from it.