quote:

Originally posted by Chris42:
The Germans had two MG for WW2.
.

respectfully suggest you get an older copy of Small Arms of the World, and look at what the Germans used, then, so some more research

they had the 34 and 42 ,,, and used more

Very true. Though the MG-34 and MG-42 were the standard infantry GPMGs, the Germans produced a number of other machine guns for other roles during WW2 (like aircraft flex mount use), as well as continuing use of some older infantry MG models from the interwar period, like the MG08 and MG13.

In addition, the Wehrmacht incorporated quite a large amount of captured enemy small arms, and not just with third line units or during their desperate last days of the war. There were a number of units equipped with these "Beutewaffen", including front line units, starting from the early period of the war. German natural resources and small arms production were never able to keep up with demand from the start, thus they necessarily had to resort to repurposing captured equipment.

They even restarted production of some foreign weapon models in captured foreign factories for Wehrmacht use, since the tooling and workforce were already in place and guns could be produced immediately.

(Naturally, the most popular options were the ones that shared action or ammunition commonality with their standard small arms, but luckily for the Germans there were a number of neighboring countries utilizing 8mm Mauser ammo, Mauser 98 bolt rifles, etc., including Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia.)

As for foreign machine guns specifically, commonly utilized Beutewaffen light/medium MGs were the Austrian Solothurn and Schwarzlose, the Czech ZB-26/ZB-30 (on which the British Bren Gun was based) and ZB-53, the Polish wz. 1928 (a FN/Browning BAR variant), and the Soviet DP-28 and Maxim.

But there were also a wide variety of other captured French, Belgian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Yugoslavian, Greek, Italian, British, and American MGs also utilized by the Wehrmacht.