Heckler & Koch began by making sewing machine parts in a gutted factory
After the war, French occupiers stripped the Mauser works in Oberndorf and destroyed its records. Three of its former engineers salvaged what they could and set up a machine shop in the empty buildings, turning out bicycle and sewing machine parts. A government rifle contest in 1956 changed their direction entirely.
Edmund Heckler, Theodor Koch and Alex Seidel started their venture in 1948 as an engineering office in the vacant plant, and on 28 December 1949 it was registered as Heckler & Koch GmbH. For its first years the firm made machine tools, gauges and precision components. When West Germany sought a new infantry rifle for its rebuilt army, the company proposed the G3, based on the Spanish CETME Model 58 and developed with its designers. It won, and in 1959 the G3 became the Bundeswehr's standard rifle. That success turned a parts maker into a defence manufacturer.
A string of designs followed. A machine pistol shown in 1966 launched three years later as the MP5, and the HK33 shrank the G3 down to the lighter NATO cartridge. The company also pursued bolder ideas: after two decades of work it produced prototypes of the G11, a rifle firing caseless ammunition, in 1990, but German reunification and defence cuts left it without a buyer. The carbon fibre G36 became standard issue in 1995.
Ownership changed hands several times. The British firm Royal Ordnance owned it from 1991, which passed it to BAE Systems, and that group sold it to private investors in 2002; Nicolas Walewski's holding company CDE has held a majority since July 2020. In 2004 it won a US Department of Homeland Security handgun contract worth up to $26.2 million, described as the largest such law enforcement purchase in American history.
Its product names follow an internal code often called the three-digit system, in which digits signal generation, form and calibre. The rules bend for marketing: the HK416 fits none of them and is known internally as the HK333.
Source: Heckler & Koch
