After the German capitulation in May 1945, production of the machine gun didn’t resume until the late 1950s, when Rheinmetall produced the MG 1 for the reformed German Army, the Bundeswehr.

The MG 08 was the standard German machine gun. A copy of Hiram Maxim’s design from 1894, it was a clumsy weapon by modern standards. The early war version weighed 60 pounds for the machine gun ...