Either destroyed or carried away by the Russians and/or the French. All of the technical drawings, all of the tooling, and most of the expertise with which the original P38s were manufactured: gone. Since Fritz's escape to Ulm, in the west, at war's end, his company has consisted essentially of a stack of patents. Spreewerk's pistol plant, in Czechosolvakia, fared no better, and Mauser's factory was gutted by the French Army. It was handed over to the Red Army in '46, looted, and burned to the ground. Well, it's a problem because the factory where the originals were made was in Zella-Mehlis, Thuringia. For which he will get paid! A lot! And make no mistake, Fritz Walther likes to get paid. Which, on its face, sounds like Herr Walther has the opposite of a problem! He has it on good authority that his pistol is still the military brass's choice, and since all the old ones are gone, he'll have to make all new ones.
Unfortunately for the Bundeswehr, virtually all those 1.2 million or so wartime P38s were gathered up by the Allies as part of Germany's disarmament, and either taken away as reparations or destroyed so here in 1956, the new Bundeswehr will have to find a source of completely new production if it intends to standardize on the same design. So many were required by the wartime Wehrmacht that the Walther company itself only made about half of the total production the others were made under license by Mauser and another company called Spreewerk. It was simple, it was robust, it required much less complex manufacturing, and it was so easy to disassemble for maintenance that it's possible to seem like you did it accidentally. Walther's design (said to be principally the work of Fritz Walther himself) was none of those things. The P38 had been developed in the mid-'30s to replace the Parabellum P08, popularly known as the Luger, which was a well-regarded pistol but very complicated and expensive, difficult to maintain, and known to be temperamental in poor conditions. The company that lands the contract to provide the new Bundeswehr's weapons stands to make very, very money, and the smart bet is on the pistol that was the old Wehrmacht's choice just before the war-Walther's P38. Having been forced to surrender all its arms at the end of the war, that army will have to be re-equipped from scratch.
His problem is that, 11 years after the end of World War II, West Germany is just being allowed to have an army again. It's 1956, and Fritz Walther has a problem.
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