Articles / History
Berlin-Lübecker Maschinenfabriken and hammer forging
2026-02-20 · 7 minutes
BLM was a barrel and rifle plant. It was not, on German evidence, the unique inventor of cold hammer forging.
Berlin-Lübecker Maschinenfabrik was a mid-1930s Heereswaffenamt plant at Lübeck. It made Kar98k rifles and invested in barrel production. English Wikipedia and collector sites often say BLM invented hammer-forged barrels. German company history does not. It records production-speed work and an automatic barrel-straightening machine. For the origin of the process, read the longer article on this site: Where hammer-forged rifle barrels originated.
Treat BLM as an important wartime barrel and assembly plant, and as an early user of forged barrels — not as the sole inventor. After 1945 the machine line that mattered commercially sat with GFM at Steyr, which is why postwar notes drift to Austria.