Václav Holek

Václav Holek weapons designer

Václav Holek (born September 24, 1886 , † December 13, 1954 in Brno ) was a Czech weapons designer. Holek is considered to be the most important weapons manufacturer in Czechoslovakia .

Life

Holek trained as a weapons designer in Písek and from 1905 worked for the Anton Mulacz company (kuk court supplier; hunting weapons) in Vienna . From 1910 he became production manager at Holland & Holland in Prague , where he developed shotguns . In World War I he developed infantry protected . At the beginning of 1918 he worked at the newly founded weapons smithy Zbrojovka Praga , where he worked on the construction of a light machine gun from the spring of 1921. In December 1924 he moved to the Zbrojovka Brno arms factory in Brno . There his construction was named Lehký Kulomet ZB vz. 26 manufactured. The English armory Enfield bought the license and provided 220,000 ZB vz. 26 under the name Bren . In 1929, Holek also developed the ZH-29 semi-automatic rifle , one of the very first self-loading rifles . The breech of the ZH-29 was later also used for the German 44 assault rifle .

In the 1930s he developed the ZB vz heavy machine gun . 37 , which was again manufactured 60,000 times in England under the name BESA . During and after the Second World War , Holek developed a number of modern automatic weapons, which, however, except for the machine gun vz. 52 were no longer produced in series.

literature

• Lubomir Popelinský: Československé Automatické Zbraně , Prague 1999