BACKGROUND: Among other restrictions, the Treaty of Versailles banned Germany from developing any type of general purpose machine gun. To circumvent this, German development of an all purpose machine gun was secretly being done in Switzerland in the early 1930's. By 1934 designer Louis Stange of the Rheinmetall armaments factory had made improvements to the secret machine gun developed in Switzerland and the MG34 was introduced as an all purpose selective fire weapon. In spite of the relatively high production cost the MG34 was accepted by the Wehrmacht Ordnance department and deliveries of the MG34 began in 1936. In 1937 due to the high cost and manufacturing time of the MG34 development began on another general purpose machine gun which utilized stamped and pressed components making it cheaper and quicker to produce. Further developments resulted in the introduction of the MG42 general purpose machine gun in late 1941. Both the MG34 and MG42 were issued with a wide variety of accessories including a tripod for use in static positions as a heavy machine gun. The tripods came outfitted with specific shoulder carrying straps which were interchangeable with both the MG34/42 tripods.