The agendas for any local government’s summer meetings are usually filled with pro-forma requests, recognitions of school bus drivers and plaques for middle school teachers.
This past summer, a motion crossed the desk of the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors that seemed like another everyday request: a motion to allow the county’s police department to donate an artifact to the Virginia War Memorial.
But the artifact in question was an MP40 machine pistol made in 1941 — in Nazi Germany. The firearm had been sitting in the Chesterfield County Police Department’s Police Property and Evidence Unit for the past 40 years, where it was a bit of a departmental curiosity.
“We have people every week bringing us things they don’t want — specifically firearms,” said Capt. Steve Grohowski, who oversees the evidence unit for CCPD. “Typically, people say, ‘Take this and do with it what you want.’ I don’t think people know this, but we destroy hundreds of firearms a year.”
Grohowski took over supervision of the evidence room about a year ago and decided to clear the gun out as part of a housekeeping effort. It was transferred to the Virginia War Memorial as an artifact and can’t be resold or transferred further.
“You see them in movies, but to see it in person you knew it was special,” Grohowski said.
The gun was given to the department in 1984 by Chesterfield resident Rebecca Edgeworth, shortly after her husband died. But how it arrived at the Edgeworth home in the first place remains a mystery.
Jesse Smith, the war memorial’s director of exhibits and collections, is trying to research the weapon’s path to Virginia.
Smith said Rebecca’s husband, Richard, was a U.S. Marine who fought in World War II. But he was sent to the Pacific theater, making it unlikely he would naturally come into possession of a German firearm.
Through his research, Smith discovered that Richard was not the only Edgeworth sent to the war. His brother, Army Maj. Alvin Edgeworth, served in the 770th Ordnance Company, which followed the D-Day invasion into France.
Smith believes it’s possible that Alvin brought the gun back as a war trophy, then gave it to Richard for safekeeping — possibly before moving to the West Coast.
“During World War II, you could bring home a rifle and a pistol. And you had to declare it as a war trophy,” Smith said. “You could do that all the way up to Vietnam.”
He added: “Lots of them were brought back that way.”
By 1968, enough automatic weapons had been brought back as war trophies that the federal government implemented a one-time amnesty period in an effort to register those firearms and prohibit more from coming in. Smith said he believes this weapon was registered through the appropriate channels while it was in Alvin and Richard Edgeworth’s possession.
The MP40 was a type of 9 mm submachine gun used during the war by soldiers in the Wehrmacht's army, Smith said — “mainly by NCOs [noncommissioned officers] and people with a little bit of rank.” This particular machine pistol was manufactured at a factory in the town of Suhl, in central Germany. It also contains barely visible proof-marks that show the gun's original parts are intact, with no parts retrofitted or replaced.
It will likely go on display as part of the Virginia War Memorial’s collection.
“The object’s neat,” Smith said. “But the story behind it is what makes it really interesting.”
