7.63×25mm Mauser
pistol cartridge designed by the Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken Aktiengesellschaft (DWM)
The 7.63×25mm Mauser (.30 Mauser Automatic) round is a bottleneck, rimless, centerfire cartridge, originally developed for the Mauser C96 service pistol. This cartridge headspaces on the shoulder of the case. It later served as the basis for the 7.62mm Tokarev cartridge commonly used in Soviet and Eastern Bloc weapons.
History
This cartridge was based on the 7.65mm Borchardt of 1893, the most successful semi-automatic pistol cartridge in production at the time, due to its use in the Borchardt C-93 pistol. The 7.63mm Mauser is sometimes confused with the later 7.65mm Parabellum (.30 Parabellum), also a bottlenecked pistol cartridge used in the Luger Parabellum. It has been manufactured from the 1890s until the present by various ammunition manufacturers.
Firearms chambered for the 7.63mm Mauser cartridge include the pistol for which it was designed, the Mauser C96 in all variants and copies, the Astra Model 900 and variants, the Schwarzlose Model 1898, the 1911-pattern Star models A and M, and a handful of pre-World War II submachine guns such as the Swiss Bergmann M/20 exported to China and Japan and SIG's unique MKMO.
Several Soviet pistol and submachine gun developments of the late 1920s were designed to use the 7.63mm Mauser cartridge. The Mauser cartridge thus became the basis for the 7.62mm Tokarev as officially adopted by the Soviet Union. Although the case dimensions of the two cartridges are nearly identical, the 7.62mm Tokarev has a stronger powder charge and is generally not suited for use in Mauser C96 pistols or other firearms chambered for 7.63mm Mauser. However, the slightly less powerful 7.63mm Mauser could be used safely in firearms chambered for the more powerful 7.62mm Tokarev.
“7.63×25mm Mauser” enters the record as pistol cartridge designed by the Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken Aktiengesellschaft (DWM). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what 25mm, Mauser and pistol can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 13, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q259228. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1893, 1898 and 1911.
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This entry incorporates text from “7.63×25mm Mauser” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.