Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are starting a week
of what I'm calling "Adventures in Surplus!"
If you watched yesterday's video you saw that
a couple months ago at Rock Island I picked up
a batch of rifles specifically to get this one.
And I figured folks might be interested in seeing, "What are those?"
It'd be interesting to take a look at
what sort of random stuff does show up as surplus.
So this week, instead of looking at the detailed history of these guns,
we're going to look at the individual examples
and see what we can learn about them.
... Where they might have been, and what's happened to them?
So we're going to dive right in with this, this is a German Kar98a.
And well, let's take a closer look and dig through the details.
Alright, so this is a Kar98a, the original carbine version of the Mauser 98 in German service.
It turned out to be too short. When they updated, upgraded their ammunition to cool high power spitzer ammo
around the turn of the century, they discovered that the carbines were incredibly loud
and had a ton of flash, and they were just very unpleasant to be around.
And so they instead had to make a new version of the carbine that was a bit longer.
So this barrel length would be reused for the ... Karabiner 98k of World War Two fame.
But this is where it originated. This was intended to be like an artillery and cavalry weapon
in the years before World War One.
During World War One it was discovered that actually if you are doing things like trench raiding
or really basically anything involving modern combat, a shorter,
handier rifle like this is a really, really nice improvement from the very long guns like the original Gewehr 98.
So ... before the war they were something like 13% of the German field army's equipment.
By the end of the war they were more like a third of the German field army's standard issue rifles.
So they were getting more and more popular.
Now, first off, the distinctive feature is this stacking rod, which is used to lean several rifles up together.
Note that it is curved. There is a Polish version of this rifle as well that looks very similar,
but has a stacking rod that's a two-part machined element.
Where there's a lug that comes down and then a rod that comes out straight from it.
When you see the two side by side you can see the difference.
If you've got a bent rod like this, that's a German one.
This one also has an original Kar98a muzzle cover on it, which is pretty cool.
These were used for two things, they were used to protect the muzzle.
So if you weren't actually in combat you would leave that on the gun so that you didn't get mud
and crap into the barrel, or hit the crown (the front of the barrel) on something and nick it
and cause accuracy problems for the rifle.
There is a little cap that you can lift up and
... that also functions as a muzzle guide or a muzzle protector for cleaning the rifle.
So you can use a steel cleaning rod down the front
without worrying that you are going to, again, bang up the muzzle of the gun.
Note that this finger piece here for pivoting this on and off the rifle blocks your line of sight,
so that you don't accidentally put a bullet through the muzzle protector.
If you go to take a shot, you'll very quickly realise that there is something blocking your sights,
so that you can remember to take this off before you start shooting.
The receiver here will tell us that this was manufactured in 1918 at the Danzig Arsenal.
Danzig made just over 300,000 of these 98a carbines ... in total.
127,000 of those were during 1918.
So they actually made the carbines prior to the war, and then there was a period during the war
when they stopped producing them, they made rifles instead.
And then in 1918 they restarted carbine production.
So 1918 is the most common year to find for a Danzig example.
We have a crown there, a royal crown, this was Imperial Germany.
We have a 1920 Weimar property stamp, which is I think a really cool element.
What this is going to tell us is the beginning of the story of what actually happened to this rifle.
So, it was made during the war. It was probably used during the war.
As I said, German Army use of 98a carbines increased as the war continued.
They were found to be really nice handy guns, people liked them.
It is unlikely that this rifle sat in a storage depot in 1918.
Then after the war, when the Treaty of Versailles was put into force
the German Army was very strictly limited in size and armament.
And they were only allowed I think it was 17,000 carbines for the Army.
However, they were also allowed carbines for 1 in 3 German policemen.
Which came out to something like 50,000 policemen total.
So, as we'll see, this was a gun that was actually issued out to German police.
Now the 1920 stamp is there because in 1920 at the requirement of the ... Inter-Allied Military Control Commission
Germany had to disarm itself of military arms.
And that meant going around the general population and collecting up military weapons.
That was ... not something that people were particularly keen to do, and so they offered a bounty of
100 marks to hand in a firearm. And if you waited too long they ... would later reduce it to 50 marks.
So you had an incentive to do it quickly.
In order to ensure that people didn't steal army and police rifles and turn them in for the bounty,
all of the army and police guns that were formally possessed were stamped 1920.
So if you tried to hand one of those in to the government, then they'll just arrest you instead.
It would be pretty typical on one of these to find a unit mark,
either on the disassembly disk here, or on the top of the butt plate.
This particular rifle doesn't have any. However it does have this.
Normally on a Kar98a stock you would see a couple of Imperial proof marks from the military acceptance of the rifle.
This one has been rebuilt and it was been given a new stock, and then we have instead an eagle over the letter "P".
This is a police proof mark. So this is a rifle that was rebuilt after the war,
possibly more than once, and issued out to the police.
Probably the civilian police because it doesn't have a unit mark like would if it went to a military police unit.
And if we come back to the receiver markings, if you look closely you'll see that the bottom of that 1918
the stamp is a little bit lighter, it's a little bit shallower, thinner, than the rest of the markings.
And what that tells me is that this was definitely refinished.
And ... they polished out the receiver prior to refinishing it, and they went a little bit enthusiastic
at this bottom end of the receiver and polished away a little bit of that 1918 mark at the bottom.
Several of the other parts that ... we would normally expect to see in the white,
namely the bolt and the follower, have also been blued.
That was done as part of post-war refurbishment.
Often these followers will have been modified to stop the bolt on the last round, this one has not been.
One of the cool things about this particular rifle is that it is a completely matching gun,
which is to say we have a serial number here, 5839 B, bravo. (That is a Prussian eagle proof mark.)
And that serial number is repeated everywhere, so it's on the stock,
it's on the floor plate,
it's on the trigger guard, it's on that screw, the last two numbers, 3 9,
it's on the safety,
it's on the bolt of course, and also right up here,
3 9 is actually stamped onto the follower,
it's on the underside of the rear sight,
it's on the front barrel band,
it's on the stacking rod,
it's on the top of the front barrel band,
it's on the front sight.
I think you get the idea. The Germans just loved putting serial numbers everywhere on rifles at this period.
Now, the sling on this rifle is not actually a proper cavalry style or carbine style sling from the war.
This is a later design of sling that has this sliding adjustable buckle on it.
The proper cavalry sling would have had just ... basically a metal stud that allowed you to
set the length of the sling with, I believe, 9 different settings so you can put it at whatever length you needed.
This is an original German sling, it's just not the original style that would have been used in World War One.
However, ... I'm getting to the extent of my sling knowledge here,
this is probably an appropriate sling for inter-war police use.
Now Kar98s were fairly popular with the German police as well as the Army at this time.
And so they were fairly heavily used by the German officialdom between the World Wars.
And ... a lot of them were actually used in the early years of the Nazi period by various ... armed government agencies.
This one does not appear to have been.
You will sometimes find various early Nazi period markings on some of these
if they were refurbished again, you know, in the mid-30s.
This one doesn't have any of that, which ... leads me to believe that this was issued to a police unit
that went ahead and used it, probably through World War Two
but the gun didn't need any refurbishment after that point.
In addition to police use, a lot of these were used as training rifles.
A lot of those will have new barrels put in them.
I won't pull the whole handguard assembly off because this has its original barrel,
so there are no extra markings under there to show you.
Really there are two kinds of historically significant guns when it comes to surplus.
One is the firearm that is in the exact original pattern or configuration that it came out of the factory,
and those are very cool because they show us what the original intent was with a particular firearm.
Then you have guns like this one that have been through a long trail of events
and have a lot of that history built into them in their current configuration,
the changes that were made by different people at different times.
Personally, I really like this sort of thing. I like being able to read the story behind the firearm,
and so I think this is a really cool example.
A gun that was made in the tumultuous last gasp of the Great War,
then held onto, specifically, by the German Weimar government.
Millions upon millions of Mauser 98 rifles and carbines didn't survive that first few years after the war.
Millions of them were destroyed by the Allies and by the German government.
So this one survived, it was issued out to the police, rebuilt at least once.
Probably, at this point I can't prove any of it, but probably kept in service through the end of World War Two,
and brought home by an American soldier as a souvenir. ...
Well I hope you guys enjoyed taking a look at this particular Kar98AZ, it's a lot of fun to
delve into a particular rifle and see what we can learn about it and its history from
its configuration and its markings and its condition and everything about it.
So, if you did enjoy it, fantastic. If not, well you might not enjoy the next couple of videos.
But, never fear, this will be going on this week, and then after that
we are going to get back to some more typical content here on Forgotten Weapons.
If you like this sort of thing though, do let me know down in the comments,
and maybe we'll bring it back another time.
Thanks for watching.
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