Hi guys! Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company taking a look at a Wehrmannsgewehr.
This is a German sporting rifle built in the pattern of a World War 1 era Mauser 98:
Lange Visier sight, super long barrel length - all of those early pattern features.
And this isn't actually a military rifle - this was for specifically shooting sports.
And this was a type of shooting sport that originated with a Dutchman by the name of Henrik Sillem
And he introduced this basically competition style in 1897 and it didn't get very popular in Germany for a while:
Picked up a little bit in 1903 and then saw some limited popularity until World War 1.
What you had here was basically three-position military rifle style shooting -
So, standing, sitting or kneeling and prone - and the ranges appeared to have varied a little bit:
They were either 100 and 200 yards (or meters) or 100, 175 and 300 meters
And it's not entirely clear to me which - the three ranges appeared to have been most common,
But it seems like some places probably had shorter shooting ranges and compressed the whole thing into 200 meters.
But what's more important about this is this was actually done not with a military cartridge, but with a sporting cartridge
This was the 8x46 mm rimmed cartridge. They fired just a simple lead ball
(Lead bullet. I'm sorry)
And it was about 150 gr. bullet at about 1,800 feet per second
(That's 9.7 grams at about 600 m/s)
So, it's a little bit of a lighter loading than you'd have with military 8x57 mm ball
And, you know, this is kind of the 1900s European equivalent of NRA High Power shooting.
These guns would become...
They would pick up in popularity quite a lot - and this shooting style would pick up in popularity quite a lot -
Starting in 1918, because at that point the Treaty of Versailles prohibited German civilians from owning military-type weapons.
And that included Mauser 98 in 8x57 mm.
But in the grand long tradition of loopholes in laws, it did not include sporting cartridges, like 8x46 mm, and so,
You could get a military pattern rifle like this in a civilian caliber and you could go out and compete with it
And this appealed to a lot of German civilians who wanted to maintain some martial awareness and martial skill,
But had to deal with the laws that were in effect at that time, so...
We'll talk about how this, kind of, tapered off into the late 1930s,
But first, let's take a look at the rifle itself.
In addition to this sort of shooting being a way for German civilians to actually own and shoot firearms,
It was also an opportunity for German companies to be able to manufacture sporting arms
And actually give their workers something to do and a way to employ people and make some money, so...
These rifles were manufactured both brand new and also converted from existing military rifles.
And this is a military rifle conversion. So, the work was done by the Haenel company.
They've pretty well scrubbed all of the original military markings off. You can see there are a couple of new commercial proofs there,
Which, of course, had to be added when the rifle was rebuilt with a new barrel and all.
Nothing on the other side of the receiver.
Nothing back here.
Being converted from a military Gewehr 98, this, of course, is mechanically a Gewehr 98.
However, if we open up the bolt, we will find...
Just a solid block of wood in place of a magazine.
The rules of the competition that these were used in didn't require a magazine, and so, a lot of them were manufactured without it.
Apparently there were some that were actually made with magazines, but not typically:
It's a lot easier
(Especially when converting to a new cartridge - a shorter rimmed cartridge, specifically)
It's a lot easier to just fill the magazine like that
Than to try and adapt a magazine follower to fit a different dimension of cartridge.
Because this rifle was converted from a Gewehr 98 it, of course, has Gewehr 98 sights,
Which are helpfully graduated out to 2,000 meters for each Mauser.
(Well, it's not innate Mauser anymore)
So, what you will typically find with the conversions is there will be two either two or three markings on the rear sight,
And I believe the way this was done was to actually zero the guns.
The minimum notch here, all the way down (which is actually the 400 marking) - that would be your 100-meter sight,
And then the first notch is for 175 and the second notch is for 300 meters, using this 8x46 mm cartridge.
So, there are a couple different ways you'll find these sights marked:
This one just has a nice little dot...
It does actually have it on both sides of the sight.
Sometimes there will be etched lines...
In various ways, they would denote these two extra sight positions.
On Wehrmanngewehr rifles that were manufactured brand-new...
They'll more often have a flat tangent sight that just has those three specific site settings built into it: 100, 175 and 300 meters.
And the front sight remains the military pattern, because, of course that, was part of the idea here.
These were supposed to be basically military-style rifles, so you got your Barleycorn front sight there.
The stock has obviously been made brand new, because...
Well, it covers the whole bottom of where the magazine well used to be,
So this did require either converting or adapting a new trigger guard, which no longer includes the base plate for the magazine
(Got rid of that - new stock)
So, a little bit of work involved in actually doing these - more than just slapping on a new barrel and marking up the sights.
In the 1930s the shooting sports in Germany tended to shift away from this sort of shooting
And move towards .22 rimfire shooting. There were some good reasons for that:
The rimfire shooting was all done on a 50 meter range, which is a lot more convenient,
(especially for urban folks) than finding a 300 meter range to shoot something like this.
The rimfire ammunition was also quieter. It was a lot cheaper to get just in general.
The shooting sports were a lot more accessible to rimfire ammunition than they were to this.
And on top of that, the Hitler and the Nazi Party would actually specify a type of rifle that they really wanted to see everybody using for practice.
And that would... That went through several iterations, but it was basically a .22 rimfire single shot model of the Kar 98k
Or a rifle that the duplicated the handling and the features of the Kar 98k.
So, as that became kind of pushed by the government, a lot of those rifles were actually sort of subsidized by the Party.
It would eclipse the Wehrmanngewehr as, you know, the popular hip shooting sport.
That said, all the way up to the beginning of World War 2 and by that time (by 1939), basically all military aged men in Germany
Were required to shoot annually and record their scores in a score book as a way to encourage civilian marksmanship.
Even up to the very end of those requirements, you could fulfill them with a .22 rimfire or a Wehrmanngewehr.
So, this remained an option for people who wanted to keep using it.
It remained. It was particularly popular in northern Germany (compared to the rest of the country),
But what we have here is certainly a beautiful example of one of the single-shot Wehrmanngewehr rifles.
Hopefully, you guys enjoyed taking a look at it.
Hopefully, you learned something new about firearms history here today.
And, of course, if you would like to have this rifle in your own collection,
Take a look at the description text below the video. You'll find a link there to Forgotten Weapons
And from there you can click over to Rock Island's catalog page on this rifle,
Take a look at their pictures, their description, the price estimate - all that sort of stuff.
Thanks for watching!