Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
taking a look at a Luger.
This is a Simson & Co. Luger.
And what makes this interesting is that Simson
is the one company that was authorised
to actually do military firearms manufacture
and reworking for the German Army
between the two World Wars, mostly in the 1920s.
The Versailles Treaty had put into effect severe limitations on the German arms industry.
Basically they wanted to say "Nein!"
"Germany cannot make any military arms whatsoever."
But you can't quite do that because, well, Germany has to have some sort of
armed forces for internal policing, and control, and border defence.
And if they didn't let the Germans do any of that well then,
"My goodness, the French would have to pay for it, or the British would have to pay for it and do it.
And we ... don't want that."
So, the Germans were allowed to have a very limited military capacity.
And part of that is they had to have some way to actually build and rebuild military firearms.
So in the 1920s ... basically there was a contract put out
for German military arms repair and manufacture, and Simson & Co. won it.
So who is Simson? Because ... you'd think this contract would
go to one of the big players, like Mauser or DWM, and it didn't.
Simson, to go back to its origins, was founded in 1847 by a Jewish family.
And in 1847 a Prussian law was put into place that basically gave Jews full rights of citizenship.
Like, not quite complete, but really close to it.
And they were, among other things, allowed to get into basically any line of business
that they wanted, just like everyone else.
And so two brothers, Loeb and Moses Simson, got into the metalworking business.
Which was a bit of a challenge at the time,
Suhl, down in southern Germany where they were located, wasn't particularly competitive in this.
But the two brothers did quite well. Within 10 years, by 1857,
they were a substantial subcontractor for parts in the firearms industry.
And they would build that business.
By the late 1800s Simson was a major manufacturer of guns like the 1888 Commission Gewehr,
the Reichs Revolvers, they made a bunch of Nagant revolvers under contract,
as well as doing parts for a lot of other people.
Business tailed off a little bit after the Mauser 98 was introduced,
because Simson was not one of the manufacturers for it.
But of course things picked back up during World War One,
and they started manufacturing Gewehr 98s.
The German military of course needed everything it could get its hands on.
They expanded somewhat, they started doing artillery sighting systems.
This was a flexible and dynamic company, they had good technology.
They were always at the forefront of material science,
and new processes and manufacturing techniques.
They made really good products.
And so in that light, it's a little less surprising
that they would end up with this contract during the Weimar period
under the limitations of the Versailles Treaty.
In addition, there is some suggestion that they actually had some political
connections with the guys who were making the decision on the contract.
Which would certainly not be surprising for that time period.
It is honestly a little surprising that someone like Mauser or DWM
didn't have those kind of connections.
But ultimately Suhl gets the contract.
And one of the guns that they are going to be responsible for making is the Luger.
So before this had even happened, about 1920 apparently,
Simson got the tooling for the Luger from the Erfurt Arsenal.
This would be right in the aftermath of the war when the arsenal was being
shut down by the Allied powers.
Now it's interesting to point out that there have only ever been
four sets of Luger production tooling made.
There was of course the first one made by DWM who started building the guns.
The second one was produced at the Erfurt Arsenal
to make more Lugers for the German military.
The third set was actually sort of related,
the Erfurt tooling of course went to Simson.
And then in 1934 after (we'll get to this in a moment) after the demise of Simson,
that tooling was actually loaned to the Krieghoff company.
Who didn't use it directly themselves ... because by that time it was quite old and worn out.
But instead they used it as the basis to make their own set of tooling to produce the Luger.
That would be the third set. And Krieghoff did not make that many Lugers,
but they put in the money to actually build a complete set of tooling for them.
And then the fourth set was actually built by the Swiss
... at the Waffenfabrik Bern factory to make the 1929 pattern Swiss pistols.
So, those are the only four sets of Luger production tooling that have ever been made.
All of the other Lugers that you ever see
will have actually been made on one of those sets of tooling.
Anyway, 1925 Simson ... starts actually producing Lugers.
And the first two years, 1925 and 1926,
they date the barrel extensions of their guns, after that they're undated.
So with all of that backstory in place, let's take a look at this one.
This is actually a 1926 dated gun,
which is the very rarest variation of Simson Lugers.
This is actually the rarest sub-variant, as I think I said, of Simson Lugers.
It is a 1926 dated gun.
So when production began in 1925 all the guns were dated like this.
They made about 600 of them dated 1925,
with serial numbers running from 1 to 600.
They did about another 100 in 1926 that were dated like this one,
running up into approximately serial number 700.
And then the remainder of the guns were undated, they are just totally blank chambers.
There would be a total production of about 11,900, just under 12,000 of these guns total.
Once they broke through the 10,000 mark they added a letter suffix.
So the last 2,000 or so have an "A" suffix to them.
... There are some exceptions, there's some other sub-variations that we're not going to talk about today.
But in general these have a toggle that is marked Simson & Company of Suhl.
And we have the last two digits of the serial number,
which contradicts what I just said about the date ranges.
So this is serial number 424, which should be a 1925 gun.
This is a gun that is actually specifically called out in the primary book on this subject,
"Simson Lugers" by Edward Tinker and Graham Johnson.
And what it almost certainly is is a gun that initially failed its quality control check
and was set aside, and was not actually quite finished until 1926.
So it has a serial number that would place it in 1925 production,
but it wasn't actually completed until the next year.
Production began relatively late in 1925 we think.
This hypothesis is supported by this little proof mark right there.
Which is so tiny my camera has a hard time even zooming in on it.
That is a little eagle over an "RC", and the RC stands for Revisions Commission.
And this is a stamp that was used during the Imperial period, as well as during the Weimar period.
And it basically was applied to a part that was really close to not being within tolerance.
... If a part was really close, they'd send it to the Revisions Commission
to check with a whole bunch of gauges to see if the part was usable or not.
If it was, it got an RC stamp which basically absolved the general weapons inspector
from responsibility if the gun failed for some reason in the field.
So RC means "Yeah, this part's good to go. It's close, but it's usable."
And having that stamp on here would be a good reason
why this gun might have taken a little bit longer to actually get finished.
The rest of the marks on here are typical inter-war proof marks.
You'll see we have a serial number on the frame.
As is typical for Lugers, we've got a plethora of serial numbers all over the place.
They're all 24, 424, so they just use the last two digits.
Up here, side plate, disassembly lever, you name it.
We have a full serial number on the barrel, along with a bore measurement of 8.8mm.
... That's normal and appropriate, that is the ... groove to groove diameter,
which is slightly smaller than the bullet diameter of 9mm.
The 6 there is an eagle over 6 proof mark,
which we see here on the opposite side of the barrel extension.
So we have eagle 6, eagle 33, eagle 6, and then another eagle as a final proof mark.
The Germans really did like their proof marks.
The grips are also both numbered on the inside.
This one the 2 is a little fuzzy, but it's pretty clear on the other grip, 24.
Simson of course also made magazines,
and their typical magazines use an aluminium [base plate].
This one is a wood [base plate], which is much less common but still authentic.
This would have been a rebuilt [base plate].
So something happened to the magazine and they had to repair it,
and they used a wood base plate.
So it is numbered there, we have again our, there we go, eagle 6 proof mark there.
And another little, tiny, bitty eagle 6 proof mark there.
In terms of general configuration, these are just standard P08 Lugers.
It's the standard army pattern, that's what was being made.
A number of Simson Lugers were used by the German police,
various agencies of the German police.
It's a minority of them, most of them went to the Army.
Unlike most of the other ... manufacturers,
there were no commercial Simson Lugers made.
So they didn't sell them to the public,
which is atypical for Luger manufacturers in general.
And with less than 12,000 made,
these are in fact the smallest scale production Luger of all of the companies.
Even Krieghoff made more guns than Simson.
It's interesting that the collector's market
... tends to value the Krieghoff ones higher than Simsons.
Despite the fact that Simson is lower production and, to my mind,
more interesting with everything that was going on during the Weimar period,
and the restrictions under the Versailles Treaty.
Simson did really quite well during this inter-war period.
... They initially hadn't really had high expectations for this military contract
because there wasn't a lot of military stuff going on.
And that changed fairly quickly.
In particular there was a training accident with machine guns
in which a worn-out machine gun barrel had a way larger area of dispersion
than it should have, and an errant bullet killed a prominent officer.
And this led the German ... military to replace something like
10,000 machine gun barrels with new, not worn out, barrels.
And those were all produced by Simson, which was quite a windfall for them.
In total between 1924 and 1934 they would produce
like 68% of all German military ... arms contracts.
It was quite a lot of business.
And this kind of set them up in a position to be viewed with some envy
and jealousy by a lot of the rest of the industry, especially in southern Germany.
"Why should they get to have this monopoly on military contracts?"
And in particular the fact that the Simsons were a Jewish family
would come back to haunt them when the Nazis started to come to power.
In particular there was a Gauleiter, a district governor,
down in Thuringia by the name of Fritz Sauckel,
who really had it out for the Simson Company and the Simson family.
In the mid-1930s he launched a major investigation
to try and prove corruption or bribery or basically anything that he could.
He was unable to actually find any hard evidence,
but didn't let that stop him from arresting Arthur Simson,
... who was ... the owner of the company at that time, and a bunch of his high management employees.
... Indicted them on charges of corruption,
arrested a couple of Simson's relatives to put pressure on him.
And ultimately forced him to sign a confession to corruption of some sort,
and give up control of the company in exchange for being let out of prison.
Which he did, and he and his family promptly fled over the border to Switzerland,
and thence to the United States.
Where incidentally he would live for the rest of his life into the 1960s.
Once the Simsons were effectively out of the picture, Sauckel nationalised the company,
... renamed it BSW, and it then became also known by the term Gustloffwerke.
After a Nazi martyr by the name of Gustloff who was killed I think in 1936 - a little bit later.
At any rate, so when you see later World War Two German production
when you see things that are from Gustloffwerke or from BSW,
that is in fact the Simson Company ... factory complex.
After World War Two this would be ... yet again taken over.
Suhl was in the Soviet area of occupation after World War Two.
There were initially some plans to just completely demolish the Gustloff/BSW factory.
That was not done, however the Soviets did basically take all of the useful machine tools,
some 4,000 plus machine tools, out of the factory
and exported them back to Russia to use themselves.
The gun making would be turned over to what became the Ernst Thälmann factory in East Germany.
So you'll see ... production from that factory,
and that is again the same factory that was originally ... Simson in Suhl.
So that is, I suppose the rather extended, story of Simson & Company of Suhl,
and their rather rare and interesting inter-war Luger pistols.
So, hopefully you guys found this interesting and not too terribly dull.
Thanks for watching.