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 very early J.P. Sauer,
well it's not a K98k, although it certainly does look like one,
but the K98k didn't exist when this rifle was made.
So what we have here is I think a really interesting
part of the story of German re-armament
in the ... 1930s really, but starting in the 1920s.
So how do we go from the Gewehr 98 to the Kar98k?
The story begins when in the aftermath of World War One,
the Mauser factory sells a complete production line for the Gewehr 98 to Czechoslovakia.
The Czechs are of course a brand new country at this point, they are eager
to set up some domestic arms production capability to equip their own army,
and to make some money selling guns to other people.
The Mauser factory recognises that there is limited possibility of making lots of money
building arms in Germany for the coming duration under the Treaty of Versailles.
So they are quite happy to sell all this tooling down to Czechoslovakia where it's set up in Brno.
And the first thing that the Czechs do is they take this obnoxiously long Gewehr 98
and shorten it down to this length, 600mm barrel, or 23.6 inches.
And they call this first the Model 23, and then they designate it the Model 24,
and they start exporting a lot of them.
And in fact the Belgians ... at FN are also selling
quite a lot of 600mm barrel Mauser-pattern rifles.
And the Mauser Company looks at this and takes note obviously, and they introduce
their own in the same configuration. They call this the "Standard Model".
In addition to shortening the barrel, they also replace
the Gewehr 98's roller-coaster rear sight with a much more practical tangent rear sight.
... It has a couple of improvements,
it doesn't get blisteringly hot when you shoot the rifle a lot, which the roller coaster did.
It has settings down to 100 metres,
instead of the 400 metre minimum sight ... setting of the Gewehr 98.
And it has sight ... adjustments in 50 metre increments,
which makes it much easier to target specific relatively small things.
This was at intermediate ranges, this was a complaint about the Gewehr 98 during World War One.
So this becomes the Mauser Standard Model, they sell a bunch of them to China,
they sell them to a bunch of countries in South America.
They are doing some of this on the down low,
without attracting the attention of the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission
because they're really not supposed to be doing this at this point.
But they do it anyway to help the economy,
to help the Mauser Company survive, a bunch of reasons.
Now we fast forward a few years to 1933.
Adolf Hitler comes to power, and one of the first things that he plans to do
is a significant program to rearm Germany.
Mauser is of course very interested in this.
At this point, 1933,
Mauser makes basically one more little improvement to their standard model.
And that is to bend the bolt handle down
and cut out a little recess in the stock underneath the bolt handle.
... They market this rifle, they still can't really publicly be making military arms,
so this is the Gewehr for
It's for the Post Office, definitely, and ... not just only the Post Office,
but it's only civilian agencies like the Post Office, and the ... Railway Police,
and the Customs Office, and the Border Patrol.
And actually it turns out you can make an awful lot of rifles
and claim that they're definitely not for the Army.
In fact Mauser was also selling these to the SA and the SS,
some of the armed elements of the Nazi Party itself.
And by the way, the ... German Army wasn't too thrilled about that.
There were on the order of 20 times as many guys
registered in the SA as there were in the actual
and the German military administration wasn't too thrilled about this.
So what they end up doing is they contract to purchase
the entire output of the Mauser factory.
And that very nicely settles this problem of, "How do we prevent the SA from buying up its own arms?"
Well, if they can't buy anything because we bought all the guns first,
that solves the problem without having to be real confrontational about it.
At any rate, Mauser develops this rifle for the "Post Office" in late 1933.
... And they start making them, they get out there.
And in 1934 the
announces that it will be adopting a new standardised rifle for the German military.
They are finally going to abandon this long rifle/short carbine thing.
They are already sort of doing this sneakily through rifles like the Post Office rifles,
which basically all went into the Army eventually.
But they announce it formally, and at this point there are two companies
that respond, again formally, to the request.
One is Mauser, and one is J.P. Sauer.
J.P. Sauer had manufactured Gewehr 98s during World War One,
so they already had all the tooling, they knew how to make these guns.
They were able to get examples of the Post Office Mauser rifles,
so they didn't have to go to Mauser for any specific help.
They basically said, "Oh well, that's clearly what the Army is going to want,
we will build a version of that and submit it to the trials."
And they were so excited about it that actually both they and Mauser
started full-scale production of these rifles
before the German Army actually picked one of them as a winner.
So what we have here is one of the 1934 production J.P. Sauer rifles
that was produced for what would become the K98k contract,
but before the K98k was actually formally designated or adopted.
And there's like one little detail that's different from this to a regular K98k.
So when the German Army announces in 1934 that it's going to be adopting a new rifle,
it specifically includes a couple of features.
It wants the short rifle pattern, clearly based on the Mauser Standard Model.
So a 600mm barrel.
It wants a rear sight that is adjustable from 100 out to 2,000 metres, in 50 metre increments.
Worth noting that the sight increments are also printed on the bottom of the sight
so that a soldier lying prone can flip the sight forward and be able to properly set it
without having to make himself too big of a target by lifting his body up.
And they also wanted a bolt hold open follower.
There were problems in World War One of soldiers losing track of how much ammunition they had,
emptying the magazine, and then closing the bolt
on an empty magazine thinking that they had another round.
So a flat surface on the follower prevents you from closing the bolt
if there is not a cartridge in the magazine.
And so J.P. Sauer jumped at the opportunity to produce a rifle to these specifications.
And their first production guns came out in 1934,
and they have a number of distinct features.
First off, there's nothing on the top of the receiver,
instead all the markings are on the side here.
We have pretty much the standard pattern that would be continued into wartime production
of three incremental proof marks, and then the manufacturer's code is here on the side.
... When Sauer basically signed up for military contracts they were given
the factory code of S/147, so that's marked there.
And then "K" is the date code for 1934.
The date code letters didn't go in order, and they only used them for a couple of years.
The 1935 code letter was "G", so S/147/K is the 1934 production.
... We have serial numbers here on the receiver and the barrel, this is 7656.
This is actually the highest known example of one of these 1934 production Sauer rifles.
And this is an all matching gun, so we've got the matching number on the nose cap,
the barrel band ... the bolt ... the trigger guard,
the magazine floor plate ... the stock, and so on and so forth.
We also have a whole bunch of
And a couple on the side of the stock here as well. This eagle H is for
Although it is interesting to note that this is actually also stamped RFV 1780
on the butt plate (as well as the serial number down there).
RFV is the German Finance Ministry,
another one of those civilian organisations that got itself some issued rifles
as a way to get guns produced and into circulation under the oversight of the Allied forces.
Now the one place where J.P. Sauer's rifle really actually differs
from the official K98k that would be adopted is in the retention of the barrel bands.
So what Sauer did is they put a barrel band spring here on the right for the front band,
and they put another spring here on the left for the rear band.
Mauser's pre-K98k rifles had a spring for the rear, but they just had
... basically a pin holding the front band in place. And that would occasionally pop loose.
What would be adopted for official production is this system,
where a single spring on the right holds both the front and rear bands.
That's essentially it, that's the only difference between Sauer's prototype
and the eventual production K98ks.
That slight bit of non-standardisation didn't prevent these from seeing military service,
all of the Sauer production pre-K98k rifles did in fact go into Army service.
J.P. Sauer continued to manufacture these pre-K98k rifles into the early part of 1935.
It would be in June of '35 when the German Army officially announced
its new Karabiner 98k pattern, and standardised the design.
... Compared to this, the change in barrel band retention.
And at that point Sauer would convert its production over to the official K98k pattern,
and we see a transition of the markings to those that are recognised
from really the standard regular bulk production.
They made something on the order of another 1,600,
maybe 1,700, of these pattern rifles in early 1935 before that transition.
So, as not just one of the very scarce early ... 1934 Sauer rifles,
but an all matching example, ... like this rifle had to go through all of World War Two
without being destroyed, significantly overhauled, anything like that.
It's really quite remarkable that a rifle like this survives,
and it's a really cool piece for the Mauser or the K98k collector.
So very cool to get a chance to take a look at this.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video despite my very long
rambling about the re-armament process.
Thanks for watching.