Available from Morphys here:
https://auctions.morphyauctions.com/_C__RARE_LATE_WAR_COMMERCIAL_GUSTLOFF_WERKE_BCD_4_-LOT662278.aspx
Late in 1944, a number of small companies assembled a batch of K98k rifles and commercially proofed them. These are a known group of guns to the collecting community, although many of the details of their purpose remain unclear. They were assembled from a mixture of reclaimed reject parts, overruns, and other scrounged-up pieces. This example was made by F.R. Langenham in Zella-Mehlis and uses a Gustloff bcd4 receiver and Gustloff barrel, with mostly unmarked other parts. It has a commercial serial number and commercial Eagle/N and diamond/U proofs, and no military proofs or waffenamts (except on the rear sight and bayonet lug).
The various theories about the purpose of these rifles, including SS procurement (which I find very unlikely) and Volkssturm use (which I find unpersuasive as well). I think the most likely explanation is use by private security guards at factories and other institutions. With the uncertainly and chaos late in the war I think armed security was a popular idea, but private security could not have sources arms form the military. Contracting with smaller shops for a relatively small number of rifles rings true to me, but there is no actually documentary evidence of this that I am aware of.
Private security makes the most sense, and you had to have a lot of it if you were making your BMWs with labor that was…sub-voluntary. Just imagine being some poor Volkssturm dude who’d had a 98az the last time he was in a trench in 1918, and now he’s stuck with some random Vetterli while the Ukrainian security guard had a nice 98k to drop when he ran off.
I have to say that trying to make rational sense of anything the Nazis were doing is basically a fool’s game…
The regime was fundamentally irrational and the creation of fundamentally irrational people. Decisions made along the way from ascension to power and ultimate self-destruction? Entirely beyond rational analysis, and due to the absolutely abysmal documentation for a lot of the weirder things like this rifle, completely inexplicable to us today.
I mean, for all we know, those rifles might have been churned out for some wild-ass idea of making money for someone who was connected, meant for export to someone willing to offer up hard currency for them. Who? Pick anyone in Europe at the time; some Nazi party official might have been trying to make a buck with rejected parts, selling stuff to any of the Eastern European vic… Er… “Allies”, or anyone else. Hell, it’s possible that the Polish Home Army worked some deal with corrupted officials to get those reject parts turned into something they could use…
The whole of Nazi Germany is a circus-funhouse of kaleidoscopic nuttery. You start trying to look at it and understand it from the standpoint of “Why’d they do that…?” and you’re rapidly going to start losing your mind. It’s Alice in Wonderland crazy; look at all the V-program weapons. Nothing there makes a lick of sense unless they had some sort of WMD-ish looking payload to put on top of them, and the idea that they’d build a V-2 without a city-buster to go on top? Nuts. So, you go looking for one, and then you’re like “Well, for all the resources put into this thing, they must have had something like a nuke, right…? Right? I mean, otherwise, how does putting most of your potato crop into alcohol for rocket fuel make a lick of sense, when engaged in an existential war you are losing…?”
In other words, trying to find a sane and rational explanation for anything Nazi is just going to leave you in a straightjacket, drooling in a corner of a padded room, while mumbling crap about anti-gravity bells and non-nuclear nuclear weapons and Antarctic bases andonandonandonandon…
In other words, don’t look for rational when dealing with the crazy. I still remember wandering around the region surrounding Darmstadt as a young man, and marveling at all the massive construction you could still find, all the gargantuan bomb shelter efforts that were still there. Not to mention, all the stuff like major bridges over the Rhine that still hadn’t been rebuilt…
Nazi Germany just defies rational analysis or explanation, for a lot of things.
Kirk:
Did not Hitler believe in allowing his subordinates to compete against each other? That ensured none of them had time to compete with him. I suppose it flattered his vanity that they were all fighting for his approval.
The result was that Nazi Germany, which we see as a centralized power structure, was in fact composed of many different power structures fighting against each other. Goering was the worst. He insisted that the paratroopers be part of the Luftwaffe, then spent time and money developing their special rifle, all for a force which did not drop into combat after the Battle of Crete in 1941. The fact he issued bomber crews with expensive drillings as survival weapons is another egregious example. He’d have had his own navy if he could have got away with it.
The whole structure of the Nazi philosophy and operating principles were basically schizophrenic in nature. The Führerprinzip lunacy basically institutionalized competing split authority everywhere, although it was all theoretically supposed to be subordinated to the next level up, culminating in the national Führer at the top.
Couple that with Hitler’s basic insecurity, along with everyone else he selected to put in power? The entire structure was riddled with duplication and wasted effort, because of the competition. There was no unity of effort, or even unity of command, when it came to things like industrial policy. On top of that, the majority of the people put in charge were basically living embodiments of the Peter Principle on steroids. I think that the only really competent person in Hitler’s circle might arguably have been Speer, but even his work-product was suspect.
The real issue of the entire WWII era wasn’t how competent and threatening the Nazis were, but how incompetent and feckless the Allied leadership was when it blundered into enabling Hitler’s con job. There was never any rational way that a nation of some 90 million could take on the rest of the world and somehow eke out a victory; that Hitler and his minions got as far as they did is testimony to the essential utter incompetency of the Allies until late in the war.
Nazism and Hitler should have never been a thing, not on the world stage. Only the fecklessness of his enemies enabled him to do the things he did. I mean, absent Stalin pumping resources in, Germany would have been hard-pressed to pull off the campaigns in Western Europe the way he did. Russian oil and other resources fueled the Battle of France in 1940, and Stalin got the blowback from that in ’41. Serious “own goal”; he set the Germans up to learn how to fight, purged his own military, and gave the Germans enough resources to turn on him.
Such expertise, such cunning… Morons, the lot of them.
Sounds like Trump’s Regime.
I’ve read that the V2 was supposed to carry a warhead packed with short-lived radioisotopes, to poison enemy land. Unfortunately, the rocket was never reliable enough to load with these (often exploding while still over held territory) and the Nazi nuclear programs never produced a practical reactor.
There was also a “plan” to put the same sort of payload in the Fi103 aka V-1 “buzz bomb”. The problem there was that it would have nearly doubled the payload wight, requiring a more powerful Argus pulse jet motor.
The Nazis’ attempts at building “dirty bombs” and etc. tend to indicate that their atomic bomb program didn’t get the job done.
Which sort of sums up everything they tried to do. I suspect mostly because of their fundamentally mystical worldview.
In 1944, when the Kriegsmarine noticed their losses of u-boats in the battle of the Atlantic were going up sharply, they decide that the reason was that the U.S. Navy and Royal Navy were using “pendulum dowsing” over a map of the Atlantic to find the U-boats psychically;
https://www.holisticshop.co.uk/articles/guide-pendulum-dowsing
They tried to use the same method to locate Allied convoys. Needless to say, it didn’t work.
Note that throughout the war they captured multiple copies of the BAMS codebook used by merchant shipping, but never managed to break a single message in time for the information to be useful.
What was really killing the U-boats were PBY Catalina ASW bombers equipped with the then top secret Magnetic Anomaly Detector or MAD. After the war, every ASW aircraft had a MAD unit, but during the war they even censored photos of the Catalinas to avoid revealing MAD’s existence.
Somehow, the country that was the birthplace of Karl Friedrich Gauss and was the first to deploy magnetically-triggered “influence” sea mines (by parachute from bombers, no less) never discovered MAD.
There was a wild strain of genius that ran through everything they did, as Stephen Hunter said in his novel The Master Sniper, in reference to an IR sniperscope that had a solar cell to recharge its battery.
But coupled with that was a tendency to plunge off the deep end into the wildest sort of fantasizing.
clear ether
eon
“(…)Somehow, the country that was the birthplace of Karl Friedrich Gauss and was the first to deploy magnetically-triggered “influence” sea mines (by parachute from bombers, no less) never discovered MAD.(…)”
And even despite their ally was actually using said technology, as according to https://ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/USSBS/IJO/IJO-48.html The Japanese Navy first employed an Airborne Magnetic Detecting instrument in antisubmarine warfare during the middle of 1944…
I’ve seen some Tv show 20+ years ago with various ww2 nazi mysticism (long before it was a common internet-youtube clickbait lore), It claimed that pendulum shite over north atlantic maps produced actually some results.
That goes back to the CIA experiments in “remote viewing” in the 1970s.
What both stories overlook is random chance. Throw enough data points at the map, or have somebody who knows a good bit about SSBNs and SLBMs do the “visualizing”, and the law of averages shows that they’ll get some things right purely by chance.
When the movie Dr. Strangelove was released in 1964, SAC panicked because the Fail-Safe panel shown in Major Kong’s B-52 was almost 100% accurate, right down to where the keys went in.
Air Force OSI was convinced somebody had sold off secret data. But when they checked, they found that it was the work of a single prop man at the film studio, a retired 20-year Air Force electronics maintenance technician.
He had worked on B-29s during WW2 and B-50s afterward. He had never even seen the panel in a Buff or schematics of same.
But being an expert in such systems that actually had no connection to nuclear weapon command and control, he realized that there was really only one way that it could actually be made to work. And designed and built the mockup device appropriately.
The moral is never attribute to espionage or the paranormal what can be explained by simple coincidence. Coincidence does not necessarily equal correlation.
Sometimes the goat is simply a goat. And staring at him pisses him off.
cheers
eon
In esoteric parapsychology that leans on dowsing, tarot, fortune telling from coffee at the bottom of the cup etc. there is a belief said peculiar methods tap into some kind of collective psyche all around us that is shared between all human beings.
It sounds totally crazy, but personally I think based on some of my meagre experiences, something exists and not all results from abovementioned activities can be simply attributed to coincidence and complete bullshit. But I also think no sane person should devote any serious effort in it, outside curiosity fringe interest.
So, with this Strangelove story, if we take paranormal viewpoint, he could have subconsciously “snatched” that thought on device design from that imaginary bio-brain-remote-“internet”.
Remote viewing was not entirely based on happenstance mysticism, the paranormal or parapsychology as the media would report; nor would the CIA entirely trust as much. Much of it was experimentation into ‘associative thinking’ instead, based on exposure to details on area that would likely mean reasonable expectation of elements of an environment and its contents, whether based on human tendencies and sentimentality, or physical attributes mandating need.
Similar to well-constructed risk management of predictions at what can go wrong, but with a lot more edge for detail. It was speculating the odds and likelihood of a situation, by character and culture profiling. For example, if an individual is known to play golf, it’s highly likely he has a set of golf clubs in his house, and if he hates bowling, it’s highly unlikely he owns a bowling ball. And from just the information of being a golfer, one can devise a profile on everything from what that person eats and drinks, smoker or non-smoker, to how they wear their clothes, to what type of car they drive, and so on, based on similarities in that culture. It’s often similar to what is used to catch serial killers and find missing people in bodies of water near where they went missing. And then for the next element, and the next, where other revelations may cancel those attributes.
There was a lot less telepathy/clairvoyance (ESP) involved and more well-informed guessing that often produced results that were much better than random speculation. If you think government has given up on it – think again. They have just gotten better at assessing and analyzing the data and are now using artificial intelligence to better the results of the data entered, to profile an installation or location.
—
@Storm,
I really don’t “believe” in any of the paranormal BS, but… I do keep an open mind on the issues.
I’ve seen dowsing apparently work. How? No ‘effing idea. All I know is that the old dude came out to the jobsite, where the drilling company had come up dry on multiple attempts, walk around with is dowsing rods, tell them to drill “there” to 300 feet, and they’d hit water. Owner demanded the well company do it, they did it, and… Hit water at somewhere around 280 feet. They drilled to 300, because the owner demanded it, and got a hit on an artesian well that had so much pressure it blew out the drilling rig.
I have no rational explanation for that.
I’ve also seen a bunch of other stuff that’s borderline “nutso”, which turned out to be workable. I’m a pragmatic sort of fellow, so… You show me it works, I’ll let a rationalized explanation come when it feels like it.
The remote sensing crap that the CIA was working on? I’ve no idea about it, no clue how it would work. I do know that one of our NG engineer outfits used to use one of their guys as a “scanner” who’d look at a map and do something to “find” the ambush sites, and they’d use that to do things with. They hit on enemy a majority of the time. There was a Hawaiian National Guard unit that had this insane rate of “find” on caches; it was all due, supposedly, to one guy who’d walk out on the sites they’d found, and he’d somehow “smell” where the caches were, find them, and that unit had this statistically improbable cache discovery number that defied rational explanation.
Do not ask me to explain any of these things. I’m just pragmatic enough to say that when I observe something that works, I’ll roll with it.
There is something to all this paranormal BS, but what it is? I’ve no earthly idea.
@Kirk
My thoughts are basicly the same,
something evidently exists in that “paranormal dimension” that is impossible to neglect (also there is often phenomenon of syncronicity that I believe every intelligent person has experienced several times in his life),
but also impossible to prove and master, which imho is not surprising, as that would move the human existence through the boundaries of the divine, and maybe some force prevents that – one that possibly is not of the classical human religious design of benevolent caring “father” (or in case of judeo old testament- not so much benevolent) but something very different from human expectations and wishes.
Some of paranormal occurances scheming also breaks the concept of free will, as it would seem that some occurances in someones life are forced by an “invisible hand” that sometimes throws both lucky and unlucky events on individual (luck and significance of it of course being his own subjective perception- though with time some events can be reevaluated to be put into different categories).
@Storm,
Overall, I think a pragmatic and open-minded approach is best in life.
There are a lot of really weird things that happen out there. How many of them are artifacts of the generally unappreciated fragility of human cognition, and how many are “real” for a given value thereof?
No idea. I mean, let’s be real here: If you’ve ever taken a look at the really and truly extraordinary lengths that your biology has gone to in order to get your brain sensory input? The incredible complexity of it all? All the myriad ways it can break down?
Then, there’s the entire question of just what the hell sentient consciousness is and how it works. I mean, let’s be honest here: You, if you are really real, are about five pounds of protoplasm piloting a meat skinsuit through the universe, and you’re having to rely on things that the meat is telling you, things you can’t quite verify independently or consistently, soooo… Why are you surprised when all these logical inferences and wild guesses you’ve made about the universe you’re wandering through aren’t always consistent?
The real miracle is that we’ve got even a smattering of consciousness and sentience going on, however glitchy and unreliable it might be.
I wonder if these guns were issued at all?
Isn’t it possible that the Germans initiated a Scrap the Barrels Project, produced these guns from whatever sub-par bits and pieces has been found, and in ensuing chaos, simply failed to handle them to any users.
I think that is the most intelligent theory, surely loads of small armaments were captured that in the chaos of 1945. in Germany for various reasons were never (given a chance to be) issued.
Germany in ’45 wasn’t really a “nation state” anymore. It was a gaggle of satrapies, ruled by local Gauleiters each of whom had basically been told “Hey, you’re on your own”.
And exactly none of them wanted to surrender to the Russians, who were coming in from the east a Hell of a lot faster than the Americans, British and etc. were coming in from the west.
As such, every one of them was having the already-dispersed “war production” industry bits in their bailiwicks cranking out whatever they could manufacture and make ammunition for. The objective wasn’t a miraculous “reversal of fortune”; it was holding off the Russians until the Yanks and Brits got there, so they could surrender to them, not the “Ivans” who would likely just hang them all on general principles.
There were numerous “last ditch” projects, the VG-1 Mauser, the MP 3008 9mm SMG, and etc. Projects in Thuringia, for instance, generally were designed for the 7.9 x 33mm “intermediate” cartridge of the MKb42/Mp43/StG44 family, because the plant that manufactured that round happened to be there.
9 x 19mm chambered weapons were made everywhere because (1) there were huge stocks of 9mm all over the place and () pistol-caliber weapons could be made of available lower-grade materials due to lower operating pressures than rifle-caliber arms. 7.9 x 57mm Mauser breech pressure was 43,500 PSI; 7.9 x 33mm operated at 49,000; 9 x 19mm was 34,000.
Add in the store of “leftover” parts for bolt-action rifles alone, and something like this really isn’t entirely surprising.
clear ether
eon
Add 80 years of uninformed speculation to continual competition to write a book on a topic that hasn’t already been beaten to death, to “eyewitness accounts” that came straight from Rumor Control, and you get some entertainingly authoritative assertions. Germans can be pretty resourceful people when they need to be, and sometimes some guy just figures out that he has a couple thousand rifles’ worth of spare parts kicking around.
In my opinion, the chance that the rifle shown is a postwar product is orders of magnitude larger than being a “late war commercial”.
But of course Nazi myth beats common sense.
Alone the idea that Suhl proof house in fall of 1944(!!!) had the resources to process about thousand rifles
– in the “by the letter” way shown,
– within any sensible time frame
is in my opinion nuts.
Maybe its a ploy to up the auction value of the rifle by presenting it as something not cobbled up postwar from parts bin.
As an example of Reich arms manufacturers needing “private armed security,” there was Heinkel using its own unbought prototype fighters, flown by its own test pilots, to attempt to defend its plant.
This could be a cool movie story!
Heck yeah! Today’s Hollywood would cast Halle Berry as the Frau Oberst commanding the brave Jagdstaffel. This ain’t your grampa’s history movie
Admirable initiative on the company’s part. ‘When seconds count, the Luftwaffe is just minutes away!’