[Ron Wood]

While I accept and even endorse some of the skepticism surrounding the “Death Head” (DH) marking, I wholeheartedly reject the blanket categorization of all of the Lugers so marked as “fake”.

I would like to debunk the circulating fantasy that all of these examples can be attributed to the efforts of an aging unidentified “retired German gunsmith” for an un-named German importer around 1960. This is an urban legend at best. Fred Datig published his seminal “The Luger Pistol” in 1955. There was no mention of the DH Luger in that first book, but in the revised edition of 1958 he has a photo and write-up of an example. Obviously the photo was taken or surfaced somewhere between 1955 and 1958, certainly well before 1960. You could chalk it up to the failing memory of an 80-odd year old gunsmith who forgot the date he forged a whole bunch of guns with a number of different dies…I prefer to chalk it up to sheer baloney.

As Postino has pointed out, the “cartoonish” insignia of the Freikorps era would lend credence to the crude execution of the DH markings on the Lugers. The creation of markings by rag-tag provisional units during a post war time of turmoil and rebuilding can’t be compared to factory applied markings or properly commissioned works by either Imperial or Nazi German government entities and should not be held up as evidence that it “wasn’t the German way”.

Before someone raises the objection that there is no hard evidence that these are actually Freikorps markings, I will say I agree. However, it is my belief that is the origin of the markings and as Gerben says, you are free to believe whatever you want.