If I may be permitted, I would like to have a slightly different notion than our esteemed friend, Klaus. I am pretty sure he is correct that the directive of 1910 did carry over into the Weimar era, but not as an official practice. I would propose that the date/20 marking was applied by a worker that was familiar with the 1910 directive and had participated in that style of production marking during the last years of WWI. Now as a civilian (civil service?) he had the responsibility to apply the “1920” property mark but erroneously appended the “/20” to the date in the fashion with which he was familiar. This also might infer that the 1917/20 and 1918/20 marked Lugers were all processed by the same individual/depot.
This is of course pure conjecture. Both mine and Klaus’ interpretations are opinions based on our individual experience and study, and therefore understandably slightly different. Such is the nature of heuristic analysis as observational experiences do not always converge on a common opinion (would that it did
). As Klaus has pointed out, there is no documentation in German archives. If he and the combined efforts of Görtz/Sturgess have not produced definitive information, it is probably unlikely that Joshua will be successful in unearthing the “missing link”…but hope springs eternal.
Ron