Hi Tom,
The West-German proof shows that these were imported in 1988, so any assembly must have been done before that time. Also, when you look at the history of the rearmament in East-Germany, there were 2 important years:
1953, the year when companies were being disowned and workers lost about 10% of their wages, hence a lot of turmoil and internal unrest and a need to provide armed protection against their own people.
1961, the year that the iron curtain was established.
References show that the P08 was still in service around 1966, being phased out as a first echelon weapon and going to the worker's battle groups ( a sort of home guard / national guard). It seems that supply was plentiful, so no need to produce any additional P08 pistols.
The GDR has been selling off their P08 pistols since the 1970s, many came to the US through Interarms.
I think they were scraping the bottom of the P08 barrel in 1988, just before the end of the GDR, and found some unissued stuff in the corners of some arsenals. This small batch of pistols dripped onto the West-German / European market and hadn't made it to the US (yet).
I believe that the N-prefix pistols were pressed into GDR service and marked accordingly, using the frame serial number of the pistols they replaced and that these pistols came to the US mixed with other VoPo service pistols. It is interesting to see that most of the N-marked pistols have the crown/U inspection / repair marking, showing that they went through additional proof house testing.
The first reference I found on these pistols was in a letter to Görtz in 1998. That was the report on #54 and #55.
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