The story goes that Hugo Borchardt felt his C-93 was perfected, and stopped working on it, despite Loewe's requests.
It was an open door that Luger walked into.
I have never seen documentation relating to the redesign process that was applied to the C-93. The patents in Luger's name do, of course, exist and provide documentation of design stages and innovation, but we really don't have evidence of where the solutions to the C-93 design problems actually came from.
If, as proven, Luger would adopt, as his own, designs from the top gunsmiths and industrialists in Europe (people like Mauser and Feederle who had the ability to defend themselves), imagine how he would treat the regular workers he was associated with at Loewe in Berlin.
The scenario I'm speculating on (without facts) is that he would have design discussions with gunsmiths posing a number of issues and problems, and then listen and write down the solutions. When the model shop did the actual engineering and tried implementations of the designs and they worked, Luger patented them himself.
Once the redesign of the C-93 had gone far enough, and looked different enough and had enough innovative changes, the whole thing got patented in Luger's name.
As a sales engineer, I am confident that his most marketable product was his own name itself, and thus with enough reinforcement we have the "Luger" pistol...
Here are a couple Luger patent links to US granted patents. The first is for the M1900 pistol US patent PDF:
M1900
The second is to the improved M1906 extractor:
M1906 Extractor
The links will take you to full PDF copies of the patents... Both patents are exclusively in Luger's name, and this must also have been of benefit to Loewe who clearly supported him in the actions (since they didn't oppose the patent applications in any way). This effectively ended Borchardt's involvement in what became the most prolific semi-automatic military pistol of it's decade.
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All this is painful to accept, and to some extent the facts disclosed by the correspondence with Mauser changes our image of Luger as a man. Temptation and ego must have been stronger in him than we realized.
Marc