These are Mauser inspectors marks, whose meaning was lost to time.
There is a batch of Wartime Commercial C96s made in around 1917-1918 which seems to have its own serial numer range. I had seen them in past. Some people called them "Nordic Contract" or something like that - maybe an attempt to link them to the Finnish Civil War (1918-1919). But any definitive proof hasn't surfaced yet.
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