Ron,
That thought crossed my mind, but the examples I've seen look different from this one (the PB39 ones). The problem is that some conversions of the MG17 look like this one as well, but according to the reference material I found they were not in ground use until the 1940s, as they were reportedly constructed from surplus aircraft-mounted machine guns.
If it's a modified MG17, then this picture shows that it was in ground use much earlier.
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