Ku Luger on Gunbroker

[tom]

In the distant early 1970s, I was extremely fortunate in being an Army officer stationed in Germany. Through circumstances I will not go into here, I became an acquaintence of Albert Speer, who was Reichsminister for Armaments during the bad old days of the III Reich. Speer and I became friendly as I think he enjoyed my interest in history and he, the perpetual self-promoter, loved telling about his role in the German government.


On one occasion I asked him about the weapons program that was conducted in concentration camps.


He explained that the program was basically a mechanism that the SS, as "Owner-operators" of the camps, used to increase their treasury by contracting labor to companies producing war materiel. He said they were basically assembly points where components, which were manufactured elsewhere, were assembled into the final products.


He stated that camp inmates made, in addition to weapons, uniforms and field gear, artillery projectiles, assembled engines, etc.


I inquired about small arms and he said that the small arms program was basically two separate programs. One was a pure assembly program for new weapons and one was an overhaul/rebuild program for weapons that were needing overhaul.


He mentioned that the overhauled weapons were assembled from whatever parts that were available from many sources and they were individually marked to identify them as being overhauled.


I would opine that this is a reasonable theory as to the origin of the Ku prefix. It certainly makes as much sense as attributing the prefix to some phantom organization that seems to have escaped being documented in any III Reich history book.


FWIW,


Tom