Blank Toggle DWM/BKIW Lugers

[Don M]

A question by Eric (http://forum.lugerforum.com/showthread.php?t=25442) has spawned a lively discussion of the Lugers produced with blank toggles by DWM/BKIW. These have been known as "sneaks" among collectors and were thought by many to be an attempt to hide Luger production from the Allies. However, recent research has indicated they were manufactured in 1927-28 for a contract with the Riff Tribe in Morocco that subsequently was canceled for political reasons. The pistols were sold later to the German police. (See earlier thread for more background.)

Since the topic has evolved beyond the original intent of Eric's post, I have chosen to post my next contribution here under a more descriptive title.

I have queried my database of police-marked Lugers and searched for 29 DWM Lugers in the "s", "t" and "u" suffix blocks. The results are quite interesting. With respect to the blank toggles, there are three distinct serial number groups.

s Block – SNs 30s to 7064s

I have recorded 17 examples, all but one of which have DWM toggles. Those Lugers with DWM toggles were issued to the Prussian Schupo and Police Schools. The one blank toggle (7064s) was issued to the Prussian Landjägerei.

t Block & lower half of u Block – 498t to 5469u

There are 186 examples, nearly all of which have blank toggles and were issued to the Prussian Landjägerei. There are 28 recorded DWM toggles (15%) scattered throughout this range. Other than Landjägerei pistols, 13 were issued to the Prussian Schupo and Police Schools and 1 to the Hessian Police.

Upper half of u Block – 6607u to 9761u

There are 24 examples, only one of which has a blank toggle, the rest are all DWM. All but 2 were issued to the Hessian Police; the 2 exceptions went to the Prussian Landjägerei.

The blank toggles are almost exclusively found on Lugers in the t block and lower half of the u block. While most went to the Prussian Landjägerei, some were issued to the Prussian Schupo and Police Schools. Since my database includes only police-marked pistols, I checked these results against Dwight Gruber’s more comprehensive database of commercial Lugers (version 3.1, 1/1/2008) and found the same pattern.

Dwight’s database indicates that a very large percentage of the recorded Lugers in the t and lower-u blocks had blank toggles. This suggests that approximately 15,000 were produced. While this seems large compared with August Weiss’ reference to “a few thousand,” it is hard to know what his scale of reference was.

Another puzzle that is presented has to do with manufacture dates and serial numbering. Weiss states that the Lugers for the Riff Contract were manufactured in 1927-28. The conventional wisdom is that all or nearly all of the Lugers in the s, t and u blocks were manufactured in 1929. The apparent conundrum is how or if a large number of blank toggle Lugers with t and u suffixes were manufactured before those with s suffixes. I can imagine all sorts of convoluted explanations but it seems likely that many of the Lugers we call 29 DWMs were manufactured before 1929.