East German Manufactured P38

[Wilhelm]

The company advertised this little guy as a WWII vintage Spreewerk pistol that had been reworked by the East Germans for issue to their police. I like Eastie stuff so I took a look. Withing seconds, I realized that the company didn't understand what they had. Yes, is was issued to DDR police forces, but this was no Spreewerk. What they were selling but were unaware of, was a P38 that is actually one of the hardest to find P38's in the world, an East German manufactured P38, not a wartime rework! I couldn't believe my eyes. At this point in my collecting life, I didn't really care to own one, I just wanted to get a close look at and document one. Other than a very late war enigma, Mauser made commercial marked P38 I have kept, I sold off all of my other P38's YEARS ago. So, I didn't much care to spend the money, but the only way I was going to get to document this jobber was to actually buy the thing. So, here we are.



When it comes to a made from scratch East German P38, there are three camps.

1. People who have no idea they exist (the vast majority, I think, of surplus firearms collectors).

2. People who know they were made. If you know they were made, you almost certainly know how few were made

3. People who refuse to accept that they were made. Well, if you still believe that after reading what's coming, you are seriously in denial and no amount of evidence is going to convince you.



We'll start with a couple basic left and right views while I fill you in on what is known, what is not known, and what is surmised about these puzzling little pistols.





Until the East Germans got serious about rearming to serve Mother Russia in 1956, their "army" was really nothing more of an armed police force using whatever weapons they had on hand laying around after WWII. This consisted of a mix of WWII Russian and Third Reich equipment. It wasn't until the formation of the Nationale Volksarmee (NVA) or, in English, National People's Army, in 1956 that they began to rearm with more modern weapons of Soviet design made in east Germany. The actual police forces continued to use older weapons though until production was such that they too would be equipped with the newer designs and the older weapons were put into long term storage. Over the years much of the old equipment was sold or outright given to other countries around the world as military aid.



So, what's the deal with the P38 in East German service. Well, they used quite a few that were left over from WWII. Along with every other design made during the war, many thousands were refurbished for reissue under the new boss. They would disassemble them, inspect all the bits and toss out any part that was considered to be unfit for reuse. Then, they would dip blue most of the parts over the existing finish, and reassemble them into "new" pistols, carefully hand fitting replacement wartime or outright newly manufactured parts. During this process, very little if any attention was made to keeping serial numbers matching weapons. Any parts that were mismatched were simply restamped or electropenciled to match. Usually, but not always, the frame was considered the base part and all numbers were matched to it. Simple right? No, not at all.



If you look at a fair number of East German reworked firearms, you'll find that there was actually very little consistency when it came to the entire process. Most times everything is matched to the frame but you'll find examples where everything was matched to the slide. Sometimes little bits were renumbered to match, but sometimes the original number was simply stamped over with an "x" and left at that. Sometimes, almost everything was mismatched and then force matched during the process while other times almost everything is numbers matching with only a minor part force matched. Then it comes to inspection and acceptance marks. They too run the gamut of minimal to extensive. Long story short, East German reworked weapons are like Chinese preban imports......any collector worth his salt knows that to believe anything other than NEVER say never is hubris.



Now that we've very briefly looked at Eastie reworked weapons, we come to the topic at hand, the P38 as newly manufactured by the East Germans. The glaringly obvious question is WHY? They had a zillion examples from WWII laying around already. WHY would they make new ones? Well, nobody knows. Perhaps they decided to make a few and compare that process to reworking and see which would produce a product that was of better Quality or faster. Maybe it was a result of national pride. We don't want to use weapons with swastikas stamped on them. We want to use our own, manufactured by us. My personal hypothesis is that, since they were into the early 1950's at this point and none had been made since 1945, they decided to make a small run to train machinists because they knew that the rework process was going to require newly made parts. The best way to learn is by doing and, since we made them, why not issue them?



So, how many did they make? The general belief among researchers is about 120 starting with either serial number N1000 or N1001. It's tempting to assume that the "N" means "New production" and many collectors do, but I've never seen an official German document that states that. None has ever been seen with a three digit number and none has ever been seen with a number over N1120. A few have been found in this serial range with an N prefix frame or slide with a wartime mismatched (none forcematched that I am aware of) frame or slide serial number. It is assumed that those examples became mismatched after DDR service because, while the Easties did all kinds of weird stuff, weapons were at least matching when they were reissued, be it by original numbers matching or force matching. All of the above also applies to lugers although it's believed that only about 100 of those were made. They also made new PP's but they made a much larger run of those, well over 20,000.



Now we come to the question of how do we know these are newly manufactured pistols and not just another rework? Well, I'm glad I pretended that you asked my friend. Starting with the next post, we'll leave the History behind us and focus on this particular pistol. If you have any interest in P38's at all, I think your going to enjoy this.