any information about this 1917/20 unit marked erfurt would be appreciated

[Don M]

Originally Posted by Ron Wood

If I may be permitted, I would like to have a slightly different notion than our esteemed friend, Klaus. I am pretty sure he is correct that the directive of 1910 did carry over into the Weimar era, but not as an official practice. I would propose that the date/20 marking was applied by a worker that was familiar with the 1910 directive and had participated in that style of production marking during the last years of WWI. Now as a civilian (civil service?) he had the responsibility to apply the “1920” property mark but erroneously appended the “/20” to the date in the fashion with which he was familiar. This also might infer that the 1917/20 and 1918/20 marked Lugers were all processed by the same individual/depot.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I tend to agree more with Klaus. One "fact" we do know is that there were clear and unambiguous instructions about how to apply the 1920 property stamp on P08s and other items. We also have very strong evidence that many of the P08s supplied to the police and Reichswehr in 1920 were assembled from incomplete pistols and parts that were available at war's end. It is my opinion that some of the barrel extensions used probably had already been dated and, lacking any more recent instructions, the 1910 directive was employed to bring the date stamp up to date.

The lack of an official 1920 property stamp on this pistol is consistent with another of my "opinions." Since the intent of the directive to apply the 1920 stamp was to identify property belonging to the government, I believe the 1920 and 1921 chamber date stamps applied to P08s manufactured only for the government in those years was sufficient evidence of government ownership and probably did not warrant an additional stamp. (I realize there are examples of 1920/1920 and 1920/1921 stamped chambers and believe these were, in fact, the result of misinterpretations by armorers.) A similar argument might apply to the 1917/20 and 1918/20 stamps. These too would be found only on government-owned P08s so the 1920 stamp would have been redundant.