WHAT DOES H.P. MEAN? REALLY?

[Don M]

Once again, I have relearned a lesson about jumping to conclusions! In the course of researching Weimar Prussian police school unit marks, I ran across a number of pistols and holsters with H.P. marks and very quickly interpreted them as belonging to the H�¶here Polizeischule (Senior Police School). I reached this conclusion despite several â??red flagsâ?� indicating these were not typical Prussian police pistols:
â?¢ The stock lugs were ground off several of the Lugers.
â?¢ Although the unit marks on the front grip straps were in accordance with Prussian orders, these marks were repeated on the right side of the receivers and on the spines of matching magazines of several of the Lugers.
â?¢ Indications from other collectors that there were some doubts about the Prussian provenance of these pistols.

When I assembled a table of all of the items with presumed Prussian police school marks, these H.P. marks really stood out. Of a total of only 21 pistols (out of nearly 500 in my database of police marks) tentatively identified as having police school marks, six of these (30%) had H.P. marks. Iâ??m not certain what the Senior Police Schoolâ??s function was but speculate that it provided advanced training for police officers who had graduated from regular Polizeischulen and had served in the Schutzpolizei or other operational units. If so, these officers would have their own assigned weapons and would almost certainly bring them with them. The Senior School would therefore not need a large inventory of weapons, even in comparison with other schools. The preponderance of H.P. marked weapons in this table was inconsistent with this.

The database information I was using is listed in the following table which includes five Lugers, one Model 1914 Mauser, four Luger holsters and one mag, all with H.P. marks:

<a href="http://forums.lugerforum.com/lfupload/hpmarks.jpg" target="_fullview"><img src="http://forums.lugerforum.com/lfupload/hpmarks.jpg" width="400" alt="Click for fullsize image" /></a>
The light finally came on when I was made aware of a contribution by Garland Barnes to the June 1989 AUTOMAG regarding Luger HP07 and holster HP04 listed in the table which included: â??Capture papers indicate it was taken from a police officer in Bingen (italics mine), Germany on March 27, â??45.â?� Bingen was in the state of Hesse, not Prussia. It seems reasonable to believe that police officers who were not conscripted into the army would have stayed in the districts to which they were assigned. That this man was identified as a police officer by his captor may mean he was in a police uniform rather than an army uniform. This would suggest that the officer, his weapon and his holster were Hessian, not Prussian.

I believe the above is strong evidence that H.P. does not stand for H�¶here Polizeischule and is not Prussian. If this is true, what does it mean? I'm wondering if it might stand for â??Hessische Polizei.â?� This is admittedly highly speculative but there are two bases for this:
1. It fits the abbreviation â??H.P.â?�
2. There is a tenuous analogy with police unit marks ( S.L.Pol. ) of another independent Weimar state, Sachsen (Saxony), which have been authoritatively identified as â??S�¤chsische Landes Polizei.â?�

While on the subject, note that all the H.P. marked Lugers in the table are u-block 29 DWM pistols produced in 1929 or early 1930. This of course means that they could not have gone into police service until 1929, at the earliest. These examples also begin with a low weapon number, 148, indicating this number series probably started for Lugers in about 1929. This suggests that Lugers were not used by the Hessian police prior to this. If true, what weapons did they use? The one M1914 Mauser may be a clue. Its Imperial-era serial number makes it old enough to have been placed in police service as early as 1919 - 1920. Its weapon number of 774 either means it was from an earlier series of numbers or it did not enter police service until after the Lugers. I prefer the former explanation.

I understand this topic was debated by collectors in the past and that similar conclusions were drawn. If anyone has any information on these discussions, data on additional H.P. marked items (Lugers, Mausers, holsters, mags) or comments on the above discussion, please reply to this post or email me at dermaus@aol.com.