Remember my slightly overstrawed P08?

[Vlim]

This was acquired as a digfind and it showed evidence of being cooked in a quite considerable way.

There were enough traces to identify it as a 1920 property-marked WW1 DWM pistol, which had been an LP08 in it's earlier life (reads like 1915). Last 2 digits are '11'. Number on receiver reads like 1511. No sign of additional numbering on the frame.

What the frame does show is the faint remainder of a unit marking. After further cleaning it reads as P.W.? (where ? is a number).

Any comments on the unit marking are greatly appreciated, as are comments on the date marks in combination with the serial number.

[Ron Smith]

Hi Gerben,
P.W. is the mark for the Prussian Police School Westfalen. Is there any indication of a sear safety?


I do believe the heat was a bit excessive for a good straw. You may want to polish it with 0000 steel wool and try it again at a lower temperature.

Ron

[Vlim]

Hi Ron,

Thanks for the info.
( next time I'll use a smaller furnace at a lower temperature )

There is no trace of any kind of sear or magazine safety ever being installed on this pistol and it's condition is good enough to tell. Which is kind of interesting.

After some extra cleaning and investigation of assorted small parts like the front toggle, the hold-open and the trigger they all have the '11' number on them. The receiver serial number is most definately 1511. Sadly no further sign of a letter suffix

[Don M]

Gerben,

The Westfalen police school was located in Muenster and, in the mid-20s, the marking for that school probably was changed to P.M. Unless your overcooked relic shows evidence that the mark was canceled, it probably means that the gun was lost, or at least removed from police service, before it was re-marked. This would explain the lack of sear or mag safeties. I have a q-block Alphabet DWM with P.M.477. and no sear or mag safeties.

If you ever coax a weapon number out of the rust, I'd be very interested in knowing it to add to my database of police unit marks.

[Vlim]

Hi Don,

After some more cleaning I'm pretty sure that the weapons number is very interesting. It's number 2.

So the marking so far (marked from in the direction from the top to the bottom, rather than the otherway round) is PW. 2

The dot between the W and the smaller 2 is pretty visible, no clear trace of anything between P and W.

[Don M]

Gerben,

The mystery deepens! If the mark is truly PW. without an intermediate period, it does not conform to a Prussian police school mark. The intermediate period was dropped from police school marks in 1932 but there was no school with a W. abbreviation at that time.

The fact that this mark is reversed from normal probably indicates it was made in the early 1920s before the 1922 orders standardized these marks. This may be consistent with a very early weapon number 2. If I had to bet on this, I would bet that there was a period between the P and W (perhaps lightly stamped) that has disappeared and that this was marked by the police school at Muenster at a time when it was known as the Westfalen police school. This is all in the "for what it's worth" category!

[Vlim]

Don,

Sounds plausible. At least I know that this particular gun wasn't boosted .

[Don M]

If it had stayed in the ground a bit longer, you might have been able to claim to be the only owner of "genuine Luger ore."

P.S. I'm going to enter this in my database of Weimar police unit marks as a 1915/1920 double dated DWM LP08, s/n 1511 (? suffix) with unit mark P.W. 2 (reversed from normal) along with lots of qualifiers. Let me know if you discover anything that makes this more questionable.

Also, where was this found?

[Edward Tinker]

Originally posted by G. van Vlimmeren
Don,

Sounds plausible. At least I know that this particular gun wasn't boosted .

For cooking, they'd say "basted" might have misspelled that, but it DOES look like it "cooked" too long

[Ron Smith]

Gerben,
Is the P scriptic or a standard upper case? G�¶rtz shows a scriptic P as "Personen"-(Kraftwagenpark) or Mechanic to you Gringos. And W as Werkstatt (workshop). It's a stretch, but it could have been issued to a Prussian vehicle repair crew. Or for that matter it could be a similar Weimar Reichswehr mark for the same type of unit. This could also explain the condition, if was in a bombed or blown up vehicle or a repair shop..

Just a thought, Ron

[Vlim]

Hi Ron,

The P is a capital one. Both P and W are capitals and of the same size. The 2 is smaller in size.

I sincerely hope for the previous user that he wasn't carrying it on his belt when the mishap took place