Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are starting a week of what I'm calling "Adventures in Surplus!" If you watched yesterday's video you saw that a couple months ago at Rock Island I picked up a batch of rifles specifically to get this one. And I figured folks might be interested in seeing, "What are those?" It'd be interesting to take a look at what sort of random stuff does show up as surplus. So this week, instead of looking at the detailed history of these guns, we're going to look at the individual examples and see what we can learn about them. ... Where they might have been, and what's happened to them? So we're going to dive right in with this, this is a German Kar98a. And well, let's take a closer look and dig through the details. Alright, so this is a Kar98a, the original carbine
version of the Mauser 98 in German service. It turned out to be too short. When they updated, upgraded
their ammunition to cool high power spitzer ammo around the turn of the century, they
discovered that the carbines were incredibly loud and had a ton of flash, and they were
just very unpleasant to be around. And so they instead had to make a new
version of the carbine that was a bit longer. So this barrel length would be reused for
the ... Karabiner 98k of World War Two fame. But this is where it originated. This was
intended to be like an artillery and cavalry weapon in the years before World War One. During World War One it was discovered that
actually if you are doing things like trench raiding or really basically anything
involving modern combat, a shorter, handier rifle like this is a really, really nice improvement
from the very long guns like the original Gewehr 98. So ... before the war they were something
like 13% of the German field army's equipment. By the end of the war they were more like a
third of the German field army's standard issue rifles. So they were getting more and more popular. Now, first off, the distinctive feature is this stacking
rod, which is used to lean several rifles up together. Note that it is curved. There is a Polish version
of this rifle as well that looks very similar, but has a stacking rod that's
a two-part machined element. Where there's a lug that comes down and
then a rod that comes out straight from it. When you see the two side by
side you can see the difference. If you've got a bent rod like this, that's a German one. This one also has an original Kar98a
muzzle cover on it, which is pretty cool. These were used for two things,
they were used to protect the muzzle. So if you weren't actually in combat you would
leave that on the gun so that you didn't get mud and crap into the barrel, or hit the crown
(the front of the barrel) on something and nick it and cause accuracy problems for the rifle. There is a little cap that you can lift up and ... that also functions as a muzzle guide
or a muzzle protector for cleaning the rifle. So you can use a steel cleaning rod down the front without worrying that you are going to,
again, bang up the muzzle of the gun. Note that this finger piece here for pivoting
this on and off the rifle blocks your line of sight, so that you don't accidentally put
a bullet through the muzzle protector. If you go to take a shot, you'll very quickly realise
that there is something blocking your sights, so that you can remember to take
this off before you start shooting. The receiver here will tell us that this was
manufactured in 1918 at the Danzig Arsenal. Danzig made just over 300,000
of these 98a carbines ... in total. 127,000 of those were during 1918. So they actually made the carbines prior to the war,
and then there was a period during the war when they stopped producing them,
they made rifles instead. And then in 1918 they restarted carbine production. So 1918 is the most common
year to find for a Danzig example. We have a crown there, a royal crown,
this was Imperial Germany. We have a 1920 Weimar property stamp,
which is I think a really cool element. What this is going to tell us is the beginning of
the story of what actually happened to this rifle. So, it was made during the war.
It was probably used during the war. As I said, German Army use of 98a
carbines increased as the war continued. They were found to be really nice
handy guns, people liked them. It is unlikely that this rifle
sat in a storage depot in 1918. Then after the war, when the
Treaty of Versailles was put into force the German Army was very
strictly limited in size and armament. And they were only allowed I think
it was 17,000 carbines for the Army. However, they were also allowed
carbines for 1 in 3 German policemen. Which came out to something
like 50,000 policemen total. So, as we'll see, this was a gun that was
actually issued out to German police. Now the 1920 stamp is there because in 1920 at the
requirement of the ... Inter-Allied Military Control Commission Germany had to disarm itself of military arms. And that meant going around the general
population and collecting up military weapons. That was ... not something that people were
particularly keen to do, and so they offered a bounty of 100 marks to hand in a firearm. And if you waited
too long they ... would later reduce it to 50 marks. So you had an incentive to do it quickly. In order to ensure that people didn't steal army
and police rifles and turn them in for the bounty, all of the army and police guns that were
formally possessed were stamped 1920. So if you tried to hand one of those in to the
government, then they'll just arrest you instead. It would be pretty typical on
one of these to find a unit mark, either on the disassembly disk here,
or on the top of the butt plate. This particular rifle doesn't have any.
However it does have this. Normally on a Kar98a stock you would see a couple of Imperial
proof marks from the military acceptance of the rifle. This one has been rebuilt and it was been given a new
stock, and then we have instead an eagle over the letter "P". This is a police proof mark. So this
is a rifle that was rebuilt after the war, possibly more than once,
and issued out to the police. Probably the civilian police because it doesn't have a
unit mark like would if it went to a military police unit. And if we come back to the receiver markings, if you
look closely you'll see that the bottom of that 1918 the stamp is a little bit lighter, it's a little bit
shallower, thinner, than the rest of the markings. And what that tells me is that
this was definitely refinished. And ... they polished out the receiver prior to
refinishing it, and they went a little bit enthusiastic at this bottom end of the receiver and polished
away a little bit of that 1918 mark at the bottom. Several of the other parts that ... we
would normally expect to see in the white, namely the bolt and the follower, have also been blued. That was done as part of post-war refurbishment. Often these followers will have been modified to
stop the bolt on the last round, this one has not been. One of the cool things about this particular
rifle is that it is a completely matching gun, which is to say we have a serial number here,
5839 B, bravo. (That is a Prussian eagle proof mark.) And that serial number is repeated
everywhere, so it's on the stock, it's on the floor plate, it's on the trigger guard, it's on
that screw, the last two numbers, 3 9, it's on the safety, it's on the bolt of course, and also right up here, 3 9 is actually stamped onto the follower, it's on the underside of the rear sight, it's on the front barrel band, it's on the stacking rod, it's on the top of the front barrel band, it's on the front sight. I think you get the idea. The Germans just loved putting
serial numbers everywhere on rifles at this period. Now, the sling on this rifle is not actually a proper
cavalry style or carbine style sling from the war. This is a later design of sling that
has this sliding adjustable buckle on it. The proper cavalry sling would have had just
... basically a metal stud that allowed you to set the length of the sling with, I believe, 9 different
settings so you can put it at whatever length you needed. This is an original German sling, it's just not the original
style that would have been used in World War One. However, ... I'm getting to the
extent of my sling knowledge here, this is probably an appropriate
sling for inter-war police use. Now Kar98s were fairly popular with the
German police as well as the Army at this time. And so they were fairly heavily used by the
German officialdom between the World Wars. And ... a lot of them were actually used in the early years of
the Nazi period by various ... armed government agencies. This one does not appear to have been. You will sometimes find various early
Nazi period markings on some of these if they were refurbished again, you know, in the mid-30s. This one doesn't have any of that, which ... leads
me to believe that this was issued to a police unit that went ahead and used it,
probably through World War Two but the gun didn't need any
refurbishment after that point. In addition to police use, a lot of
these were used as training rifles. A lot of those will have new barrels put in them. I won't pull the whole handguard assembly
off because this has its original barrel, so there are no extra markings
under there to show you. Really there are two kinds of historically
significant guns when it comes to surplus. One is the firearm that is in the exact original pattern
or configuration that it came out of the factory, and those are very cool because they show us
what the original intent was with a particular firearm. Then you have guns like this one that
have been through a long trail of events and have a lot of that history built
into them in their current configuration, the changes that were made by
different people at different times. Personally, I really like this sort of thing. I like
being able to read the story behind the firearm, and so I think this is a really cool example. A gun that was made in the
tumultuous last gasp of the Great War, then held onto, specifically,
by the German Weimar government. Millions upon millions of Mauser 98 rifles and
carbines didn't survive that first few years after the war. Millions of them were destroyed by the
Allies and by the German government. So this one survived, it was issued
out to the police, rebuilt at least once. Probably, at this point I can't prove any of it, but probably
kept in service through the end of World War Two, and brought home by an American soldier as a souvenir. ... Well I hope you guys enjoyed taking a look
at this particular Kar98AZ, it's a lot of fun to delve into a particular rifle and see what
we can learn about it and its history from its configuration and its markings and
its condition and everything about it. So, if you did enjoy it, fantastic. If not, well
you might not enjoy the next couple of videos. But, never fear, this will be going
on this week, and then after that we are going to get back to some more
typical content here on Forgotten Weapons. If you like this sort of thing though,
do let me know down in the comments, and maybe we'll bring it back another time. Thanks for watching. [ sub by sk cn2 ]
oh wow he made a video about the one he bought?
I so badly wanted the video to continue as he finished the christmas unboxing
Don't really have much to say about the video or the buying process, but a Weimar police Kar 98A is a super cool gun to have in your collection.