What is the German 1920 Double Date Stamp?
Forgotten Weapons
•
10m
One will sometimes encounter German WW1 arms - mostly Lugers and Kar98 carbines - that have two date stamps, one of them being 1920. What is the significance of this?
The crux of the matter is that the "1920" stamp is not a date, but rather a property mark. When the Treaty of Versailles was being enforced, it restricted the German military to just 100,000 men , and strictly limited the number and types of arms they were allowed to have. At the same time, strict civilian gun control was enforced in an attempt to remove the leftover military arms from the war from Germany. In total, nearly 5 million firearms were collected and destroyed between roughly 1919 and 1921.
The 1920 stamp on guns indicated formal (and legal) German military ownership of a particular weapon. This made it accountable to the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission (to the extent that they tabulated such things) and also made the gun easily identifiable if it were stolen from a military unit.
Up Next in Forgotten Weapons
-
Browning M1919A6 Double Size Training...
During World War II, the US military had a simultaneous need to put machine guns into combat service, and also a need to train new soldiers on the operation of those machine guns. Cutting up existing guns to make demonstration models reduced the number available for field use, and the solution wa...
-
British L129A1 Sharpshooter Rifle
With the British military's return to Afghanistan in the Global War on Terror, it was found that the very long engagement ranges made it necessary to have a 7.62mm designated marksman's rifle, in addition to the 5.56mm scoped rifles in service. This was not unique to the British military; the US ...
-
Thorneycroft: A Victorian Bullpup Rif...
The Thorneycroft was the first military bullpup rifle, developed in the United Kingdom in response to combat experiences in the second Boer War showing the British infantry rifles to be overly long and cumbersome. Scotsman James Baird Thorneycroft figured he could address this by moving the actio...
