Got a chance to spend some time with this beauty lately.
Pre-WWI commercial C96 models generally have a serial number that falls into the 30,000 to 274,000 range, and the VL&D marked pistol that recently came through the GDC Warehouse is No. 81976– putting it as roughly a 1905 production handgun. As such, it hails from the peak of Mauser’s golden era, with excellent fitting, fire-blued small parts, a “strawed” trigger, and deeply varnished wooden grips.
Further, it is kind of rare, being one of just 1,900 guns shipped directly from Oberndorf-on-the-Neckar to the firm of Von Lengerke & Detmold in New York City.
The Mauser Construktion 96, or C96, entered service in 1896 and was made– barring Chinese and Spanish unlicenced copies– into the late 1930s for both the consumer market and military contracts. While the standard barrel length of the “Broomhandle” was 5.5-inches, and shortened “Bolo” length guns ran 3.9-inchers, there are a few that went significantly longer.
And of course, any of these could have been fitted with a stock to make them more “carbine” regardless of barrel length
The M1896 Kavallerie Karabiner, made for just three years, ran a 15-inch barrel with a permanently affixed wooden stock and forend. This was later repeated briefly in the M1917 Mauser trench carbine proposal during the Great War that never reached production.
Then came the 12-inch Karabiner pistols, with detachable stocks.
During the 1980s and 90s, Navy Arms custom made a few batches of faux Karabiners in rifle format, complete with fixed stocks and 16.25-inch barrels to keep them NFA legal.
They were produced from a pile of C96 parts Navy Arms had imported from overseas. (Photo: Morphy)
Morphy’s Auction House has been specializing in these long boys for a minute, having sold several over the years.
Morphy also in 2019 auctioned a one-of-a-kind engraved C96, complete with a 12 inch, slightly heavier custom barrel that was made by the Bohler steel company of Austria.
Chambered in .30 Mauser– the Lord’s caliber for Broomhandles– it is made from an Oberndorf-marked C96 and carries a 16-inch barrel, but is still a pistol.
Bidding is within my range, currently, so maybe we’ll get to bring this one home.
In military service for more than a half century with some of the most unlikely of people, the C96 Mauser Military Pistol began a new era of semi-automatic pistols on the modern battlefield.
In the 1890s, most if not all handguns in the world were revolvers of either single action (Colt 1873) or double action (Smith and Wesson) type. These types of guns equipped gentlemen officers, travelers, and law enforcement personnel around the world. This was fine, but in Germany, there was a team of three brothers by the name of Feederle that felt they could do better.
Read the rest in my column at Firearms Talk.com
