Adventures in Surplus: From German Imperial Navy to Ethiopia

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I really enjoy finding guns that can be positively traced through multiple different parts of history, and Lugers can be a great source for that sort of story. Today I have a Luger from Royal Tiger Imports that has an incredible amount of history to it…

The upper assembly of this Luger was built in 1917 for the Imperial German Army, then property marked by the Weimar Republic, then rebuilt by Mauser and used in World War Two, then rebuilt again and used by East Germany before being supplied to Ethiopia as military aid, probably in the 1970s. The frame of the gun has an even more interesting history, as it actually began as a P04 Naval Luger, marked as part of the Wilhelmshaven naval arsenal.