Background

Inflation had taken hold immediately after WWI, the dollar exchange rate increasing from the pre-war 4.2M = 1$ to 57M in 1920 and 83 in 1921. DWM’s management would have been acutely aware of this, and as always in inflationary times would have quoted and concluded the contract in convertible hard currency, the dollar. Stoeger’s liability on signing the contract was therefore over $30,000 including the accessories ordered, today the equivalent of some $400,000, based on Consumer Price Indices, or $1.5M using skilled labour rate comparisons. Whether Stoeger had such resources is unknown, though it is doubtful. Given his apparently small sales of Luger pistols in 1919 – 1920 it would have been foolhardy to have committed such a sum to buy what must have been obvious to him as being 8 – 10 years or more of stock. Probably his intention had been from the start to call off and pay for small batches as required, maybe DWM misunderstood this, and possibly, having produced most of the order, or at least the components, the purpose of Stoeger’s visit to Europe in early 1922 was to resolve this situation by face to face negotiation, part of which, given the probably non-coincidental timing, may well have required DWM’s affirmation in March 1922 of Stoeger’s exclusivity as importer.

This explains the large apparent gap of some 6-7 years between production of the large group of some 2000 consecutively numbered five digit sn. guns and the late 1920s BKIW and early 1930s Mauser pistols, only produced sporadically in small numbers, but using the same frames and receivers, with immediate post-WWI machining characteristics and internal inspection markings, right through to the final guns assembled by Mauser with 11xxv serial numbers. The very few guns known with two-line address and military suffixed (in the -i to –r blocks) serial numbers before the late –t suffix and –u suffix two-line address groups described above probably account for only 50 – 100 guns. The –t and –u suffix numbered pistols amount to probably some 150 guns, and the last three-line inscription –v suffix guns to no more than a further 150 pistols in total, which with the final stock sold off to Palestine accounts quite accurately for the 2500 pistols, and their special SAFE marked frames, originally ordered and manufactured in 1921. Proper analysis of the guns and their serial numbers shows that earlier estimates of a total of 5000+ Stoeger guns are greatly excessive, the sizes of the batches evident in the serial numbers of surviving pistols not supporting a greater total than approximately 2500. ¹