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Mauser 71 in 1944?

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Blackpowderresearcher

Well-known member
I'm reading Anthony Beevor's The Battle of Arnhem. On page 162 he wrote: "Many of them were armed with rifles froom the First World War and even, Harmel claimed, from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870." Beevor cites as his source: B'Archives MA N756 162. Oberst Harmel commanded "railway security guards, a few local militia, members of a police band, a few scattered SS men, and other units' that defended Nimijen.

Can anyone else confirm the use of the 1871 in WW II? I can't see an old rifle like that used outside of Germany by anything other than the Volksturm. The book "Crack! Thump" mentions an old German dressed in his hunting clothes and who fired his flintlock, missed and was sent home by the GI (who broke the rifle on a tree:cry:).
 
There's a certain degree of unknowable unknowables in this. Beevor is a good historian, and the fact that he noted "Harmel claimed" is telling - he doesn't want to go too far out on a limb because he's accepting essentially one person's account. See if you can find someplace in the book where he spells out how his citation scheme works. MA is most likely the Militärarchiv in Freiburg, and given the context it's probably the personal files of that Oberst Harmel. If you're really curious you could likely email someone there and ask what the file is. Which is all to say that if Beevor says that Harmel said that, I believe that Harmel said that. Whether or not Harmel was correct or mistaken is an open question, and something that Beevor is notably not commenting on even if he thought it was an intriguing enough thread to include it in his work.

Now, that said, the Germans used a ton of random garbage for their truly rear area soldiers. I could easily see people on guard duty at a railroad depot having something that antiquated, and once you're looping in local militia and policemen the sky is the limit.

In short, I don't doubt that it's an accurate reflection of a claim that exists in the archives, and it's plausible enough, but there's also no real way to definitively corroborate it.
 
I sent an email and am just posting this so that this thread is easier to find if I get a response.

Not holding my breath!
 
Someone else shared a page (another website) with me of the 5th Edition of Robert Ball's Military Mausers of the World. Ball uses "perhaps" with reference to issuance to the Volksturm. Jury is still out on this issue.
 
Blackpowderresearcher said:
Someone else shared a page (another website) with me of the 5th Edition of Robert Ball's Military Mausers of the World. Ball uses "perhaps" with reference to issuance to the Volksturm. Jury is still out on this issue.
Click to expand...
Ball is frequently wrong, and his citations are terrible. The background history he gives on a lot of things seems to have been sourced from gun show wisdom in the 50s-70s. German guns are what I know so that's what jumps out to me, but the errors there make me deeply suspicious of anything else he writes.

edit: he's pretty OK when talking about the physical properties of the firearms. Length, caliber, weight, magazine capacity, the basics of when they entered production etc. But the background info can be really, really sketchy. Doubly so for anything Imperial German.
 
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