Raimey on Hermann Schlegelmilch

Now there was also a Hermann Schlegelmilch of Suhl who was a gun stocker prior to WWII and might have been the same person or a son or father. The Schlegelmilch folk were very competent weapons makers. Casper was a specialist gun barrel maker while Franz was a barrel blank maker possilby all funded by Ernst Wilhelm Schlegelmilch who possibly purchased components from Sauer or had Sauer to make longarms and roll stamp his name on them. There were a couple more Schlegelmilch folk with Reinhard Schlegelmilch being a stocker. Any relationship between "H.S." and Hermann Schlegelmilch is pure conjecture on my part but we have the initals on the guns and the gunsmith names in the directories. If you handed me the longarm and gave me a very finite amount to time to make the call: with the Krupp steel on the tubes and the "H.S." I would say it was a joint venture of Sauer & Schlegelmilch and a firearms merchant/gunsmith in Bohemia. As a side note, a monogram of "H.S." found on 6.35mm pistols probably stands for Haenel-Schmeisser(Carl Gotlieb Haenel & Hugo Schmeisser). So as several have posted, we may never know the exact maker due to the passage of time and destruction of info. It was a cottage industry with many doing many functions. If we had a list of contractors and subs we might have a start. I don't know that I've seen a no-name Bohemian longarm as most have the name on the rib or somewhere, but yours could well be an example. Is there a Lion on the watertable near the "NP" sub "w"? Nice coordination of info on your blog.

On 10th glance I think I see the Sauer "Caveman" mark under the "2" of the "16.2" under the left tube. Then again I see the Sauer "Caveman" mark in my sleep. Can you tell what the mark is?

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse