Portugal Mauser 937

Check Please!

To my delight, the guns at Centerfire Systems ranged from good to excellent, probably owing to Portugal’s extremely limited combat operations during the period of their service. Pricing ranged from $900 to $1,700 depending on condition, matching numbers and accessories. Maybe this seems like a lot of money but considering what you would pay these days for a 1941-dated German military issue Kar98k alone, much less one with a sling, bayonet and scabbard and cleaning kit, they seem underpriced to me. Most of the rifles I examined had good exteriors and excellent, bright bores.

The only thing distinguishing a m/937B from early war German military Kar98k is the Portuguese coat of arms receiver stamp and stock cartouche. It’s the same gun, made in the same Mauser-Werke A.G. Oberndorf factory, and liberally marked with Waffenamt Nazi eagle inspection stamps.
In a move suggesting the magnitude of the military/industrial undertaking required for a world war wasn’t fully appreciated by those Nazis, around 10,000 m/937B rifles, completed and ready-to-ship to the Portuguese in 1941, were instead taken by the German military to meet their immediate needs. Those rifles actually saw service with the Wehrmacht in World War II and have since turned up around the world as surplus, most recently among the Russian-captured stocks of Kar98k rifles.

Mauser made an additional 10,000 m/937B rifles to complete the Portuguese contract and delivered them before the end of 1941.

Now for the weird part — by 1941, World War II was already in full swing for a year. German armies invaded and occupied Poland, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and France. In June of 1941 they were invading the Soviet Union and exponentially increasing their military requirements. This begs the question “why on earth did the Mauser company even accept a contract from Portugal, a non-allied/neutral power, in 1941 and then fulfil it when their best domestic customer clearly needed more guns?”

It’s easy enough to see why a cash-starved Mauser firm would jump on foreign contracts for its rifles after Adolph Hitler decided it was time to kick-start the German arms industry in preparing for war. German companies were blocked from the world arms market after World War I while Fabrique National in Belgium and BRNO in Czechoslovakia profited making variants of Mauser designs.

In the midst of a global economic depression, the Mauser factory must have been eager to get a piece of the action — and they did. Before Germany kicked off a shooting war in Europe with the invasion of Poland in 1939, Mauser had openly made rifles for China, Brazil, Honduras, Paraguay, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Ethiopia and Portugal while quietly re-arming Germany’s growing military.