Mauser Broomhandle Hash Barrel Bolo

NOTE: This item sold in our shop in March 2017 to a private collector.

The Mauser C/96 “Broomhandle” Pistol was made from 1896-1936, and is an incredibly fascinating pistol to collect, with an immense amount of variants made over its long production run. The pistol featured here was made in the immediate Post WWI era, and was made at a very chaotic time in German Arms production.

Mausers from this time period may be “1920 reworks” (full size military pistols cut down to comply with the Treaty of Versailles), standard full size guns, standard Bolos, French Gendarmes (full size frame mounted with a Bolo upper, for a rumored French contract), or completely inexplicable variants such as this Long Barreled Bolo.

Mauser took a C/96 upper, cut the barrel off, and then threaded a new 7.63mm barrel into the barrel extension. They then masked the area of the cut and threading with the distinctive “hash” marks seen on this pistol. The barrel was also given a very different sight than standard C/96s, with the front sight band being sleeved and pined into place. All this was then mounted on a Bolo frame, to complete a very strange and rare pistol. The few of these guns that were manufactured all seem to occur in fairly tight serial number range groupings, meaning they were not just guns sent back to Mauser to be reworked. The guns we have examined in this configuration also have no variance in their bluing, nor any evidence of rebluing, which tends to show that the entire pistol was assembled together at the factory at the same time. They seem to have left the Mauser factory in this configuration, the exact reason being speculative at best.

These guns left the factory with all matching factory stamped serial numbers, and while we have not seen a matched stock with one of these, it would stand to reason that they left the factory with a standard matched wooden holster stock. All the other Mauser markings are standard, with no variance from standard stamping. The rear tangent sight is the standard 100-1000 sight found on most C/96s of that era.

The pistol pictured has a “Germany” export stamp on the left side, which is commonly found on guns of this period that were intended for export out of Germany. We have observed ones aimed at the US market that are marked “Made in Germany” or just simply “Germany,” perhaps for European sales.

Mauser also produced an even more rare variant of the Long Barrel Bolo, that being a standard size upper on a Bolo frame, but without the hash barrel feature. That variant will be featured in an upcoming blog post.

C/96s have shown up in nearly every conflict of the 20th Century, and have seen service in such far flung regions as revolutionary Mexico with Pancho Villa’s Division del Norte, the execution of Czar Nicholas and his family, to Winston Churchill’s African exploits. The amount of variants produced is staggering, and it’s always a good thing to realize that such words as “always” and “definitely” are best used with caution when dealing with the C/96.

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