Mauser Revelation
IN HIS CLASSIC books on Mauser rifles, Ludwig Olsen’s description of Paul Mauser’s Model 1888 test rifle in calibre 7.65x53mm was based solely on images from the Mauser Patent book of 1908 – he never had the opportunity to lay hands on an actual example of this rifle. Ludwig’s first trip to Mauser’s Oberndorf factory and museum took place sometime in 1956. The first examples of this model only came back to Oberndorf in 1968, by which time not even the folks at Mauser had any idea what this rifle represented.
At the end of WWII, with the French occupation of Germany, France had taken over the Mauser factory at Oberndorf on April 15, 1945. The French took the entire Paul Mauser collection and the company’s reference collection back to France. As part of a new post-war diplomatic relationship between France and
