doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion German & Austrian Sporting Guns @ doublegunshop.com Otto Reif Suhl

From time to time the name Otto Reif Suhl surfaces as a waffenh�ndler on sporting weapons. Seems there is little info less what Mr. Apel has penned in some of GGCA's publications. Most of these examples surface in Russia which tends to support that Otto Reif was selling wares with his named stamped on them to Russian officers post WWII. By 1952 he was run out on a rail from Suhl. I don't believe we will see an example here in the U.S. of A. but I guess it is possible. Some like the following have surfaced recently & it piqued my interest on just who was Otto Reif. From an empirical stance, when you look at the marks on Otto Reif Suhl examples they always wear Simson marks. So I guess there's a clue. So I dug deeper and yes used car salesman Otto Reif worked for the auto arm of Simson & Company right after WWI if not in 1920. Seems there was some issue with accidents in Simson vehicles and liability fingers were pointing and the issue may have been attributed to tyre blow-outs. Anyway by Sept. 1924 Otto Reif found himself around such an incident & he may have resolved it himself. At this time or a little later he became a director in the Simon & Company auto arm and he is labeled as Autoh�ndler. By 1930 he is involved in a criminal suite dealing with autos and it may be here that he loss his car dealership privileges. But, but he resurfaces in 1934/1934 and it may be he was a waffenh�ndler which lasts till about 1952. My crystal ball tells me that he siphoned off components or sporting weapons in the white from Simson & Company as the firm is hijacked. Who would miss a few thousand components??? About this time or a little later in 1945 I think he teamed up with Edgar Strempel for his wares or he sourced Edgar Strempel, who post WWII seemed to have an inside track to Simson & Company components as many of his examples wear Simson type touchmarks. I haven't seen a sufficient number of marks on either Otto Reifs or Edgar Strempel's wares to confirm this, but the data is leaning that way.




1946 Otto Reif








cneu 3aka3(site won't accept characters) or special order on Krupp 3 Ringe tubes

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

I failed to mention that Otto Reif along with Hugo Vonderlind look to have been race-car drivers either in Simson autos or sponsored by Simson & Company.

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

Well, it would not be surprising if someone in the employ of the Simsons were to take advantage of the Nazi policy of expropriating Jews. How much you want to bet Mr. Reif did that sort of thing? He'd probably have been hailed by the then-government as something of a national-racial hero for doing it. Mr. Reif seems a bunter Hund at best and more likely a real rogue. No wonder they ran him out of town.

As to the guns sent back to Mother Russia pictured here, I have to say they look a little too bourgeois for any Real Soviet officer to risk having made. Too nice, too foreign. Something the NKVD would be on the lookout for, particularly during the late days of Stalin.

The second picture from the top shows the words "Holland - Holland" in the top rim of the sidelock, just above the dogs and in gold. What gives?

This is another one of those posts where I'm brought to remember and regret the departure of Geno. I'm sure he would have had some good info to add to the discussion. I'm hoping our other Russian friends do....

the text reads spetz. zakaz

which translates as 'special order'
as far as I can make out

Holland&Holland probably indicates that these are H&H type Sidelocks

regrads from England
G�nter
NRA Life 1974

Thanks for the input guys and from the H&H advertising, I too would guess it notes H&H type locks. Regarding ole Otto Reif, I can't seem to find exactly what he was doing from 1934 to WWII. He did register a firm but I do not know it's function for now. With his used car salesman talent he was able to capitalize on the situation post WWII. I would like to clarify that all of his frames I have seen wear Simson touchmarks but not all the tubesets.

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

Another Otto Reif example from 1947 - 12, 16 & 20 bore and I think one of the 20 bore tubes is rifled




H&H must have been an advertising ploy.

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

Where do you find this stuff?

It comes to me in my dreams.

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

Ah, I just stumble on it looking for something else.

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

Looks as if in 1924 a trio of Suhl racecar drivers(Simson?) could be found in Richard Bauer, Fritz Jung & Otto Reif. In the same year Fritz Jung arrived 1st in a race from Saalfeld to Hohen Eiche but on the return trip or some other leg he had a fatal crash & the racers were cancelled for the year, if I understand the situation as it occurred. I'm curious how Otto Reif went from director at the Simson auto manufacturer/racecar driver to used car salesman to waffenh�ndler of some interesting sporting weapon examples.

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

DIM, as I've said before it is all centered around combinations and permutations. An example here is that I was looking for something related to Holland & Holland locks in the Russian realm. For some reason unbeknownst to me, Holland & Holland morphs to Goland & Goland in Russian. So when I search Goland & Goland I ran across the 3 tubeset peddled by ole Otto Reif.

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

in German gun catalogues of the 1960s, 70s and 80s (perhaps before and perhaps later as well),
the description 'Holland&Holland Seitenschlosse' (H&H Sidelocks)
would appear for high quality and expensive sidelock guns.
Whether the locks were actually made by H&H I don't know - I always assumed they
were H&H 'type' sidelocks made in Germany - but may be wrong.
Perhaps someone in Germany can answer that question.

Best regards from England

G�nter
NRA Life 1974

Gunter,
I'm not in Germany,but lived there in the 70s&80s.It's my considered opinion that you are correct that what they meant was,H&H type sidelocks.This is similar to the term "Skil Saw" being used for all such saws,not just Skil.
Mike

Up till WWII, I'm leaning toward the possibility that the Germans sourced some of the sidelock components from their Belgian counterparts. Post WWII, it would seem that most were home grown.

http://www.doublegunshop.com/forums/ubbt...true#Post229383
Mainwaring thread

http://www.doublegunshop.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=176769&page=1
Jules Bury type locks/examples

http://www.doublegunshop.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=202510&page=1
H. Barella peddled example - sourced


Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

Dave, that's EXACTLY the kind of 'trophy' the Soviet officers were willing to take home - and often did. The point is, looting was unofficially allowed - with Stalin's content if not direct order - 'to compensate for the hardships endured in war'. Pragmatically, there was the concern that having seen the life levels of the Western Europe, and comparing it with the poverty back home, the soldiers and officers would question the Socialism issue. Now, with the loot, they were feeling priviledged and superior and happy, and therefore conformist. So everyone could make believe that the reason for poverty was that 'the Nazis left the country in ruins', and the loot was OK because 'we're only bringing back what they stole from us'. Anyway, with literally carloads of spoils coming back home, the 'chic' lifestyle was OK - provided you had done active duty at war or otherwise served the country - but since almost everyone did, 'chic' was OK for all.

In Russian 'gun talk' such guns are often referred to as 'bread guns' as they were often traded for food and other bare essentials. They were often of very poor quality but richly decorated, because the officers who ordered them were, mostly, quite innocent souls - country or factory boys, who haven't seen much more than the officers' school and war, war, war. Quite competent in military guns, they were often innocent in sporting weapons, and couldn't tell good work from bad. They could tell if the gun looked 'rich' or not, though - and assumed lots of engraving and carving meant good quality.


I am not sure if the accusations of 'lifting' of the parts from Simson is valid. To my knowledge, Reif was an official member of the Autovelo Trust / Ernst Thallman cooperative (the German umbrella company which de-facto acted as the Suhl Gun Guild), and they all sourced from Simson.

However, postwar Soviet gun books all voice the same warning against buying richly decorated but poorly made guns (these books stated these guns were made for colonial trade, to fool innocent natives) and invariably gave Otto Reif as an example of such. The quality of the 'workmanship', if the books were to be trusted, was below any standard, the guns sometimes had the play in the action even when new! This is probably the reason why he was finally expelled from the trade, after the Soviet Army top brass which patroned him withdrew from administrating the country.

As for the Holland spelled Golland (too bad this site doesn't accept Cyrillic characters... shotgunworld does...). There is a tradition to transcribe the initial Latin 'H' with a 'G'. It goes back to early 18th century, from dealing with words borrowed from the German in the course of Peter I's reforms. At the time, the 'g'-letter stood for a friсative 'g'-phoneme, which sounded almost identical to the German hard 'h' of the time. Later phonetic variation moved the pronunciation from the spelling, but the tradition is still there. Even Hitler is spelled Gitler.

HD, this is very interesting indeed.

With kind regards,
Jani

HD, thanks for all the info and insight as it begins to fill in the missing pieces. With Otto Reif being a racecar driver as well as a used car salesman, that is reason enough not to trust him as far as you could throw him. I am very curious how he attained the rank of master gunsmith if indeed he did attain it. Also I still consider it very odd that most, if not all, of his wares wear the Simson trademark. For now I still contend that he utilized some unscrupulous means to source components from Simson.

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

I wouldn't know for sure, but from the way the system work, such bourgeous nonsense as 'rank of master gunsmith' mattered very little. It was the resonsible Party burocrat (presumeably a Soviet general in this case) who said who was a gunsmith and who was a capotalist exploiter and belonged in a prison camp. And a gift of a lavishly decorated shotgun or two could solve this problem in a minute.

Humpty - thanks so much for the elaboration. I was hoping you'd chime in to help.

I thought the white stock inlays shown in one of the pictures (whether they were ivory, mother of pearl or whatever) were along the lines of what one might expect to be attractive to the Russian "market". A while back, while trying to track down some information on what turned out to be a Tula hammergun, I spent some time on the Tula Arsenal website and enjoyed immensely looking at the decorations on some of their guns' stocks.

As to the government trying to tamp down anti-socialist sentiment by allowing looting, some of the writings of defectors to the West mentioned a lot of the same happening in the 60s and later among Warsaw Pact troops. This sentiment was supposedly pretty widespread among those troops who went into the then-Czechoslovakia in 1968 - "This place is a lot nicer than home. Why are we here busting it up?" - so much so that many units were sent direct from there to the Chinese border to get that idea out of their heads.

HD, I've seen info that suggests that Otto Reif had a business from 1934 to 1951. Have you any idea what he was doing from 1934 to WWII?

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

Raimey, I've no idea. Most of Reifs here are postwar, and I seem to remember that when a pre-war showed up, someone suggested Reif was deliperately marking some of his new guns as prewar, since after a while the customers caught up with the fact that prewar quality was better. But this is just speculation.

Dave, that would be mother-of-pearl. There is a persistent idea in this country that a high-end shotgun must look like a Fabergier egg with two barrels. However, most of these guns are made as gifts and seldom get to be fired.

Another Reif.
http://forum.guns.ru/forummessage/112/1026993.html
Looks
An alternative opinion on Reifs is that his guns were in quality just like any other postwar East German makers, and the only differentiating feature is the overboard styling.
The one on pics looks pretty well-made.