doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Interesting Collath

I was just cleaning up my computer drive and found some pictures of a gun I used to own. I posted pictures on the Parker board but then thought they may be of more interested here. I sold the gun about 5 years ago but just realized I had these pictures. Unfortunately I don't have any full length pictures. It is a Collath with very ornate engraving inlaying and horn work. It is the highest grade Collath I have ever seen. The sliding/dropping action and the safety are typical Collath. It was chambered in what I believe is named the Collath 14, which is a proprietary round with a 14 ga bore and a roughly 12 ga chamber. This is the most unique set of damascus barrels I have seen as to configuration. The bone work is also pretty incredible.

Wow incredible craftmanship.

Incredible gun! I haven't seen one similar before.

...used to own??? I'd have a very hard time parting with something like that, even if I couldn't shoot it.

I'm curious about the line we see on both sides of the frame, just behind the breech balls from the point of the scalloped frame, that extends upward to the top of the frame to where a rib extension might be.

The shop of an old German gunsmith who lived not far from my parents, when I was a kid, had piles of guns that looked similar to this Collath, with extensive deep relief engraving, inlays, carved horn and wood. He had incredible stuff that rivaled anything I've ever seen in any firearms museum or collection. He told me that he had been an armorer in the German army during WWII, and part of his job was to remove and burn the wood stocks from guns that were confiscated by the Nazi's. Then he was supposed to crush the breech section so they could not be recaptured and used. Then the crushed guns were sent back to Germany where they were melted as scrap for the war effort. In broken English, he told me, "Oh I crush a lot of very nice guns... but really nice ones, I stash. And after the war, I come to United States, and my brother smuggle them here to me." I wish he was still alive, so I could see them again, and so I could ask how he managed to hide and save them until after the war, and how he was able to smuggle such a huge quantity of guns into the U.S.

I'll probably get called a Nazi again for repeating this here, but somehow, I'll manage to survive. The DGS Cancel Culture hasn't cancelled me yet.

I own several Collath guns and they are of very high quality. Most of mine are in 16 gauge or its equivalent. I do have one in 14 gauge which I shoot regularly with black powder and also smokeless with 28 gauge inserts.

I wish to reply to this brief condensed narration, lest I lose track of the old thread.
Keith has occasionally retold the story here, also in a bit more detail, which I try to rehearse from memory.

The veteran in question was very likely hailing from one of the gunsmithing and firearms production centres of Germany, and when drafted, the Wehrmacht's "Wehrersatzwesen" possibly did something reasonable (in all armies of the world, it is inevitable that the system, by pure chance and happenstance, does something reasonable and thoughtful, though bureaucracy does its best to counteract this danger via "regulations").

He cannot have been a mere regimental armorer, but mostly liked worked in a Heeresfeldzeugpark. The Heeresfeldzeugparks, usually somewhere in back echelon range, but at the Eastern front moving behind the troops, were not only tasked with major repairs and back-to-factory deliveries pipelined through the Heeresfeldzeugämter. They were also tasked with looking through, checking, and either destroying or delivering confiscated guns from occupied enemy territories. In France e.g.,there were two seperate confiscation drives, in 1940 (occupied France) and 1942 (Vichy territory), which brought quite a number of French hunting guns into the hands of German hunters in the Reich. The local collection points were usually the Ortskommandanturen, and the lorries or trucks from the Heeresfeldzeugpark would then collect the stuff in due time.

What is interesting for future archival research, are the "exact" competences, which in typical Nazi style, were murky, conflicting, and complicated. In my opinion, this issue was most likely within the competence of the MBF (Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich, residing in Paris in the Hôtel Majestic, with five administration districts in occupied France) with the local French police underneath them, hence within the competence of the military administration staff, composed of drafted civil servants in uniform, rather than of the (very thinly dispersed) Wehrmacht military proper, which had a different chain of command.
The MBF staff usually did not destroy their files when they left in a bit of a haste in 1944, after four halcyonic years, unlike the SD (RSHA, Gestapo, GFP).

Carcano

To add to the record, I will have to report that the barrels were very rough inside. It was sold to me as a 12 ga, and I didn't measure the bores for quite a time. When I did, I was shocked to see they were true 14 ga bores, but the gun chambered a normal 12 ga cartridge. I did some research and found that Collath made and chambered a number of propriatary rounds. One was the 14 Collath I mentioned. Pictures appeared that it was a 14 ga cartridge with a stepped 12 ga head. In actual fact, it was likely very similar to the Greener police cartridge for the Martini police guns A close look at the throat revealed that this gun had no forcing cone. It was obviously a very high grade gun originally and I had to presume that at some point someone simply bored the chamber out to 12 ga due non-availability of ammo. It is lucky the barrels were made with the reinforcing ribs over the chamber and forcing cone section. I suspect the pressures ran pretty high compared to the original cartridge. During this period, Continental (Particularly German) makers developed complete ranges of propriety cartridges in order to insure ammo sales to customers. I have a Sauer cape gun that is chambered for 16 ga shot in the left barrel and the right fully rifled barrel is for a 1-5/8" 20 bore brass shell with a sixteen ga ball. The rifle barrel appears to be made from the same rough blank as the 16 ga shot barrel, but finished so that he groove diameter is 16 ga and the land diameter is 20 bore. It is not a Sauer cartridge but from another manufacturer and available in several overall lengths.