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.
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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, 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
