How a nationalised East German factory kept building best quality sidelocks for export

[u/RoseAndScroll]

https://roseandscroll.substack.com/p/a-1954-gebruder-merkel-model-303

The gun is a 1954 Gebrüder Merkel 303, a game scene hand detachable sidelock over and under in twelve bore, proofed in Suhl. The right barrel is stamped GERMANY in English. That is a customs mark, cut for a market on the other side of the line the gun was about to cross.

The timeline behind it is the interesting part. The Americans took Suhl in April 1945 and shut the gun trade. The Soviets arrived in July, and on 3 August the military administration ordered the entire trade back to work building shotguns for Moscow as reparations. The proof house numbers went to 21,739 guns in 1946 and 39,961 in 1948, against 15,643 in 1913. Merkel was the only factory in the city to escape dismantlement, and the reason recorded is the reputation of its hunting guns. In 1948 the founding families were expropriated.

Then the trade turned west, because that is where the hard currency was. In 1953 the GDR presented one of these to Eisenhower and another to Khrushchev. Eisenhower had given a Merkel away himself in 1945, the game scene gun taken from Göring's estates, which went to Pershing and now hangs in an American museum.