Filed off serial numbers on a 1911

[Patrick Chadwick]

helps me control them.

That's the way the bureacrats think.
Do not forget, the First commandment for any official is "Thou shalt cover thy arse, yea very well indeed".
The second being, of course "Thou shalt not admit any responsibility, ever".

So if you are a manufacturer, proof house or acceptance inspector, you make d..d sure that what you stamp with your personal stamp as being OK is numbered AND you keep a record of what you approved - a list of numbers of the approved parts. Which requires that the parts be numbered! So that if anything goes wrong with a part that is not in your list of numbers, you can say "Not my responsibility".

But failed/non-approved parts do get smuggled out of factories. And they have no numbers.
Guns get stolen and the number are erased.
End-of-run spares (also without numbers) are acquired when factories close down.

And all these bits are used to refurbish defective items, or made up into "new" guns and sold to that ever-trusting section of the gun-buying public who imagine that there really are caches of mint Lugers and K98ks being dug up on some other planet (because it can't be this one).
So for me, at least: no number on one of the parts listed above = not legitimate.

Oh, and BTW, I do have the definitive work on the marking of German small-arms from 1871 - 2000. No trace of any "this one's for the Luftwaffe, so we don't need to number it" exceptions.

To use a neat phrase coined by someone else
"In God we trust. All others must have supporting documentation."


Patrick