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Hi, cap and ball,
You are correct that there were only three sets of original tooling. DWM had one, Erfurt had one, and Bern had one. DWM became Mauser. The Erfurt tooling went to Simpson; after the Nazi's took over, it was used by Krieghoff (the Simpson owners were Jewish). After WWII, Mauser bought the Swiss tooling and made some pistols for Interarms.
But the stainless steel ones were made here by (I think) a fellow named Mitchell. The major parts were cast, but seemed to work OK (or as OK as a Luger gets). He sold them for a while under his own name, then Stoeger bought him out and sold them for a while.
There were two .22 Luger type pistols, the "Stoeger Luger" and the one made by ERMA. Neither was anywhere near as good as the Ruger standard model, and they were around the same price.
Stoeger owns the trademark "Luger", so only they can actually sell a gun under that name. Both Interarms and Mitchell(?) called their pistols "Parabellum", which was an old DWM trademark also used as their cable address.
Luger failures have always been chronic. In 1949 or 50, I fired a brand new Luger, all matching, including magazines, with German ammunition. The magazines had never been loaded and were not worn out. I got at least one failure out of every couple or three magazines. Lugers are nice, I love to collect them, but no way would I trust one to work if I needed it.
Jim
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