Aside from the initial short-side rail models, the earliest large-scale production sniper rifles were the turret mount K98k rifles, which were loosely based on pre-war commercial sporting models.
Until rearmament was underway post-1933, this was all the army had in the way of sniping weaponry.Īlthough Germany began the war ill-equipped for sniping, it soon made up for this by introducing a truly bewildering range of scoped rifles.
A sniper can be seen in the center of the picture with a World War I Vintage Gew.98 sniping rifle on his lap. So, Germany embarked on what would prove to be an expensive and time-consuming path, creating more variants of telescopic-equipped rifles than were employed by Britain, America and Russia combined. There were loud complaints from senior German field staff about equipment shortages in general and sniper rifles in particular. Indeed, Sepp Allerberger, one of the highest-scoring of all the Wermacht snipers, began his career using a captured Mosin-Nagant rifle. In practice, many of the German snipers entering Russia in June 1941, found it more practical to equip themselves with some of the many captured Mosin-Nagant 91/30 rifles with PE scopes, and numbers of photographs exist from this period showing them carrying Soviet rifles. These began to be issued in early 1941 and were the first of a very large number of variants of sniper rifles to be subsequently fielded by Germany. They had a steel rail attached to the left side of the receiver with three mounting screws and a lever-operated, quick-detach, U -haped scope mount holding either a 4X Ajak, Hensoldt, Kahles or Zeiss telescopic sight. However, due to the shortage of new K98k rifles, many re-worked World War I-era Gewehr 98 and Karabiner 98a rifles were also being used.
In the mid-1930s, SS snipers began to be equipped with the first purpose-made sniper rifle to be adopted post-armistice, the Karabiner 98k, with a short side rail mount. Uniquely within the army, it was only the SS under Heinrich Himmler (who was himself a keen rifle shooter) who were actually trained to shoot to any sort of standard. A small part of this was the limited issue of telescopic-equipped rifles, mostly left over from World War I. This was hugely expanded after the Nazi party came to power in 1933. Immediately after World War I ended, Germany began a clandestine system of rearmament called ‘ Aufrüstung’, quietly flouting the restrictions placed on it by the Allies at Versailles in 1919.
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