As well many rifles assembled by the suhl entities and erfurt were "sternegewehrs" and had the numerical suffix in place of the alpha. In 1916 shortages of rifles required a revisions commission to approve out of spec parts across the spectrum of german small arms production.
The scheme the germans used of supplying parts to artillery depots where many rifles were assembeled from new and salvaged parts to include receivers was widespread. From 1915 until 1917 Erfurt predominantly manufactured in regards to gew98's receivers and spares. The production of gew98's began in late 1915 at erfurt. For the largess the letter 'J' was never used as it looked too much like the script "i" in written german. The alpha suffix as noted was for 10,000 rifle lots. That book is the third of three books on German rifles and, although expensive, contains a wealth of information. The above information is taken from "M98 Rifle & Carbine" by Dr. The total number of M 98 rifles made at Erfurt is, it appears, unknown but is certainly a six-digit number. Some of the rifles are marked with a 'star' indicating manufacture from parts made at Erfurt and supplied from elsewhere. The production of M 98 rifles did not begin at Erfurt until 1916 and had reached 275 a day by June that year. In addition, a rifle took about seven weeks to manufacture so a rifle dated 1917 may, in fact, have been made in 1916. The system is not so straight forward as one might suppose as there are some inexplicable gaps in the numbering blocks. Once a second run through the alphabet was necessary the letters were doubled i.e.'aa' and so on. Thereafter it was repeated with the addition of the letter 'a', etc. The numbering system ran from '1' to '9999' with no suffix.
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