New Made Item: First adopted in WWI by German Officers, these are the leather pistol holsters designed for the standard C.96 Mauser Pistol. Each holster comes with an “over the shoulder” bandolier complete with bullet loops and a stripper clip pouch. This rig was not designed to be used with the wood shoulder stock holster. Extremely popular with German Officers and extensively used after WWI in various other parts of the world.
Note: The bandolier will hold both 9×19mm Parabellum and 7.63×25mm Mauser. While the bullets are different in size, the case width is virtually identical, due to the Mauser 7.63 being bottleneck.
The Mauser C96 (Construktion 96) is a semi-automatic pistol that was originally produced by German arms manufacturer Mauser from 1896 to 1937.[5] Unlicensed copies of the gun were also manufactured in Spain and China in the first half of the 20th century.[5][6]
The distinctive characteristics of the C96 are the integral box magazine in front of the trigger, the long barrel, the wooden shoulder stock which gives it the stability of a short-barreled rifle and doubles as a holster or carrying case, and a unique grip shaped like the handle of a broom. The grip earned the gun the nickname “Broomhandle” in the English-speaking world because of its round wooden handle, and in China the C96 was nicknamed the “box cannon” (Chinese: ???; pinyin: hézipào) because of its rectangular internal magazine and the fact it could be holstered in its wooden box-like detachable stock.
With its long barrel and high-velocity cartridge, the Mauser C96 had superior range and better penetration than most other pistols; the 7.63×25mm Mauser cartridge was the highest velocity commercially manufactured pistol cartridge until the advent of the .357 Magnum cartridge in 1935.
Mauser manufactured approximately 1 million C96 pistols,[9] while the number produced in Spain and China was large but unknown due to the loss, non-existence or poor preservation of production records from those countries.[5]