War Trophy question

[Alpo]

Suppose someone brought home a pistol war trophy.

 

Has the capture papers. Did it by the book.

 

Then, years later, he commits a crime using that pistol. The cops have the gun.

 

Could it be traced to the soldier? Do THEY - the military - have copies of the capture documents they could search through?

[Utah Bob #35998]

Yes they have copies. It’s the military. Everything is in triplicate at the least. It would have had to be some time ago if it was a pistol because you can’t bring them back anymore. Whether or not they could search those records if they haven’t been digitized, I don’t know.

[Chantry]

13 hours ago, Alpo said:

Suppose someone brought home a pistol war trophy.

 

Has the capture papers. Did it by the book.

 

Then, years later, he commits a crime using that pistol. The cops have the gun.

 

Could it be traced to the soldier? Do THEY - the military - have copies of the capture documents they could search through?

 

How do the police know it is a war trophy?

[Alpo]

A good clue would be that it's old - 60s or earlier - and it doesn't have the country of origin stamped on it.

 

But they don't have to know it's a war trophy. Just doing their due diligence, could they check with the army? Say the gun is a Luger. Kinda difficult to go to the Luger factory and ask who they shipped that gun to. But they might could go to the Army and ask if an Erfurt-made Luger, serial a1776, was brought home as a war trophy.

[Colonel Kraken]

They may not have the records. A lot of information was lost in the 1973 personnel records fire. This was a great tragedy. According to the Wiki page (and backed up from the national archives page) this is what was lost:

The losses to Federal military records collection included:

• 80% loss to records of U.S. Army personnel discharged November 1, 1912, to January 1, 1960;^[2]
• 75% loss to records of U.S. Air Force personnel discharged September 25, 1947, to January 1, 1964, with names alphabetically after Hubbard, James E.;^[2]
• Some U.S. Army Reserve personnel who performed their initial active duty for training in the late 1950s but who received final discharge as late as 1964.

None of the records that were destroyed in the fire had duplicate copies made, nor had they been copied to microfilm. No index of these records was made prior to the fire, and millions of records were on loan to the Veterans Administration at the time of the fire. This made it difficult to precisely determine which records were lost.^[2]

 

^{Here is a link to the wiki page:} https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Personnel_Records_Center_fire

 

 

[Trigger Mike]

One of the advantages of being stationed in Germany when the wall came down was the on post sporting club gathered up a bunch of Czech border guards pistols and the soldiers could fill out the army paperwork with command approval and buy one for 65.  I recall that it was similar to war trophy paperwork.  I am sure that they have records still.