Female Soviet snipers wearing the loose two-piece ‘amoeba’ camouflage suits widely issued on the Eastern Front. (Courtesy of the Central Museum of the Armed Forces, Moscow, via Nik Cornish)
GERMAN SNIPER RIFLES At the beginning of the war, little consideration had been given to producing a standard sniping rifle. Germany had adopted the shortbarrelled version of the Gew 98, the K98k, before the end of World War I, and by 1939 it was the standard for all infantry use. Some SS units were equipped with early K98k rifles converted to sniping use with the addition of a short side-rail scope mount. Army units fielded a mixture of World War I-surplus Gew 98s, many modified to the shorter K98k pattern and fitted with an ad hoc mixture of scopes and mounting systems. In the wake of the invasion of the USSR, calls began for the rapid acquisition of proper sniping rifles, so Germany embarked on the production of a bewildering number of models and types; short side-rail, long side-rail, turret mount, claw mount, SS double claw mount, Gew 43 side-rail, plus several scope mounts for the new breed of assault rifles, the FG42 and MP43/44, neither of which were ever conceived with a view to sniping. Captured Russian rifles were routinely used and Soviet scopes sometimes grafted onto Mauser rifles.
The most commonly issued sniping rifle to the Wehrmacht during World War II was this Mauser K98k/High Turret combination. It was not much different to the set-up of the previous war, but the scopes were of slightly higher magnification and the size of the objective lens was greatly enlarged.
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