Story,
Your gun doesn't date to 1894/95. The so called "sole (actually sled) and pick" mark was not used at that time. Your initial assessment of Nov. 1965 proof is actually correct. The above listing of serial numbers would not apply as it is for original JP Sauer and Sons guns and by the time this gun was made the name had been sold and was reorganized in West Germany. The gun is actually a post war, East German one and since it "spoke to you", you got the deal you thought you were getting when you bought it. I don't know how it wound up at SARCO, but here is a possibility. East Germans were allowed to hunt, but the marketable game went to the government (My friend Walter Grass told of his father, who lived in the East Zone, killing a fox. He had to turn the fur over to the government but staked the body down in the creek overnight and ate it the next day, after the running water cleaned it). The guns had to be stored under government control rather than by the hunters. I speculate that SARCO was able to buy some of these guns, maybe left over from hunters who had passed on or were too old to hunt any longer. This is out and out speculation but makes sense to me.
Mike
