When the French took over control of the Mauser factory complex in May 1945, the plant had some 85 tons of pistol parts on hand – 7.3 million individual components in various stages of production. This was enough to make a whole lot of guns, even if many of them were not completed parts. So alongside K98k rifles, HST and Luger pistols, the French restarted P38 pistol production at Mauser.
German military production ended at about serial number 3000f in April 1945, and the French chose to start back up at 1g. They would make a total of 38,780 P38s by the early summer of 1946, completing the G, H, and I serial number blocks and getting mostly through K as well. A final batch of 500 were numbered in the L series after being assembled back in France at the Chatellerault arsenal.
French production P38s are generally recognized by the French 5-pointed star acceptance marks on the slides. They will have slide codes of svw45 and svw46 (the French updated the code to match the year in 1946). Many of the parts used were completed prior to occupation, and various German proof marks can be found on some parts.
My uncle was in the army in WWII, and at one point he ended up at a “liberated” factory where P-38’s were made. Our soldiers immediately started selling souvenirs to other soldiers. When they ran out of pistols, they went and started assembling more. Not all were functional, or had all of the parts they were supposed to, but they made money on it.
In the face of an apocalyptic final battle, Mauser was still cranking out millions of pistol parts? When it could have been making StG45s instead with fewer man-hours per gun? What a misallocation of resources.