M1884/98 III (near-mint condition, post-war refurbished DDR-issued) Karabiner 98K bayonet

[ColonelKlink1942]

Hey gang,

 

Here is the final M1884/98 III of the initial trio, and the nicest of them all regarding condition.

This bayonet has some markings that I didn't understand at the time but learned about later. On one side of the Ricasso is "44ffc" (I think the 44 is the year the blade was produced, "ffc" is the letter code of Friedrich A. Herder und Sohn, out of Solingen), and on the other side is "6712 over d" ("d" block letter prefix, 6,712th bayonet). There is a WaA marking on the pommel, but I can hardly decipher it. It looks like it reads "WaA5", but then nothing after that. Was the rest ground off/worn down? It doesn't look like the surface has been ground or buffered, but I could be wrong. It has a waffle-pattern/hatched flash guard.

There is no marking on the spine of the blade. It has fluid still on the blade, and seemingly inside the scabbard. The scabbard is marked "P. Weyersberg 1940", which tells me that the scabbard and blade are clearly mismatched, but it's neat that I have a 1940-dated scabbard and a 1944-dated blade. The leather hanger is apparently a post-war addition. The scabbard also has what looked like some sort of alloy screw in one side of it, but that screw appears to have been ground off for some reason. The grips are post-1943, a plastic with wood flour as a filler (I think that's what Bakelite is).

From the research I've done so far with these things in mind, it could possibly be that this bayonet was refurbished post-war and issued to members of the DDR (or some other European nation). Bayonets from that post-war period that look like this are often hardly used, hence why they're in such good shape.