[Icelander]

Does anyone know how common the Mannlicher-Schönauer Grosswildbüchse rifle might be in 1944-1945?

If the leadership of the SS were quietly preparing to escape to another world with the defeat of the German Reich, could they surreptitiously obtain a few of them?

Ten? Twenty? More?

Assuming they were trying to buy or trade for them without drawing undue attention, as their plans for a Last Redoubt were not public and, indeed, were exclusively an SS endeavour, not approved by Der Führer. Having senior SS men buy an exotic sporting rifle or two is fine, but they couldn't have armed members of the security services seize any such rifles they learned about or anything.*

If any of the Austrian nobility or wealthy industrialists who owned such a rifle before the Anschluss were politically unreliable or even, gasp, of impure racial stock, it might well be that their rifles had already been seized by German security services, in which case the SS would presumably find them easy enough to obtain.

I imagine that some affluent German sportsmen who hunted in Africa, as well as other members of the European upper class who had gone on safari, might conceivably own a Mannlicher-Schönauer chambered in this very heavy caliber, but the sense I get is that it was a very rare rifle, even for Europeans who might have hunted elephant or rhino. Not to mention that the majority of the production presumably went to German-speaking areas of Africa and didn't necessarily come back to Festung Europa before the war began to go against Germany.

Without having obtained any numbers, I would not be surprised to discover that Mannlicher-Schönauer Grosswildbüchse in 12.7x70mmRB caliber amounted to only a tiny fraction of Mannlicher-Schönauer rifles made before WWII and that even if someone living under the regime of the Third Reich owned a rifle in 12.7x70mmRB, it was more likely to be a Mauser 98 pattern.

Assuming that the Antarctic Space Nazis managed to bring at least one Mannlicher-Schönauer rifle in 12.7x70mmRB, how hard would be it to make unlicensed copies in the future?

They'll have experienced gunsmiths and the right tooling for Mauser rifles, but I don't know if they'll manage to bring the same for the Mannlicher-Schönauer rifles.

I imagine that a very skilled gunsmith could not doubt make such rifles more or less by hand, using the same tooling as is used for Mauser rifles, but it would likely end up consuming a lot more of his valuable time than simply making Mauser 98 actions for the 12.7x70mmRB, even if that means Shots 2+1 rather than Shots 5+1.

*Well, no earlier than in April 1945, at which point they might have done just that, during the last battles against the Red Army in Austria.