If these old guns could talk, the stories they could tell. I have also read that in Europe it was not uncommon to store rifles and bolts separately so that should the rifles fall into the hands of enemies foreign or domestic they were useless.
So I have to assume that sometime somewhere a bunch of rifles and their proper bent bolts were separated from each other, and then the rifles re-issued with available straight handled bolts, and the one I have may have been one of them. Then, years later, I was reading about WW II and how German support troops were often issued K98k rifles with straight bolt handles. He did a great job and it can't be distinguished from one that was originally made as a bent handle. He dug through his parts drawers and found one, but I had him bend the one that came in the rifle as I was worried about headspace-just something I had read but didn't know much about. There weren't that many gun books or gun magazines around in those days, so I consulted my local gunsmith and he confirmed that it should be bent. didn't match the receiver's number, but I didn't know much about them at the time, and it took about a year for me to realize that the dished out area in the stock below the bolt handle's knob was probably a relief for knuckles, in which case the bolt would have to be bent. My first K98k came when I was about age 15, and it had a straight bolt. Now there's an interesting point for speculation, straight vs.
Yours looks much like mine, except mine has a turned down bolt like Scharfs', back up in post #13. Verrry Interesting, as Artie Shaw used to say.