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I don't recall seeing a similar post. Having just watched a documentary on the bombing of German cities Berlin 80% destroyed Dresden Hamburg Cologne Nuremberg etc knowing populations etc what does one think the destruction rates of daggers, tunics and other militaria was do to bombing/fire? We seem to have a vast supply of certain items available to collectors but if we take into account those items lost to bombing, destruction by owners at end of war, de-nazification by the allies the amount of militaria available for plunder would have been greatly reduced. Certainly the Russian occupying forces would have destroyed much. Then one has to account for German items destroyed post war by owners,items simply thrown out as Nazi and valueless from 1945 until 1970 when items were generally viewed by many as non historic and of little value. Items damaged such as daggers by owners,cloth items ravaged by 30 years of poor storage, moth eaten and crushed headgear. The attrition rates would be significantly high. Taking all this into account what do GDC members feel the survival rate (%) of daggers is??? cheers Ryan

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I do believe a lot of it was thrown away stateside pre 1970. Also as you stated during the war and destruction hence there being far less group II ss daggers. Some other things thrown into lakes etc. Still no amber panels. Interesting to ponder about.

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As the Russian troops occupied Germany, if they found an SS uniform or anything that made them think the house was related to an SS member, they killed everyone in the house. So the destruction of the SS items in particular was occurring by the SS families even during the war. I saw an SS uniform where you could see the insignia was literally ripped off.

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I have an SA JA Henckels dagger with group OST which are fairly hard to find because area came under Russian occupation.

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Hey Jim,

Do you know that Nazi soldiers and officers killed 16 000 000 (this is SIXTEEN MILLION!!!) Russian civilians, mostly women and children?
Do you know that Nazi doctors drained blood from 4 - 6 years old Russian kids to help wounded SS officers until these kids die?
As a payoff for ONLY 16 000 000 million innocent lives damn Russians should keep themselves civilized when they occupied Germany.
I hate to ask, were did you get this information? Were you there and did you see it yourself?

Regards,

Alex

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Alex, I don't think Jim was speaking as if it was some great crime against ss militaria- or against the families, etc. I think he's merely stating it as point of fact- I'm certain one could take the romantic lost cause/unjust viewpoint, or that it was well deserved. I don't see his post as exhibiting either of those notions. Nazis killed innocents. Every kid over the age of 10 knows that. To be honest, if anything, both the reprisals by the soviets, and the similar hell endured by millions of innocents in the ussr under Stalin are the lesser known of the two evils. MANY graduating (18 year old) students in the USA do not even know the facts in the latter case. For example- which of the two t-shirts can you wear walking down the street with little problem in many countries...one with a black swastika upon a white roundel on a red shirt, or a red shirt bearing a golden hammer and sickle??
Best regards,
Che Guevara

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With all due respect Alex where is "this" coming from ???? How do you turn an informative and interesting thread suddenly political We don't want to even remotely get into the Stalinist purges and murder of the Russian or Polish people or Communist China or Japan's murder of 22,000,000 Chinese after invading Manchuria. No one has a monopoly on genocide or murder I absolve no one Jim your statement is accepted as documented historical fact. regards

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How about the 10 million German women brutally raped by the Savage Russians..... girls as young as 4.....disgusting....... Imagine no 40 year cold war if Russia would have been crushed, USA should have teamed up with facist Germany then dealt with them later....

Last edited by chris12559; 08/05/2017 01:17 AM.
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Lighten up Alex. The discussion is what happened to a lot of the daggers. Political discussions are not allowed here for a good reason and this is a perfect example of why. We are discussing daggers and suddenly we are suppose to argue who has the most evil empire.

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It appears Alex may be on the wrong forum..as this website is based on Third Reich Edged weapons...including that of the allies.

Other than that ...perhaps another forum he may want to vent his frustrations.

Regards Larry


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..back on track..great question Ryan..it was not until fairly recently that German militaria became the items that drive the commercial militaria shows and/or collector sites. Before that, German items were quite literally relegated to the bargain basement. Kept under tables, traded or bought for peanuts at gun shows or antique dealers.

When I first got into the hobby, I would pick for general antique dealers to fund my hobby (started mid-late 70's) these men would rather eat nails than give you a dollar for any common SA,SS, army dagger, iron cross etc. etc. Very few collected and the German items seemed to be everywhere. How common? I had trunks full of daggers, uniforms, helmets etc and never paid more than $50 for a dagger. Quite literally, no one wanted to pay me anything for some of the best items that ever came out of the woodwork in Canada.

Fast forward 15 years and things changed...these same dealers would beg me to sell them anything 'Nazi' and had a customer base that would pay top dollar even for common items. By this time, tired of their BS, I would sell at top dollar as I knew that much of what I was selling was leaving the country and would never return in my lifetime (or so I thought!)

Now, I began to think..what had I missed? Was there more? How many times had I contacted veterans only to be told that they had tired of the items they had brought back 10 years after the war and had dumped them into the lake/landfill/river? I bought and sold a ton of items and yet the leads told me that for every one item I obtained, 10 no longer existed. We tend to carelessly throw around words like rare, but we have to remember that the items that we collect were produced in their millions for members in organizations that numbered in the millions.

The conflagrations of war no doubt destroyed vast quantities of men and material, reducing daggers, cloth, skin and bones to rivulets of molten Nickle and stickey ash. Our luck as collectors, if you like, lays in the reality that such great quantities were produced, used or stored away, that it could not all possibly be destroyed. Even during the great de-Nazification purges, those tasked to destroy often became great dealers in illicit souvenirs themselves. The Russians were great hoarders. They would have you believe they were not for ideological reasons. Some of my best uniforms have come from Eastern block countries.

It may be interesting to note that much of the early regalia we love was not so much in circulation by 1945. Many of the daggers were put away, the cloth items recycled for war materials. A-SS tunics were given away to paramilitary units in foreign countries, and over 80,000 former SA men alone had met their creator by mid war. Many of their items were turned in during war drives and were destroyed years before the war ended!

We may never know how much was lost..we can only ascertain much of what was through the limited samples that are still available to us. We may not have all the daggers that were available, but we have enough that opinions can be formed re: disposition, types, makers, construction etc..

Interesting topic!

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Great reply Doug thought provoking cheers and best, Ryan


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