I've seen this dagger hundreds of times since I got it; I took 8 years of German; I didn't realize the spelling error until just now. It's like one of those puzzles you look at on emails where they say "I bet you can't pick out the incorrectly spelled word".
Well, my grandfather was a tobacco farmer's son from NC who didn't know German except what he'd been taught by the Army. Also,I'm not sure where he or another soldier, without the benefit of the Internet, would have found this very real German Gefreiter's name, when my grandfather didn't serve in Crete.
Compare that to the fact that even today, with spellcheck, errors are made on signs and television captions, and even tombstones, I can easily see an uneducated German who was probably paid a pittance to carve this in (or maybe it was the father himself) making that mistake.
After all, I have 7 years of college and grad school and I sometimes misspell my own company's name when I'm writing letters. I wonder if the franconian/swabisch dialects have anything to do with the ease of the misspelling? After all, in both the -tsch sound is very smooth and sounds like "Doysh" when spoken.
