..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!
