Compost Piles, Ninja Pilots and Other Silliness

Oh, Okay

At a 500 table gun show in Ohio last year, a collector asked to examine a Luftwaffe gravity knife in a dealer's case. On releasing the blade, he noted that the blade had been shortened by over an inch and repainted."That's special Heer issue" the dealer said,"they shortened them all like that so they could tell them apart."

Ninja Pilots

A collector in California found a pair of flightsuit type rank patches done on black wool at a local event and took them into a dealer's shop to find out more about them. "Oh" said the dealer, "those are special rank patches for Luftwaffe night fighter pilots -they had special black flight suit's." If dealers in other hobbies were such buffoons, they'd be laughed out of business.

Maybe Darwin Was Wrong

Every wonder how people so stupid have so much money? One of my favorite sink holes lately for the rich and fatuous is the current crop of "Sepp Dietrich" personal items - like the so- called Sepp Dietrich sword, engraved with the initials "SD". How can people this dumb have survived into the 20th Century? Why weren't their slow-witted ancestors trampled by mastodons? SS Oberstgruppenfuhrer Dietrich's given name was Josef. "Sepp" was a nickname, like "Ike" for General Dwight Eisenhower, and no one uses the initial of a nickname in a monogram.

Georgia On My Mind

Aren't all the mint Army daggers fascinating? You know the Germans made millions of combat helmets during the war - every Gl's favorite souvenir. Yet today you can't open any catalogs and find a wide selection of clean, tight, sharp, unscrewed-with helmets. Fascinating.

Gee, They Smell Right

It still amazes me that people don't take the time to read and research what they're doing before wasting large sums of good money on ridiculous garbage. German WWII Paratrooper boots are a classic example. During WWII, German paras often referred to their side-lace boots as "gangster shoes", because unlike hobnailed boots, their all rubber heels and soles made for very quiet walking on city streets. But the guy making them now with the silly rubbish on the bottoms (like metal heel irons) can't turn them out fast enough to keep up with demand. He puts them in his compost pile for two weeks, has his dog visit them a couple of times, and for $350 bucks we have another pair of "VG unissued" boots and another happy collector.

From Pakistan With Love

Lately we've been hearing a lot of garbage about how righteous it is that some repro dealers tell you right up front that their near perfect insignia are reproductions. After all, it's not their fault that they're used by the unscrupulous to make phony hats and tunics, is it? Well, Aman Khosogi probably doesn't loose any sleep over selling thousands of "Bouncing Betty" mines to lunatics all over the world either. What I want to know is, if these honest repro dealers are so noble, then why don't these stalwarts permanently mark the backs or insides of the pieces in some way, so they can't ever be used as fakes to rip people off? Because their buyers are fakers, and nobody would buy them, that's why. If you're not a part of the solution, you're part of the problem, and I don't care how you rationalize it.

Der Maulwerf ,(The Mole), "Compost Piles, Ninja Pilots and Other Silliness", Der Gauleiter, 1990