PKeating

There are various militaria dealers in Paris and the provinces. Some, of course, are more honest than others. Fred Finel sometimes has nice French uniforms amongst the Allied and Axis stuff, and he speaks fluent English, being married to an English lady. Overlord 96 Rue Folie Méricourt 75011 Paris Phone: 011 33 1 43 55 21 19 I think Fred has a website and I will come back to you on that but if memory serves me correctly, it's really for the part of his business that supplies private purchase gear to modern French soldiers. Another place worth looking at is Le Poilu, which can also be found on the web at: http://www.techmili.com/Magasins/Lepoilu/Le_poilu.htm They have someone who speaks English. PK

This are fakes of the Type 2 Army Parachutist Badge struck by C E Juncker in .800 silver as a retail 'upgrade' for men who could prove their entitlement to the badge. Like the aluminium badges, there were three types: the Type 1, the so-called transitional type resulting from an attempt to rework the dies in the area of the eagle's talons, and the Type 2, which had a completely different eagle mounted on a wreath struck on the same dies as previously. They were engraved with the recipient's details: name, rank and the number of his award document or his parachutist licence. They were also engraved with the unit details. I once had a Type 1 aluminium badge engraved by Juncker in the style of its silver counterpart, which features on the cover of Eric Queen's book Red Shines The Sun. The 1st Edition of Forman shows a fake. The 3rd Edition of Forman shows the 'transitional' silver badge named to Karl Büttner. In Büttner's case, the badge was engraved with his parachutist licence number, which was 68, rather than the number on his award document, which was 53. The pin is clearly a replacement. Given that there are less than twenty known original silver Fallschirmschützenabzeichen (H) in collections, there being twelve when Eric produced his book and a few more discovered since, the chances of finding one in the hands of a dealer or an eBay vendor are extremely slim. Moreover, the only firm that supplied the Army Para Badge during the Third Reich era was C E Juncker, in 1937/38 and 1943/44. If you're looking at a badge that does not confirm precisely to a known original, then it is a fake. PK

Save your money. By the way, a 1957 issue would not carry a Third Reich era LDO retail code like the L/50 hallmark on these Oakleaves. Regarding these Oakleaves, the leaves are wrong, the silhouette is wrong and the stamp is wrong. Garbage. The miniature Iron Cross ribbon ties are also a bit of a giveaway. The Knight's Cross of the War Merit Cross ribbon was usually finished thus but not the ribbon of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. Even if you do find a genuine set of Godet Oakleaves or Oakleaves and Swords, as in a set conforming to known wartime issues, with PK or LDO marks, there is no way, unless you really have cast iron provenance, of telling whether they were made in 1944, 1964 or 1974, no matter what some 'gurus' and 'advanced collectors' may claim. PK

These are sometimes difficult. One of the things that makes me suspicious, the form of the deathshead apart, is that the important part of the SS/RZM label is missing, meaning that it could be an original label from another kind of accoutrement with the telltale code removed. The work reminds me of a London embroiderer by the name of Israel M Hand, who not only supplied cinema and theatre costumiers as well as UK government with bullion insignia but also produced fakes for some of London's top 3rd Reich dealers of the time, almost thirty years ago. PK

That is an amazing group. It is definitely an award linked to the Anglo-American Terror Bombing. As Rick says, he must have done something truly outstanding. PK

Excellent!

Absolutely, Gordon. In the end, it's always the ordinary people, the people just trying to live as best they can, who are hit the hardest of all. The tears of a Serb mother for her conscript son killed in action in a war, essentially, against his own people are no less valid than those of Behdri Maxun, one of dozens from whom I took statements on my way up through Northern Albania to the border. This is his story: His wife, daughter and daughter-in-law were in visible need of urgent medical attention as the paramilitaries had taken the balance they considered their due from these women 'in kind', so to speak. However, rape being a taboo subject in such societies, they remained in a huddle under a plastic tarpaulin on the back of the flatbed truck, unwilling to allow strangers to witness their shame, with the menfolk twirling rags in an attempt to keep the flies away. This was common daily fare there but, in the end, no more cruel than the experience of pulling bits of family members and friends from a Belgrade building hit by a 'smart bomb' or missile. Perhaps the medieval savagery of the killers on the ground was more honest, in a way, than the clinical savagery of clean-shaven young NATO airmen pressing buttons at 35,000 feet. Many of the paramilitaries were Russian veterans of Afghanistan and Chechnya and a lot them were high on cheap heroin and alcohol. I met a few of them as well on my travels and they were scary people. Others were the inevitable lowlife recruited from prisons and gutters by Arkan's officers and NCOs. A few were nationalists and neo-fascist extremists who had bought into the notion that they were defending the edge of Christendom from encroaching Islam, many Kosovars and Albanians being Muslims. However, these people were Catholics in the main before the Ottoman Turks 'persuaded' them to convert to Islam. I don't know if the people who put the Behdri family out of their houses or the savages who held them up ever answered for it but I do know that I and some of my colleagues handed copies of our notes and photos to the Red Cross and other NGOs, and to the war crimes investigators, and that some families were reunited and some perpetrators arrested. The whole Balkan experience was a deeply troubling lesson in how thin our veneer of civilisation really is and how ordinary and even pleasant most of the worst killers turned out to be, crazed junkies and drunks apart. Just as ordinary and pleasant, in fact, as the young airmen who bombed Belgrade and other Serb targets, but perhaps more honest, as I said, about the violence to which they were subjecting fellow human beings. As a society, we Westerners tend to recoil from violence if forced to see it up close and acknowledge it. We'll cheer in pubs when we hear that some mad mullah has been taken out in his slum lair by a missile or a 'smart bomb', without having a care for all the people around his lair who were killed and maimed too. We'll buy the pilot a pint if we meet him. But we will recoil in horror from, say, an IRA man who blew his target up with a car bomb or a Balkan killer who tied a family together with military telephone cable, doused them in petrol and used them as kindling to burn down the farmhouse, even though their actions are not really so different to those of the airman bombing and burning people to death from a great height. War is sometimes a necessary evil but those who call for it tend to be those who have never seen it close up or are never likely to be directly involved in it. It is a very serious matter and all too often entrusted to politicians who unleash it without taking any personal responsibility for the consequences and who gull the sheeple with all this nonsense about smart bombs, clinical strikes and all the rest of the phraseology aimed at masking the horrific reality while the usual suspects rake in their profits. PK

Aerial bombardment is rarely a solution to any military problem. It is often said that the Anglo-American bombing campaign against Germany may have prolonged the war by up to a year and a half through polarising German civilians who were not normally disposed to supporting Nazism in any active way and creating a diversion from Hitler's woeful performance as the supreme military commander once things began going wrong. As Leigh says, we should avoid politics but it is an inevitable consequence of showing images of "war trophies" with revisionist captions referring to Western aggression against Yugoslavia so perhaps you will all indulge someone else who was there in 1999, although somewhat removed from the sun-dappled boulevards, caf?s and stunning women of Belgrade in the springtime. The bombardment of Belgrade was a major factor in persuading the Serbian dictator Milosovich and his henchmen to withdraw not just their armed forces but the irregulars commanded by Arkan and his ilk from Kosova. However, it was only when the Serbian militiamen and irregulars got a dose of their own medicine from 3 Para and certain members of the Bundeswehr in places like Pristina once the NATO columns finally rolled that the Milosovich regime realised that the days of using force underscored by state terrorism in the form of genocidal or democidal tactics to hold "Yugoslavia" or "Greater Serbia" together were over. Boots and bayonets on the ground trump aerial bombardment every time. It took me years to be able to share a room or a dinner table with a Serb after what I saw there and in other places in ex-Yugoslavia. Perhaps this was irrational but PTSD does funny things to people. I realise now that many Serbs, especially youngsters, were against Milosovich and his maniacs, and that even as our glorious leaders were cuddling up to the Serbs as their new best friends, there were many young refuseniks languishing in prison camps whose crime was to have refused to do their national service in Kosova or, as Serbs call it, Kosovo. I cannot recall any Western politicians calling for their release after the war. I remember humans rights groups trying to raise the question and being told by the new regime's spokespeople in Belgrade that it was an internal matter. One can of course understand the Serb viewpoint. Conservative Serbs sometimes ask us how we would feel if the Muslims of Bradford in the UK or the Hispanics of Florida suddenly declared their regions independent and threw white people out of their homes. However, the Kosovars were genuinely scared of the Belgrade regime and with good reason, given the human rights record of the Milosovich dictatorship since the rekindling of the civil war in 1990. Extreme savagery and cruelty have been hallmarks of Balkan conflicts for centuries and the behaviour of all sides in the 1990s continued this tradition. Whether the NATO bombing of Serbia was morally defensible or not, it did play a part in bringing that dreadful conflict to an end - until the next time our Balkan cousins succumb to bloodlust - and you would have to have been there, amongst the Kosovars, to experience their gratitude to Washington and London first hand as they saw the thugs and killers sent by Belgrade on the run. Sure, some elements of the U?K were rather nasty themselves but that's another discussion. Anyway, this display hints at the real underlying attitudes of many Serbs in general. They are not sorry for what their country did. They're just sorry that Milosovich screwed up and lost the war. They'll take Western aid, funded by our taxes, and they'll throw us the occasional war criminal or discredited dictator in exchange for positive headlines but they would do it all again if they got half a chance. They should have been subjected to national reeducation of the kind we imposed upon the Germans in 1945 through the denazification programme. The only thing keeping them more or less civilised, rather like the Turks, is the prospect of EU membership and all that lovely money they stand to receive, all paid for by our taxes. Meanwhile, their true nature is glimpsed in this display, with that rhetorical tosh about our "aggression against Yugoslavia". Utter tommyrot! It was a military campaign against the Milosovich regime. It was perhaps the last morally justifiable Western military intervention on record, with the exception of Britain's expedition to Sierra Leone in 2000. Milosovich and his henchmen needed stopping and, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it was time for war-war rather than jaw-jaw. Of course civilians were killed. That's the price of war. And it is a terrible price. Buildings are blown to smithereens and people are killed. We find it harder to bear when they look like our buildings and our people, that's all. One of my uncles, who participated in the liberation of Europe in 1944 and 1945, accepts that the bombing of German cities like Dresden and Hamburg was terrible but still bristles when he hears the term "war crimes" in connection with the bombing campaign because he remembers entering Belsen on the second day. A part of him still feels that the Germans got their just desserts. And then he feels bad for harbouring such sentiments. Of course most of the Serb civilians killed in 1999 by our bombs didn't deserve to die. But nor did the Kosovars subjected to Serb barbarism. Perhaps if you had stood beside me on a few occasions in Kosova and Northern Albania in 1999, confronted by the victims of Serb aggression, your feelings towards the Serbs you worked with at the time, who seem to have been very much a part of the Milosovich regime, might have been a little different. I am not suggesting that you should not remember them with sympathy but let's not forget that they were, for the most part, enthusiastic supporters of what Milosovich and his henchmen were trying to achieve. In 1945, we said "Never Again!" so Milosovich had to be stopped and all the handwringing and dialogue in the world wasn't going to work. Simple as that. It seems that even when Milosovich's generals did turn up for talks with the NATO delegation, which included Generals Wesley Clark and Mike Jackson, the latter had to point out very forcefully to the Serbs that they were there not for negotiations but to hear and accept the terms imposed by NATO. In other words, they were the commanders of a defeated - and morally discredited - army. Some accounts allege that General Jackson pointed his service pistol at them to emphasise his points. Knowing Jackson, that may be true. The Serbs certainly the tent left in a hurry and had to be coaxed into returning. Jackson was subsequently removed from his post, leaving the far more malleable Wesley Clark there as a safe pair of hands from our leaders' viewpoint, given that they were already preparing to do business with Belgrade. One always has to follow the money or the smell of the money in order to gain a broader understanding of these things. PK

Good. That's how it was intended. I'd be more than happy to argue with you until we had no spit left and then buy you a beer. I'd also take it gracefully if you out-argued me. Maybe this is a debate that should take place offline or in a closed environment, to prevent distractions.] PK

I wouldn't dismiss this possibility at all. Again, very possible. We're almost on the same page here. It's one thing to rework or try to rework a die but quite another to attempt to repair cracks. Repairing cracks would entail skilled welding followed by recutting. Even skilled welding to steel causes considerable damage to the surrounding metal, to the point that it might be considered less trouble just to make a fresh set of dies. This still begs the question of how unflawed Type 1 frames are seen on early 1957 crosses, doesn't it? Whose consensus? My 'boss' rejected them because they were damaged. They were described as the S&L frame dies and he, coming from a family of die-cutters and toolmakers with connections to The Royal Mint and the Franklin Mint, satisfied himself that they were the dies on which the frames a couple of "4" marked KCs he had were struck. But he said they were "shagged" and that he couldn't sell anything made with them. He tried to buy the core dies. I'm not so willing to align myself with this consensus. Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. Who knows? All I know is that all of this seems like an attempt to prevent the bottom falling out of Steinhauer & L?ck KCs. The very least one can say is that the S&L KC is a "problematic" item. Of course there are genuine Nazi-era examples out there. But there are a lot of postwar restrikes too. That is pretty much all I am saying. I would want to be proven wrong too, before I blew a load of money on several S&L KCs. At the moment, there are only three makers with which I feel comfortable: Juncker, Godet and Zimmermann. The last two used the same dies so that's two types of KC upon which I would spend money. The rest I prefer to leave to advanced collectors and advocates of KCs approved by this recent consensus. PK

Don't worry, Rick. Harrier and I are both adults. These discussions only become fraught when the retards arrive. That's the nature of the internet. In real life, we could all sit around at a bar and discuss these questions quite robustly and emphatically without falling out because we would all pretty much blank any well-known idiots who tried to join in. It's harder to blank them on the web. PK

I fail to see how anything I have written here could "offend the forum". I suppose my continued rejection of beliefs adopted in the wake of Dietrich Maerz's book might offend a few people but I think you're stretching it to suggest that my beliefs where KCs are concerned are offensive to the members in general. I think that a loose cabal of dealers, fakers and their shills might find some of my posts extremely irritating, especially when they interfere with attempts to introduce new 'variants' unseen in the past six decades, or with the apparent new strategy of trying to rehabilitate certain medals and badges long dismissed as questionable by serious, time-served students of the subject. The afore-mentioned list of firms authorised by the LDO to produce Germany's highest award is widely accepted as accurate and reasonable by many serious students of the subject. There is no known proof of the kind you presumably envisage but when Deschler's status as a supplier of awards to the regime is taken into account, along with the handful of known, marked crosses in advanced collections whose quality conforms to the sort of quality one might expect of this firm, it is reasonable to entertain the notion that Deschler was one of the authorised makers, even if the firm did not produce hundreds or thousands of KCs during the war. You're perfectly entitled to reserve your opinion in the absence of proof. The Deschler KCs might be as genuine as the "Rounders" you and your friends so passionately defended a while back. If you are able to put a coherently argued case against the probability or possibility of Deschler-made KCs, I am sure it would be taken seriously. I know I would make an effort to give you a fair reading. This discussion is about 1957 KCs. 1939 KCs by Steinhauer & L?ck qualify as on-topic for obvious reasons. A recapitulation of the names of firms authorised to supply the KC during the war is also legitimate in the wider context of the topic. So is the discussion about precious metals in Occupied Germany between 1945 and 1949. Attacking facts and conclusions based upon study and logic with sophistry and semantics in a manner redolent of our adversarial justice system is probably legitimate too, from the viewpoint of people on an agenda, with a lot to lose if items in their collections are shown to be questionable, but facts are facts and in the absence of facts, or proof, it is reasonable to form opinions and to draw conclusions based on available information, logic and hearsay. Juries do this all the time. So do judges and magistrates. Probability and possibility play major r?les in the study of history, which is why I consider the majority of KCs by Steinhauer & L?ck to be questionable. I can't prove that they are fakes but I can't prove them genuine either, which is why I have never bought one. PK

For the benefit of readers to whom all of this is new, I wasn't present when they were sold and I have never claimed to have been present. I was present when they were offered to the crook for whom I worked from time to time as a runner before I got a life. He passed on them because of the damage to the frame dies. We heard from the broker that they had been sold to a top London dealer, well-known amongst his fellow crooks, who may still have them although he probably hasn't used them for a long time. This was twenty-eight years ago. PK

Moving on, let's get back to the question of Steinhauer & L?ck KCs. 1. Unflawed 1957 S&L KC: made sometime after August 1957. 2. Flawed 1957 S&L KC: made sometime after August 1957. 3. Unflawed 1939 S&L KC: made sometime before August 1957. 4. Flawed 1939 S&L KC: made sometime after August 1957. 5. A & B cores: irrelevant to the question of the flawed dies. 6. Repaired frame dies: how exactly does one repair such dies? 7. Flawed dies: I saw the flawed dies in question myself in London in 1981. 8. Dies in question purchased by a 'top drawer' London dealer. 9. Advent of internet enables sharing of such information more readily than before. 10. Book appears easing pain of collectors who have paid thousands for flawed S&L KCs. Maybe I am wrong. I am sometimes wrong. I have no problem with admitting this. But in this case, I prefer to remain very wary of any S&L KC, unless it has very convincing provenance indeed. Even then, there is always that little doubt in the back of the mind. Therefore, I prefer to stick to crosses with no questions attached. PK

Here endeth our dialogue. Sorry. PK

QED...

The rules prevent me from answering this post in an appropriate manner. PK

I initially assumed that you meant KCs as I cannot recall seeing any 1939 EK2s with hallmarks anywhere but on the ring. I didn't catch the clarification. I presume you're talking about EK1s, then. I'm discussing the Knight's Cross here. Many firms had wartime medal and badge components in stock after the war. Again, I am talking about the 1957 KC and the question of unflawed Steinhauer & L?ck frames. I think you've introduced a bit of a red herring here. As for the definition of bullion, the word is used colloquially in Britain and the United States to describe gold and silver stock. Embroiderers will use it to describe gold and silver wire used in embroidered insignia. Expanding on that, representatives of the FED would have taken any gold and silver they could lay their hands on, all of which would normally have been smelted into ingot form, with impurities removed. These metals are alloyed to render them more useable in manufacturing terms, hence .375 and .585 grades of gold. Pure silver is not quite as soft as gold, of course, but still requires the addition of a small amount of other metal to render it harder and harder-wearing, hence .800, .925 and .935. This is not to say that ingots are not made of lower grades. Of course they are. But for bank reserve purposes, the metals are usually smelted into their purest form. So, 800, 925 and 935? It would all have gone into the smelting pot and come out as "bullion", according to the purest definition. Darrell: I don't have a Deschler KC. I think Gordon Williamson might be able to provide some pictures of Deschler KCs, which are extremely rare. I would say that they are rarer than "20" and L/52-marked KCs. There is an example in his book, on Page 293, bearing an 800 silver mark and the firm's PK hallmark '1'. I know that there have been other books written on KCs but I consider Williamson to be the most reliable extant authority on the subject, his inclusion of the "Rounder" variant notwithstanding. I have handled a "1" KC and I recall its overall quality as conforming to that one expects of Deschler und Sohn. This firm, however, seems to have focused particularly upon NSDAP-related awards and upon enamel pieces. Perhaps they felt that the market was already well-covered by the other firms, hence the scarcity of their KCs. PK

The authorities seized any kind of gold and silver bullion they could find. I think you'll find that silver-framed EK2s and EK1s 1939 are rather scarce. The LDO only got tough about the materials used in production of the KC. The authorised KC producers were: C E Juncker Godet C F Zimmermann Steinhauer & L?ck Deschler und Sohn Klein und Quenzer Otto Schickle Godet and Zimmermann's KCs were identical and were probably made on dies owned by Zimmermann, otherwise there would have been many restrikes produced by Godet in the 1960s and 1970s. So, we are looking at six basic types of KC, ultra-rare variants like the "half-ring" type aside. As I said, there would be no legitimate or logical reason for any KC frame to bear an L/11 hallmark. I have not seen any of these 1957-pattern KCs with the L/11 hallmark you describe so I have no opinion to offer on the provenance of such frames. Were it established that these frames were made on wartime dies, that would be worth a discussion. However, the L/11 hallmark would seem to be illegitimate. Perhaps some fool stamped them with this Nazi-era hallmark afterwards. Are there any old three-part 1939-pattern KC fakes bearing the Deumer LDO hallmark and are the frames in question the same as these 1957-pattern "L/11" KCs you mention? Do you have any clear pictures of a 1957-pattern L/11 KC? PK

I don't know if S&L managed to hang onto any silver bullion in any shape or form. That kind of knowledge is likely by now to have been lost forever in the mists of time. All I can say is that the Allies were quite diligent when it came to locating and impounding the defeated nation's assets and that medal and badge manufacturers were obvious targets. Prior to the formalisation of Allied plundering, there was also the question of soldiers helping themselves to anything of any value if they thought they might get away with it. Deumer was not an authorised manufacturer of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross 1939. On Page 264 of Gordon Williamson's highly researched reference work The Iron Cross of 1939 (Bender 2002), GW shows the reverse of a KC with the following caption: The LDO marks were intended for retail pieces. If Deumer acquired some KCs for their display cases, which was not unusual amongst medal and badge makers of the period, they would have been unlikely to have stamped these with the L/11 mark and even if they had done so, they would surely have used a stock L/11 punch rather than stamping the reverse frame with a crude composite mark. I have never seen a 1957-pattern KC bearing an L/11 mark. There is no legitimate or logical reason for the existence of such a hallmark on any KC, whether of 1939 or 1957 pattern. Regarding silver grades, I am not quite sure what you mean. There is certainly a legal onus to differentiate between grades of precious metals. To mark 800 silver as 925 or 935 silver would be illegal. Or do you mean, perhaps, differentiating between prices in charging more for a 935 piece than an 800 piece? PK

As a side note, unflawed silver frames observed on 1957-pattern Steinhauer & L?ck crosses are sometimes said to be leftover wartime stock used by the firm after the 'restitution' of the Knight's Cross in August 1957. However, silver bullion of any description and in any form was impounded by Allied forces after the surrender in 1945 and given into the custody of the Foreign Exchange Depository, set up by the US Army at the Reichsbank in Frankfurt. In November 1945, the FED was officially tasked by the 12th Army Group to serve as the central repository for all captured "gold and silver bullion and coin, foreign currencies, foreign securities, precious stones or jewels, jewelry, gold teeth, and other similar valuables." The FED was assisted by Bank of England officials and evaluators and, Steinhauer & L?ck's L?denscheid remises being in the British Zone, any silver bullion, whether in unstamped sheet form, sheets of uncut RK frames or prepared RK frames, would have been duly impounded and sent to the FED in Frankfurt, where it would doubtless have ended up in ingot form, just like other precious metals seized by the Western Allies from businesses all over Germany, the Soviet Zone aside. Following the establishment of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland and the return to the German nation or part thereof of a degree of autonomy in 1949, the FED handed over all seized assets bar some industrial diamonds, platinum ingots and a few stray stocks and bonds. The FED was closed down in December 1950, with any remaining assets held by the FED transferred to the custody of the Bank Deutscher L?nder. So, any .800 silver frames observed on 1957-pattern S&L crosses are likely to have been produced either after the August 1957 restitution of the RK in de-nazified form or sometime after 1949, in other words, in the 1950s for 1939-pattern crosses requested by recipients or families of recipients as replacements for lost or stolen crosses. It follows that any S&L RK, whether of 1939 or 1957 pattern, with flawed frames postdates the August 1957 restitution while all that can be said for any unflawed 1939 cross without verifiable provenance is that it might predate May 8 1945. PK

I'd never seen Belgian miniatures before. They are quite as finely detailed and beautiful as their French counterparts. Thank you for showing these! Your grouping has the civilian version of the Resistance Medal. The original owner spent the same amount of time as a political internee. They seem to be mounted back-to-front, with the Order of Leopold and the Croix de Guerre at the wrong end. P

Recipients of Ulsterman's medal were also issued with these. It says a lot for 1940s German synthetics that these are still useable, six decades later. They are also reusable as they can be washed and re-lubed although the OKW insisted that they be destroyed after use for the sake of health and hygiene. Now, does anyone have an example of the super-rare M43 cap issued to armoured vehicle crews of the Hermann G?ring Division, the one with the peak on the back to allow unhindered use of gunsights and drivers' periscopes? PK

Other side:

Found in the mid-1960s by a friend's mother in a Naples junk shop. Shown just as they are. The medal for the Italian contingent sent to help Franco during the Spanish Civil War is nice. So are the typically bombastic Fascist medals for Greece and British Somaliland. However, these last two were not intended for wear in uniform, were they? PK