Hungary Recon Badge of 1957

[hunyadi]

To add to my pile of interesting and rare - I picked this one up lately. According to my literature is the 'Excelent Platoon Leaders Badge' designated for the recon troops. (Paratrooper Special Forces type!) Also acording to the literature it was only awarded between 1954 and 1957. The ones with the Rakosi coat of arms are rare, but this is the 1957 version, only awarded and manufactured for one year.

[Hauptmann]

Charles... how in the world do you and Gordon do it! Combined you both come up with the rarest of the rare and make it seem easy. Another terrific find! Don't know how I missed this one till now. Congrats!!!!

Dan

[cimbineus]

Gents,

I am sorry to say, but to my best knowledge, there was no such a badge. I mean the one with the '57 coat of arms. This badge is one of the favorites of the counterfeiters, because it is enough to stick a tiny coat of arms to the original badge, and the "scarcity" is ready for putting on the market. (... accompanied with a nice story, of course...)

(About a year ago, one of our members, being in Hungary at that time, met one of these badges, but he was wise enough to resist the temptation, as far as I remember.)

Regards,

cimbineus

[hunyadi]

I still dont buy that one enough - the badge with an original Rakosi coat of arms would fetch probably five times what I paid for this one. If these are being reporduced then why are they not flooding the market? The demand is high. I would have expected to have seen at least three or more on Vatera or even Ebay over the past few years - but I have not seen any... or have I been missing them all???

I still think this was a State Mint prototype - or produced badge but was sold off in the 1990's.

[cimbineus]

I still dont buy that one enough - the badge with an original Rakosi coat of arms would fetch probably five times what I paid for this one. If these are being reporduced then why are they not flooding the market? The demand is high. I would have expected to have seen at least three or more on Vatera or even Ebay over the past few years - but I have not seen any... or have I been missing them all???

I still think this was a State Mint prototype - or produced badge but was sold off in the 1990's.

hunyadi,

Please, do not take it personally. I do not argue with you and I have no intention to convince you. My only intention was to help you and others who collect Hungarian medals and badges by sharing with you my opinion. I tried to protect you Gents from a possible disappointment.

In literature I have met just two serious and reliable mentioning of this badge. There was nothing about reconnaissance and paratroopers and this kind of mystified things. This badge was what the inscription says: "EXCELLENT PLATOON" and was awarded to platoon leaders before 1957 with the '49 coat of arms on it.

The badge with the '57 coat of arms has no credibility amongst specialists in Hungary, that is why you can meet those badges not too often, but time to time appears a new "fortune hunter" who tries to place these badges on domestic and foreign auction sites to sell them for beginners or abroad. Sometimes on those sites you can meet fantasy medals too which never existed even as a "prototype"…

Regards,

cimbineus

[cimbineus]

.

This was the badge of excellence for the reconnaissance troops and paratroopers between 1950 and 1956 and it was identical for soldiers, NCOs and officers:

Regards,

cimbineus

[cimbineus]

.

...and the back:

[hunyadi]

I do understand and I am not taking it personally - I just dont see any profit for modifying a perfectly good "broken" (IE missing the Rakosi coat of arms) Excellent Platton Leaders Badge with using a coat of arms from 1957. The size of the coat of arms that is needed is one from the Order of the Red Star. I have no doubt that the State Mint probably sold little baggies of these particualr size coats of arms back in the 1990's. Perhaps the individuals making these badges actually took apart an Order of the Red Star and then affixed the coat of arms. Either way - when I purchased this badge back in 2007 the price was just above that of a cased Order of the Red Star 1957 version. So where was the profit in this? Selling it as a pre 1957 piece with the coat of arms missing would have turned a much larger profit at auction or even the shows. I bought it becasue it was different and I bought alot of items that would certainly be odd and differet simply because they were probably in my mind prototypes because making fakes or fantasy items at the time would bave been and still would be plainly unprofitable for the effort and time involved. The transition period after the revolution certaly left the State Mint, the Party and the desigeners with a quandry of what the next phase of the image of the HUPR was to be - prototypes of old badges with new symbolism I dont think should be cast off as "unlikely" unless there is clear documentation from the State Mint that this never happened. Not being a Hungarian, I cant get any of that documentation from the archives.

But you are probably right - as the collecting field is - with just a few experts when they all say its a fake its a fake no matter what. The economic logic (which is all the fakers work off of) still makes not sense to me that this is a fantasy badge...