Everytime I go to a gun show the nazi stuff is always selling.
what is it about this stuff that causes the high price? on the news they said the uniform (practically perfect) was a uniform of a nazi SS man and they said it was worth 7 thousand dollars, how could it be worth that much money? was the lady on the news wrong?

on the same topic I have a vietnam flak jacket the type with the hardened steel plates you got any idea about how much its worth?

I dad has a photo of my granddad in a Nazi uniform. I'm not sure if it was a SS uniform or not.

Talking about Veitnam stuff, what about a Veit cong knife? It is about a foot long and has a bamboo scaberd for it. It kind of shaped like a gurka. Is it worth much?

A friend of mine recently got 3 grand for an SS officer's cap.
Some people collect that stuff and others like to strut around in it.
Maybe naked except for the cap.

Reality check: there are a lot of nutbars out there. Nutbars with money. [rolleyes]

If one was in the SS, esp. an officer, in ANY arm of the SS, said person was a committed, dyed-in-the-wool Nazi. They would have rather died horribly, than, say, undergone a blood transfusion from A Jew. We in the West saw the Hollywood version of the noble German SS soldier; everybody else in Europe saw his true face, that of a psychopathic murderer. I literally wouldn't be caught dead with SS gear on me or in my house.

I knew too many people growing up in Germany who had suffered horribly at the hands of the SS, to entertain any notions of them being admirable warriors.

You think Nazi stuff is expensive look at CSA  stuff sometime.

Some of that stuff is so rare and valuable you can dam near buy small south American countries with them.

A lot of people collect Nazi crap. High demand, no supply since 1945 = high prices.

I still have my dad's stuff, that he brought back from the war.
A visiting contractor saw my dad's German helmet and offered $300 on the spot. And that was in 1983.

I saw somewhere that approx. 50% of collectors of nazi items were Jewish.

Source? Otherwise, I'd have to call [BS]....

No supply of the real deal, yes.  A lot of the Nazi stuff has been repro'd &/or faked.  Take a Spanish helmet, paint it the proper color & add SS decals, then bury it in your backyard for a while....then sell it at the gunshow to some dipshit skinhead as the real thing for $$$$$$.  

From google:

http://www.jewishsf.com/bk980320/etlure.htm
In fact, Jews are among the foremost collectors of Nazi signatures, according to Alexander Panagopulos of Alexander Autographs.


http://www.swastika.com/holocaust.html
The following article appeared in the December 25, 2000 edition of Forbes magazine in a special section dealing with investments::

In his book 'Selling Hitler' - which deals with the events surrounding the Hitler diary forgeries - the author, Robert Harris, writes: 'It has been estimated that there are 50,000 collectors of Nazi memorabilia throughout the world, of whom most are Americans, involved in a business which is said to have an annual turnover of $50-million. Prices increase 20 percent a year....In the States, according to Charles Hamilton (a leading dealer), 'the collectors of Hitler memorabilia are 40 percent Jewish, 50 percent old soldiers, and 10 percent of them are young....'

The *stuff* might be worth some money, but actual Nazis, and the wannabes that emerge from the slime every so often are completely worthless.

I understand they have quite a collection of Nazi stuff here:



[url]http://www.ushmm.org/[/url]

Because it is a piece of history!  And anything German made, especially before and durring the first part of WWII is of the highest quality.  So why wouldnt there be a market of it?

WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!
Thanks. I hate myself now.
Entire vet bring-back uniforms(Old vets sell em usually), including helmets and all kinds of medals etc.. were sold at dirt cheap prices at this one place I was when I went to ukraine.
Don't know if I'll ever be going back.

I knew I should have put down the $100 for a complete general uniform (EVERYTHING, perfect condition, original, medals and all)
I think ill be calling my grandma shortly as shell be coming here for a couple weeks in the near future.


Now I feel like a goddamn idiot for passing this up.

Edit: anyone know the prices on Medals(Incl. Iron Cross's), and SS/Gestapo and Storm Trooper helmets? What about those little black daggers with 'Wales fur Deutchland" written on em(All real, brought back by soldiers)?

Sad.

But, thanks- I stand corrected.

I sell 1/6th action figures in a variety of different countries at a flea market.

People LOVE the WW2 German stuff.

If I told you guys how much I sell of the German and SS stuff in a single sunday you would probably crap.And these are toys for crying out loud.

The funny part is that 95% of my regular clientele are professional men and not some skanky "88's"

The reason nazi items are worth so much is because the market is always growing yet the items get rarer and rarer as collectors take items out of circulation for personal ownership.

i bought a pair of silver ww2 bombardiers wings at a gunshow for around $30-40 and sold them for $80 a year later on ebay.  i have 3 sets of wings that were my grandfathers and some other stuff that i would never sell.

i know a big german collector and that's who i have check out my small items for authenticity.  i don't have much, an armband, HJ belt buckle and some collar tabs.  i'd like a helmet but i'm too cheap to spend the $275 and up they go for around here.  

none of my stuff is on display, although i plan on some of it with my K98's when i get a nice gun cabinet.  it won't be out in the open though.  don't want people thinking i'm a nazi.

Cool.
BTW, the stuff I was looking at WAS real. Mostly old people selling it off in the flee market, Lots of stuff there that way. I was really eyeing a bunch of medals, and a uniform.
Some of the guys were selling their own uniforms as well (Any price on a Soviet uniform? Not a conscript, but a Leutenant or Admiral?) Saw a few rusty weapons, but I wouldnt even bother bringing em here (Rusty StG42 would make a great project IMHO)

BTW, anyone know the prices one can expect to see outside of ebay on things like turn of the century cameras, and other 'technical' things from back then? Saw an old clock, wood was cracked and worn, mechanism ran great condition. Looked early 19th century at latest, on sale for $200 (BTW, people over there are relatively dirt poor, and a couple hundred bucks is a decent monthly wage).

This thread really slays me.  I always thought that the kind of people who slam collectors of WWII German militaria were the same kind that slam gun owners/collectors.  I see differently now.  As if merely owning a nazi uniform, hitler youth dagger, etc... somehow made a person evil or deranged.  What a load of absolute horseshit!  Thats like saying if you own a Bushmaster rifle you are evil and deranged like the DC snipers...come on guys!!!  I have my degree in histroy and concentrated on WWII.  Collecting militaria is a hobby of mine (I mostly collect U.S. recruiting and propaganda posters) and yes, I have nazi stuff...and if this was Dec. 7, 1941 I'd be first in line at the recruiting office tomorrow morning begging for the chance to get Hitler in my crosshairs.  I have a friend who collects uniforms and would have died to pay $7,000 for that SS uniform, he's got a Luftwaffe officers HAT that he paid almost $4,000 for!  I mostly collect US stuff and am in the process right now of putting together a 101st Airborne sergeants D-Day uniform.  Its a lot of fun, but cuts into my gun/fly-fishing budget a bit!  Nazi collectors, by and large are normal people who would oppose anything remotely resembling the Third Reich.  For sure there are some real nut jobs out there, and I can tell you with certainty that no nazi skinhead would pay big bucks for a helmet... it would cut into his/her beer money...

There was a guy in Santa Monica who put his collection on display ($4 to get in), and he had stuff that was unbelievably hard to find; Napoleonic-era uniforms (complete-and in near perfect condition), etc. This guy had spent [b]millions[/b] on his collection.

[BS2]  That is so wrong I don't even know where to start.

Who got drafted into the SS? Wasn't Nazi party membership an absolute prerequisite for being in the SS? And when do we make nice neat divisons of the SS into nice guys and bad guys?

Read about the activities of the SS on the Eastern Front and speak with people who lived through their deeds, on the receiving end. That was the reality of the SS, both the Waffen-SS and the Allgemeine-SS. I have, and grew up in Europe, Germany specifically, went to German schools and university, worked and lived in Germany for several years, and met a lot of such people, on both ends. I did not live in the safely insulated world of the GI dependent, who reads about the German Army's battle tales, and gets a noble picture of the Nazi opponent from WW2 movies. You guys have a very filtered view of what Naziism was really about. There was NO nobility to this cause whatsoever. If foreigners joined, they were either deluded into thinking they would be eliminating godless Communism (and replacing one dictatorship with another) or fully agreed with Naziism and its BS ideas about racial purity and German superiority.

Another thing just came to mind about the Waffen-SS: once in a while they forgot to be "nice" (relatively speaking) to the Americans and Brits, and their true, ignoble colors came out.

One word: Malmedy.

I HAVE A SHIT LOAD OF NAZI WWII STAMPS WITH PICS OF THAT A HOLE ADOLF. AND A LOAD OF STALIN STAMPS TOO ANYBODY GOT A VALUE FOR ME?

Garnad_Shooter put it very well, but since I started this arguement I will join back in.

First of all, party meambership was not a requirement.  Many early members were, but the numbers became so small by the end of the war as to be near zero, most early members who somehow survived.  Most accounts show that the few party members there were in the units were hated quite badly.

New research had found so many new Waffen SS formations from so amny different countries in Europe I could not list them all on one page.

Out of the 40 Waffen SS divisions, only a few account for much of what you speak.

Yes there were massacres.  Some were argueably justifiable by the time period and what lead up to them, but they were still bad never the less.

The Waffen SS role in Russia was so far and away different from traditional soldiering than most can inagine.  The conditions there just created its own monster.

On the Eastern front, everyone was trying to kill everyone all the time. If there was a dead body along side the road, a driver would go out of his way to run over it.

Now take these men and place them against the "more civilized American and British" who were leveling their cities and commiting genocide against their cilvilians (in the soldiers point of view) it was impossible for them to just turn off the switch in their brain that had kept them alive in the east.  They were still fighting the more savage war.  This was not a case of their "true colors", it is a simple case of battle stress.  Yes it was bad, but American propaganda would have you beleive that the Americans were playing nice and were sweet innocent soldiers fighting a clean war.  They weren't they were soldiers doing soldiers work, and the Germans knew that.

The German activities on the easternfront are hard to doccument.  Everymassacre will never be doccumented with any certanty as the Russians can not be counted on.  In any event, if you look at what was going on, you will see that the Russians intentonally created conditions for large scale massacres.  This was to lower military losses, and for propaganda reasons. The Russians are more to blame for their 71 million dead than the Germans becuase of their tactics, and total disregard for life.  there are ever increasing accounts of the eastern front, you should read one.

As for breaking up the Agemeine SS and the Waffen SS into two groups, yes, you have to.  Not to do so is argueing false information.  There was a difference, they did have completely different roles. read your history.

IF there were foreigners in the Waffen SS???

There were more foreigners than Germans. Their records show what their belifs were and what they thought they were going to get out of it.  Again, read some history.

I an Austrian, my grandfather fought for the Germans because he had to.  Now when I talk to Austrians about the war, I get the same rosey eyed overly PC information you have gotten.  When You get the right people alone when they know they can talk, they will tell you waht really happend.

My grandfather hated the Nazis, he only fought because he had too, but fought well and was well decorated. Why, for the same reason everyone else did, to destory the communist, and because you had a better chance of living at the front than you did by saying NO, or  living in town.

You are sadly mis-informed on the war, the politics, and the reality of the history of WWII regarding the Germans and the SS / Waffen SS.

WTF does nobility have to do with anything?  This is war, not knights in shining armor in a fairy tale.

I thought SS units also include Christianns, and also Muslim SS unit(s). Wasn't there also a connection wth Tibet or Neplal?

There were several Croatioan, Albaninan and "fee" Indian legions as well as Swede, Norwegan, Danish, French, Swiss, British (commonwealth), Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Romanian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Austrian, and a few other obscure ones I can't think of right off the top of my head.

Is that a crack?

You beat me to it. I must have missed pressing submit or my connection died or something. I know a jew that bought anything authentic, and he burned it/melted it down. He has gotten a talking to(read:threat to his well-being) from me, and has since stopped his appauling disrespect for a group of people who mainly were good people with the exceptions of a few. He still dislikes the fact that I can still make the point that the jews are far more evil than the "nazis".

I have some Nazi stuff I *might* be willing to sell. It was brought back from WW2 by a friend of my dad's, who was in an engineering unit that fought in the Battle of the Bulge:

1) Volkstrum armband
2) gas mask, complete with container, filters, etc.
3) small filed jacket with most insignia removed, including ampulets (I believe that the eagle & swastika is still there).

I also have two Geman medals, one from WW2 and the other I think from WW1. I believe that the WW1 medal was brought back by a relative, so I'm inclined to keep it . . .

Since most of the stuff out there is fake anyway, all they are doing is making the Japanese and Pakistanis rich.



Who said a thing about them being noble.  I pointed out several times that they were guilty of quite a few war crimes.  Hitler was an idiot, it would be impossable to argue otherwise.  In talking with all the Gemran vets, even one who was Chief of staff of all artilery forces, only one person I know of SS or not, like Hitler.  



So, what is your point. Are you calling me a Nazi?  My interest really does no lay with the SS (Im am more into the history,weapons and tactics of the regular army), but few here have seen too many movies and don't know history.
What does my screan name mean?  What unit is that ensignia?  One of the most famous units. I'll bet you have no clue.



Ok, so you tell me why the foreign units joined up. Give me a detailed description of all 40 divisions, and 210 independant regiments.

No where will you see that I said that the Muslim units wanted to fight the communist.  

(They joined for their own reasons, to fight the Serbs.  It was an alliance of conveinece.)

The war was about more than you realize.  It was not a good war, but few really understand why it was fought.  No one ever said the Germans were nice guys.  

What he said!  I have over 300 books on the subject, would you like the names of a few good ones?

I'd guess about six million Jews.....[rolleyes]

What a GREAT idea!

Group buy anyone?

Why only the Jews? 11 million people died in those camps remember. Are the Jews more important than the rest?  I don't see a difference betwwen the life of a jew or anyone else who died there.  All were massacred just the same. All deserve equal sorrow.

Let them destroy the stuff. Without this history, they are doomed to have it repeat, and collectors like me will have more and more valuable items.  They are destroying their own history.  They should know better, and I think that most do.

That SS uniform (most likely fake or it wouldn't be at a gun show) would then be worth $10K then.  AND, you know for damn sure someone would still buy it.

Because the Gypsies, Poles, Russians,etc don't control the media....

For once we agree. I also look at USSR gear and think of all the lives that Lenin and Stalin and their henchmen murdered as well.

BUT read "Mein Kampf"- Hitler makes no bones about who he sees as the main cause of the world's troubles and as the main focus of his world plan- to rid the world of them. he didn't say outright how he'd get rid of them, but we sure saw how that turned out, didn't we? The irony of the other deaths at the hands of the Nazis was that so many Poles, Ukrainians, et al, were not exactly Judeophiles either. Anti-Semitism has a long history in Europe (AND here...). but they still died anyway, because they were against or not considered suitable for the Third Reich.



Ah- do I now I understand your interest- pecuniary above historical?

 

I'm not Jewish, but I should imagine anybody in their shoes is glad to be alive, and would like to wipe the whole memory and the latter-day fascination it engenders, off the face of the earth.

Just why is Nazi stuff so fascinating? I spent four years majoring in European history, and another three gatting an MA in modern German literature, both in Germany and in the USA, and I still can't find a single definitive answer on it. How can we blithely ignore the horror and suffering they caused, and unprecedented systematic degradation and singling out of one people, and then exterminate them like cockroaches on an assembly-line basis? How did so many Germans let themselves go along with this, and gleefully participate in it?



A fool and his money are soon parted. Me, I'll be at the Kettle Korn booth at that show, avoiding the 4th Reich types, and the overpriced ARs with the pre-ban features on the post-ban receivers. Overpriced mags, anybody?