Official State Property of the 3rd Reich and other WW2 Things....Question??

[Ash]

I was watching American Beauty.

In one scene, Ricky (the neighbor) shows Jane a plate with the Swastika on the bottom.

He states that there is a whole subculture of people who collect that Nazi s**t.

My uncle Jerry has a Nazi helmet and a Japanese rifle.

These were given to him by his father and his uncle who took them from the men they killed in that war.

He also has a small Japanese flag of the rising sun on it.  
You can still see the bloodstains.  (they have faded to a dull brown)
He told me that his father took it (the flag & rifle) from the dead man right after he shot him.
He also has a black and white photograph of the Japanese man his father killed and his family .  
There were 4 of them in that picture.  
The Japanese man, his wife and 2 children.

He told me the story of how and where (Tarawa) his father shot him and took these items from his dead body.

He also told me the stories his father told him of how he still thinks of that man from time to time and where he might be if he had lived.


My question for you is this:

Do any of you or your fathers or uncles have any original things (maybe collected from your grandfathers) from World War 2?

[Dano]

I have a cane my grand dad took from a Japanese soldier who was in a special unit where all the soldiers were six feet or taller.  The Japanese thought these guys would be really intimidating if they put them all in one unit.

Fact check: You say the picture is of a dead Japanese soldier and his civilian family?  I believe the Japanese garrison at Tarawa was entirely military.  Maybe it was Okinawa.

[Ash]

I don't know.
I thought he said it was from Tarawa.  
After all, don't most soldiers carry a photograph of either their wives or family regardless of nationality or where they were stationed?
It was several years ago that he showed these things to me.

I think I'll call him today and find out for sure.

I'll let you know.

[Ash]

I called him and he said the rifle his father took was from was from the Phillipines , not Tarawa.

The rifle was so shoddily made that it had a tin plate over the breach to keep it from blowing up in the face of the user.  
The stock is cracked as well.

The Japanese mass produced them like that because they were so short of money and supplies at the time.

[Dano]

After all, don't most soldiers carry a photograph of either their wives or family regardless of nationality or where they were stationed?

*****  Oh - I'm sorry ASH, I misread your statement.  I thought the guy took a picture of the dead Japanese soldier.  Never mind.

[Ash]

No problem Dano.
 I can easily see how my statement could've been misinterpreted.

Does anyone else have any interesting stories of this nature?

While on the subject, I think I'll pop in "Band of Brothers".

I feel like watching a little comaraderie(did I spell that right?) and carnage.

[Chadzilla]

ASHTHECAT wrote:
>
>
> In one scene, Ricky (the neighbor) shows Jane a plate with
> the Swastika on the bottom.
>
> He states that there is a whole subculture of people who
> collect that Nazi s**t.
>


Well yes, there is.  I don't know about it being a 'subculture' - Neo-Nazi, now THAT could be considered a subculture, but the collecting of historical artifacts from a history making regime, especially a notorious one, yes.  There is BIG money to be made there (especially since a lot of Nazi stuff was destroyed during the bombings, or so I think, I might be wrong).

ebay got into hot water with France about allowing the auctioning of Nazi material from WW2.  It is illegal in France to sell such material, so ebay banned the sales of it.  Still, they were hot selling items.  I guess there is something seductive in being able to hold in your hands an actual Nazi flag that hung on some flagpole somewhere in the nightmare that was the Reich.  Holding a symbol of such an evil as that in your hands, it must give you the strangest feeling.

[Dano]

Holding a symbol of such an evil as that in your hands, it must give you the strangest feeling.
*****  If you're ever in the DC area, stop at the National Archives and check out the captured German photographs from WWII.  Stuff from the Eastern Front is insane.  One series of photos from an SS unit showed the following:

1.  A Waffen SS unit entering a Ukrainian village.
2.  SS troops searching houses and talking to the locals.
3.  One SS soldier standing in the doorway of a house holding out a bunch of German uniform insignias he found in the house.
4.  A group of villagers being loaded into a truck carrying shovels.
5.  The villagers under armed guard digging up a grave that had the bodies of German soldiers in it.
6.  The villagers bagging the dead Germans and loading them into the truck.
7.  The truck heading back into the village with the bodies of the Germans and the shovels the villagers were carrying... and no villagers.

Those photos were the most frightening things I ever held.  It was like watching a crime.  Well, it was basically.

[Neville]

In many countries of Europe it is banned to sell this kind of memorabilia. Guess it brings too many bad memories. In Spain we had a civil war which was sort of a prelude of WWII (lasted from 1936 to 1939, when General Franco took power), and it is much easier to collect things from that event. My father had a hand grenade many years ago. He had picked it from the floor when he was a child and played on the outskirts of his village. Told me rifle bullets were also easy to find back then.

Finally he gave the hand grenade to a collector, and I am happy he did. I mean, it was live ammo and not a thing to keep at home. Every year at least a couple of collectors get killed. It uses to happen when they try to dig out bombs and cannon shells buried at the rivers' shore. You know, they look all rusty and harmless now, but the explosives are still there, and when they try to deactivate them themselves... well, you can imagine. Those jerks won't even call the bomb squad, because common practise in these cases is to make them explode from a safe distance.

[wheresthecarrot]

When my grandpa was digging through his old army stuff to find me a suitable backpack, he found his old field jacket...he put it on, and when he reached into the pocket, he found a swastika pin that he had ripped off a Nazi uniform....It was amazing to watch my grandfather's face as he relived that memory....he then threw the pin to the ground and smashed it with a hammer until it was completely unrecognizable....sure, it was prolly worth a lot of money, but for him, that wasn't the point.  "By allowing people to keep stuff like that in their private homes," he said, "who knows what kind of demons you my be breeding?"  It was a very profoud statement that has stuck with me, long after his death.

I still have the backpack, but I don't wear it much.  It gives me a creepy feeling to know that my "pap" used it to carry ammo around for the purpose of killing people, even if they were Nazis....

[peter johnson]

Geez, more than you can imagine . . .
I happen to know a great number of collectors and folk who lived through the era in question who have scads of stuff like that.  I won't go on forever, but I will hit some major ones here:
My uncle, father's side, was a corpsman in Belgium, and was swept up in The Battle of The Bulge.  He went on as far as Munich before being mustered out.  He has knives, flags, cutlery with swastikas in the handles, etc. etc.  One flag he has was painted onto burlap, for the previously stated reason that the war was going badly towards the end & the Germans didn't have good cloth to print the flags on.
I still have pretty much all my father's stuff (Naval Air/Helldiver pilot), including all his official papers, oxygen mask, 3 flight helments, goggles, leather jacket, dress uniforms, etc. etc.  These will be passed on to my sister's kids & will eventually end up in a museum, no doubt.
My friends in Germany have commemorative medals from Stalingrad, medals given for contributions to the Reich, a copy of Mein Kampf given to them on their wedding day by the functionary who performed the ceremony, pics of their family in uniform, etc. etc. etc.
I guess I'm pretty lucky in that I've been privvy to some items from private collections that you never see in museums and are even difficult to find in the history books.  All this stuff will make its way to historical archives someday, but in the meantime I count myself lucky to have seen and been told of some things firsthand by those who were actually there.
peter johnson