Para Helmet

[Hugh Zillmann old]

Hello Gordon,

I have one of these in my collection. It's identical to the one photographed at the start of the thread. No markings in it, save for a size stamp ("58", I think).
I bought mine from Mitchells Disposals in Melbourne in 1986. It cost me Aus$80, which was not cheap at the time but.......just look at it!
I was at a conference at the time. When I got back to my home in Brisbane, I told my "collecting friends" about it. Upshot? Another four (4) were purchased. One of my friends still has his, the others were sold long ago. If I have time, I'll photograph mine and send the images to you.
As to present price? No idea, but in 1986 Aus$80 could buy a reasonable quality TR schirmutze. Maybe, given rarity, etc. these would command a good price today.

All the best,

Hugh

[Gordon Craig]

Hugh,

Thanks for your input. This might give David some idea of what to ask as a sale price. At least to start. Looking forward to your pictures.

Regards,

Gordon

[Klaus1989]

IE in as new condition so I think that very few were ever issued for wear as a trial helmet.

Strangely for Versuchshelme, some of these helmets were issued. There are photos from late 1950s of entire Fallschirmjäger units wearing these helmets. Because Stahlhelm 1A1LL (M1-style FJ helmet) was not adopted until around 1961, this was only helmet they had to wear before then.

regards
Klaus

[Gordon Craig]

Klaus,

I have wondered about the fact that those that have turned up for sale were in such good condition. I don't remember if mine is marked or not but Hugh says his has no markings at all. Also very strange for a versuchshelme. Another thought is why blue? I have a number of pieces of BW clothing marked for Truppenversuche and I would have expected to see the helmets marked the same way. I vaguley remember seeing a picture several years ago with BW paratroopers wearing both blue and brown helmets at the same time but I am not sure of that.
Baer, in his volume II, gives several pages of coverage to the different helmets tried out for the LL Truppe before the American style was finally chosen. I'll try and reduce it to a reasonable length and then post what I put together.

Regards,

Gordon

[Klaus1989]

I am not saying it is not Versuchshelm, but it appears that the "M38" style FJ helmets were popular and tested more extensively than everything else except the M1 derivative. There are photos of them in use for field exercises and even a pararde. Before about 1961, they appear almost standard for FJ in photos. Maybe before they used them also as temporary helmet until they decided what model to produce.

The West German-production two-piece M1 copies are also somewhat blue colour, so that is not strange - it is colour Bw used for helmets in 1950s. Why, have no idea...

regards
Klaus

[Guardian 5]

Klaus,

I have wondered about the fact that those that have turned up for sale were in such good condition. I don't remember if mine is marked or not but Hugh says his has no markings at all. Also very strange for a versuchshelme. Another thought is why blue? I have a number of pieces of BW clothing marked for Truppenversuche and I would have expected to see the helmets marked the same way. I vaguley remember seeing a picture several years ago with BW paratroopers wearing both blue and brown helmets at the same time but I am not sure of that.
Baer, in his volume II, gives several pages of coverage to the different helmets tried out for the LL Truppe before the American style was finally chosen. I'll try and reduce it to a reasonable length and then post what I put together.

Regards,

Gordon

Gordon - That is my all-time favorite Bundeswehr picture.

Hey, I just had an idea for a new thread......

TJ

[David Fettes]

The main thing that I have noticed while viewing photos of BW Fallschirmjäger is the bolts for the lining. The photo that Thomas posted shows slotted bolts and the one from Gordon shows a totally different type of liner fixing altogether. The really early types of helmets seem to have a spanner bolt arrangement similar to the TR style. Just a thought.

[Asbjoern]

Don´t forget the following aspects on early BW:

The capacity for the production of military goods to equip the new formed BW was limited - such companies where closed down after the war or went into civil marked and there was the "Wirtschaftswunder" with steadily increasing demand on any kind on civil products. So there often is more then one firm which manufactured a specific item without the controll of a good working procurement organisation.

This was complicated by the fact that there was a constand change in the equipment ... the first 5 years are like a 5 year "Truppenversuch". Beside mayor changes - seen on the canteens or the folding spade - there may have been little improvements even between smaller batches of equipment.

Then many items came with the men from the BGS.

Especially the airborne where a little special branch. Often seen on photographs, but they wherent so much people ... so real mass production wasn`t necesarry for their stuff!

And for the question "why such stuff ist found in mint condition": don`t forget that even in this initial phase stock was spread over germany and europe as reserve for the great war !! Most of the old stuff was used up, but some boxes or containers where lost until the 80ies ore later... in the late 90ies fore example unused splinter-camo gloves came to collectors marked. It was sayed that they "where found" in a Nato depot in Italy...

Regards,

Jens

[Gene T]

I'm reviving this older thread to get some input on the helmet below, which I picked up this morning.




My initial impression upon seeing this helmet was that it was a twin of David's. Then I noticed that it's olive green, not blue gray. It also doesn't have the brow curvature at the front (therefore it would sit flush on a flat surface, like a British helmet). It uses two types of bolts to hold the liner and straps in place. And most notably, the two half-panels of the leather liner are sagittally sewn, not coronally, as is normally the case.

The seller got this helmet as part of a trade and really didn't know anything about it. The vendor at the next table thought that the liner was likely a repro. Since the only other saggitally-sewn liner I have seen to date is the one that came inside a Chinese-made M38 repro that "HongKong Keith" sold on eBay some years ago, I tended to agree with him.

However, after taking this thing apart and looking at it more closely, I am not so sure that it's a repro anymore.




First, the calfskin-like leather liner has exactly the same texture as the leather liners in some BRD police helmets that I have. The straps too, are close (but not exact) matches of the ones found on the M-1971 FJ helmets (see panel A).

The aluminum liner frame is rather crudely made (see panel B), but it's not as rough as the one found on Keith's repro. The frame is riveted (rather than sewn) to a plastic liner band, with a layer of rubber foam sandwiched in between. A strip of (red) felt fills the gap between the plastic band and the leather panels (see panel C), giving the latter a much softer look (and feel) around its edge than is common for this type of liners.

The chin-straps are secured to the liner frame and shell via spanner bolts (see panel D, green arrows), while the neck straps are attached via slotted bolts and matching heavy-duty nuts (blue arrows) - similar to the ones used on M-1971 helmets. The spanner bolts differ in size to the ones installed on Keith's repro.

Lastly, I strongly suspect the liner half-panels in this helmet are dimensionally identical to the ones in David's helmet, and were molded on the same form, and cut using the same dies. The reasons for my suspicion are twofold.

First, while David's liner looks nice and smooth, mine is distorted, with a lot of "ripples" in the crown area and zones under tension on the sides (see Panel E). This can happen if a liner was shaped during manufacture to have coronal sutures when installed, but was then rotated 90 degrees and installed to produce sagittal sutures instead. Since the helmet is an ovoid, forcing the liner into the shell "sideways" would compress the liner in the horizontal axis while stretching it in the longitudinal axis, resulting in distortions. The exact same effect can be seen in those "corrected" Keith helmets, in which the owners had tried to reproduce the "authentic" coronal sutures by re-orienting Keith's sagitally pre-shaped liner.

Second, I've noticed that the liners in both David's helmet and mine are assembled using two identical half-panels, i.e., the positions of the two large holes are the same on the front and back half-panels of David's helmet, and left and right half-panels on mine (see Panel E, green arrows). This is a significant departure from wartime M38 helmets, where the large holes are positioned laterally on the front half-panel (in order to facilitate access to the chin strap nuts). In other words, both David's liner and mine appear to have been assembled using two M38 rear half-panels. Since his is installed coronally, access to the two neck strap nuts is unimpeded, because the large holes are where they should be. However, access to the chin strap nuts is no longer helped by the location of the large holes, which are not where the M38 designers intended them to be. In the case of my own helmet, the exact opposite is true - due to the 90 degree rotation of the same liner.

Interestingly, Keith appears to have paid attention to this detail when he made his otherwise 'not-even-close' sagittal liner. Unlike the designers responsible for David's helmet and mine, Keith put the four large holes where they were supposed to be - next to the four nuts. This created a problem for the "restorer" however, as the rotated liner no longer had left-right symmetry...

Finally, my helmet is unmarked save for the size stamp (in a font that very much resembles the one seen on David's liner), just like the other helmets mentioned in this thread.

Given what Jens, Klaus and others have already said on this topic, I am leaning towards this being another variant of the many FJ-type helmets trialed by the BW during this interesting period. To my eyes, It is simply too different from the M38 to be a repro, not that I have seen all the repros out there.

How far off am I?


Thanks for your patience!

Gene T

[Guardian 5]

Gene T - How's the heft? I've heard the M-38 repros are made with a "soft" steel. Would you feel comfortable jumping out of a perfectly good airplane wearing this pot?

I took a quick look through Baer's Vom Stahlhelm zum Gefechtshelm, but couldn't find the exact match to your example. The fact that it sits flush on a flat surface seems to be the main characteristic that separates your example from those Baer includes in his book. Does anyone else see it differently?

As always, I appreciate the painstaking analysis that accompanies your posts. You're certainly not one for hip shots. I look forward to seeing what others have to say about this great looking lid.

All the best - TJ

[Collectinsteve]

Thanks to China I automatically suspect anything that looks new or has a good size to it. Which stinks because I don't know enough to tell the difference between them

In fact, I saw one at a surplus shop today. I think STURM distributes at least one version of these helmets.

Steve

[Hugh Zillmann old]

Hello Gentlemen,

I think this could be 'the real thing'.

If one looks at the helmet depicted photographically in post #13, it appears to have the same 'steep' front as the one depicted by Gene T.

Also, I had a close look at the lining and straps on mine (which I apologize for not supplying photos of earlier, as I promised) and they appear to be identical to those on Gene T's. I bought my helmet in 1986, when they weren't (to my knowledge) building repros of these, so I believe it to be genuine BW issue.

My thoughts.

All the best,

Hugh

P.S. If it's not too inconvenient, Gordon, I'll send some 'happy snaps' of my helm to you, so you can determine whether or not it adds to the scholarship of this thread.

[Gene T]

Thanks for the input, Gentlemen!

TJ, My helmet weighs roughly 1.35 kg (3 lbs) complete, and according to my trusty little micrometer, the shell is about 0.055" (1.4 mm) thick (measured in several spots around the rim). As Baer pointed out in his book, trial helmets of this type, when furnished with large-sized liners, tended to have negligible foam padding around the liner band, resulting in dubious impact absorption qualities. As is readily apparent in the photos I posted, this example has even less padding than David's (probably due to differences in shell dimensions - on my helmet, the external circumference of the shell just above the flare line is roughly 69.5 cm). So no, I don't think this thing would significantly reduce the chances of my getting a concussion if I were to land head first onto a rock. However, I suspect it would do no worse a job of keeping my skull from being cracked open than any other steel helmet (either due to jump-related impact or flying shrapnel). Not that I can measure the V50 value of the steel by simply bouncing this thing in my hand while visualizing the impact scenarios. At least not with any degree of confidence.

Steve, This is one reason I decided to buy a Keith helmet: for reference! Other than the sagittal suture, there is really nothing in common between this helmet and the Keith repro. Interestingly, the Keith repro is made from a heavier gauge steel (averaging 0.062" around the rim, or 1.57 mm, almost as thick as the DDR M56 helmets I've measured). The various leathers used in the Keith repro don't resemble anything found in original German headgears.

Hugh, I'd love to see some pictures of your helmet!

When I saw no response to my post, I figured that either I posted a really obvious repro, thus demonstrating my embarrassing lack of basic knowledge and appalling Internet search skills, or it was something rather unusual. If Hugh's helmet turns out to be a twin of mine, then the odds of mine being the "real thing" would indeed be doubled, instantly.


Thanks again!

Gene T

P.S., When I wrote that my helmet had no brow curvature, I may have exaggerated it just a little. There is a minuscule curvature, and even a hint of a 'peak' in the middle. These details are visible if the helmet is placed on top of a perfectly flat surface, such as a glass table. They are so subtle (but probably not accidental, as there is left-right symmetry) that you can't help but to wonder: Why in the world did they even bother?

[Gordon Craig]

Hello Gentlemen,

I think this could be 'the real thing'.

If one looks at the helmet depicted photographically in post #13, it appears to have the same 'steep' front as the one depicted by Gene T.

Also, I had a close look at the lining and straps on mine (which I apologize for not supplying photos of earlier, as I promised) and they appear to be identical to those on Gene T's. I bought my helmet in 1986, when they weren't (to my knowledge) building repros of these, so I believe it to be genuine BW issue.

My thoughts.

All the best,

Hugh

P.S. If it's not too inconvenient, Gordon, I'll send some 'happy snaps' of my helm to you, so you can determine whether or not it adds to the scholarship of this thread.

Hugh,

Sorry for taking a while to respond to your request. My ISP has been having email server problems. Please feel free to send pictures at any time without asking for permission.

Gene T,

Brown helmets are normal. Some helmets were isued and painted brown and used in FJ training. I have one in my collection. It was originally blue and then painted brown. It has a rough surface which was probably produced by adding sand or some other gritty material to the helmet during painting. An old WWII tactic. I'll try to find some time to day to compare my two helmets with yours. One thing I did notice, as Hugh says, the chin straps look to be exaclty the same as those used on these early FJ trial helmets.

Regards,

Gordon

[Hugh Zillmann old]

Hello Gordon,

I always think it courteous to ask before 'bombarding' someone with large email traffic. Thanks, however, for the warm invitation.

We are currently in the middle of an audit, so I think I won't be in a position to send anything until next week. I also think that I have another BW chinstrap assembly 'hiding' in a box, so I'll see if I can dig that out to be photographed as well.

Don't you just love this hobby. So esoteric! Grown men getting exited over old helmets and chinstraps! No wonder my Wife looks at me oddly some times!

Cheers,

Hugh