Some GDR to wet your appetite

[Frank Heukemes]

Here are three medals to maybe wet your appetite for collecting GDR. Honestly, most of them are ugly mofos but you have to love them for just being that:

Medal for "Treue Dienste in den Kampfgruppen der Arbeiterklasse", 10 years, Bronze. It is quite common.


Now a quite valuable and rare one: "Vaterländischer Verdienstorden in Gold". This thingie is the second highest order of the GDR!

Also one of the rarer ones: "Medaille für Verdienste im Brandschutz":


Cheers, Frank

[Adam H]

ugly is the best possible way!

Hi Frank,

Thanks for sharing, those are some interesting pieces! I'll have to pick up one or more of the books Bastian suggested and keep my eye out locally for some choice bits.

These DDR awards smack of the cheapo Russian awards pumped out in the post war era...in design and construction. It's too bad they did not retain the quality and beauty of their pre-war ancestors.

Methinks I should have bought in quantity when I lived in Germany in the late 1980s-early 1990s. I got my first militaria items there when my dad came back from visiting Berlin (we lived in Lahr, in die naehe von Freiburg, im schoene Schwarzwald) He brought me a DDR officer's visor cap and a steel helmet...I still have them to this day, still pretty worthless but nice keepsakes all the same!

The only other item I got when I was there was a 10 pfennig coin from 1942. My friends and I used to explore the old bunkers near the French border, one day we did some digging and I unearthed this old coin. Terrible condition...but at the time (I was about 13) it seemed the coolest thing in the world.

Cheers,

Adam

[Frank Heukemes]

Hi Adam,

Anybody who wants to collect these needs to hurry up. While the majority is still cheap (like the top medal I pictured), the one in the middle is USD 200.- and the one at the bottom already USD 100.-. People do start collecting these. Since I made up my mind and now collect everything that says award and German on it, I am also a GDR victim now. Hope I am not considered to be an "accumulateur" now, as I read in one post here! But I like to have lots of stuff in my collection as long as it is original. And as you can see, I also have a heart for the ugly and worthless stuff now. Man, you should see the cases of the regular awards: See-through-plastic with a piss yellow foam inlet. The good thing is, as you can see in my pictures, I got all of mine cased together with the "Feldspange".

Btw, the books that Bas suggested are THE books to get.

Cheers, Frank

[DaveM]

awards seem cheap

Hi Frank + Adam,
the trinket quality of DDR awards, I think is a great reflection of the politically bankrupt society they represented....I too collect some DDR stuff and the very "ersatzness" I find interesting...paper ribbon bars et al.
cheers,
Dave

[Rick Research]

The paper ribbon bars of the DDR are right up there... but without any doubt, The Crappiest Awards Ever Devised are those of North Vietnam. Hands down "winners."

They generally make the lead-cast-in-garages Third Reich fakes of the 1960s look GOOD.

Frank is right about DDR stuff--there used to be a dealer down south when I first started in Soviet stuff, just after Reunification: 5 or 6 years ago you could get complete unissued uniforms, down to all the stuff like underwear and shoes, all insignia, caps, overcoats, everything. They have now gone out of business: it is ALL gone.

Awards are in a similar situation to what happened with GOOD old Soviet stuff (not the endless modern "jubilee" crap).

Enjoy the "Golden Age" when stuff is still around, treasures are mixed in with junk (If you have your Reference Books!!!), and you can "load up."

Because I am sure the DDR "wooly mammoths" will--very, very soon, be just as "extinct" as all the top CHEAP Soviet stuff.