Dachau made items.

[billbert]

Also just about certain they MADE some WH insignia there..or as said stored it there..saw dachau only 45 th vets stuff ..gorget embroidered army cap insigina..police gorget etc..

[Jody]

Dachau

Another Tab.

[Jody]

Dachau

Here is something else that came out of Dachau and was liberated from one of the SS men working there. It is a SS custom watch band and here is a close-up of the band.
Jody

[billbert]

Somewhere in the carolinas there is/was a vet/family who has a DUFFLEBAG full of dachau.. knew a dealer who made the trek..they decided NOT to sell.. .Wouldnt even sell him 1 of each to thank him for his efforts and assistance..Buy a nice house down the beach cash with that haul no doubt.....

[Donald Abenheim]

Dachau material

It is my understanding that, for instance, British soldiers were forbidden to collect souvenirs and return to Britain with them, although I have no documentary evidence of this. Plainly, Dachau was in the US zone, and I do not know of an equivalent locale of concentrated SS clothing and equipment, save in what is today the Czech Republic, that had significant material. My ex-student who is presently on US government service in the Czech republic has anecdotal evidence of Czechs making off with similar heaps of SS material in 1945 as at Dachau, but the stuff could not be openly collected in CSSR. He has operated in the Sudeten lands over the years and seen much, including the flourishing fake industry there, too. Maybe colleagues out there are aware of other locales where large scale heaps of German material survived and got scooped up, say in Norway or Czechia, Poland &c. There is some evidence that the Soviets and the Czechs accumulated caches of stuff, but it went into theater and film production. I have a wonderful black SS officer's cap from Barandov (Praha), and a nice, stripped black tunic from Lenfilm (Petersburg), both of which were unleashed in the early 1990s. One of the Fleckentarnanzuege M1944 that came from a local source (US veteran of Dachau) recently re-appeared at auction here in the Bay Area...I first saw this piece along with a coffee can of SS insignia, other Fleckentarn material, a black Pz cap, &c. &c. in the summer of 1971. I bought some and then sold it all....wie dumm von mir.

[Waffen-Mike]

Yes, no question.
Best Regards

Mike

[Gaspare]

Anyone that refuses to believe in the Dachau items insults the 100s of US vets and surviving family members that saw, brought back and recieved the items.

Of course like anything else the insignia has been reproduced, ,G.

[Bob Coleman]

US 45th Division veterans have told me about bins full of insignia made at Dachau. Over the 45+ years I have collected, many times I have encountered veterans with insignia collected at Dachau. Many years ago, I purchased two photo albums from the brother of a deceased flight suregeon who had been at Dachau. Being an amateur photographer, he documented his trip through Europe including going to Dachau. In his second album were glued in a number of pieces of SS insignia along with his pass to enter Dachau and notations that he had aquired this insignia out of a certain building he had photographed. There were also numerous loose collar tabs, arm shields and sleeve and feldmutze eagles. It was only in recent years that I have heard this inane arguement that Dachau insignia never existed. If it didn't, this is the world's greatest and most accomplished conspiracy, going back nearly 60 years involving what at the time was worthless cloth trinkets. There are still huge caches of this material still waiting to be located by some lucky collector.
Bob

[MGN]

Very Well said Bob

[Donald Abenheim]

Bravo.

US 45th Division veterans have told me about bins full of insignia made at Dachau. Over the 45+ years I have collected, many times I have encountered veterans with insignia collected at Dachau. Many years ago, I purchased two photo albums from the brother of a deceased flight suregeon who had been at Dachau. Being an amateur photographer, he documented his trip through Europe including going to Dachau. In his second album were glued in a number of pieces of SS insignia along with his pass to enter Dachau and notations that he had aquired this insignia out of a certain building he had photographed. There were also numerous loose collar tabs, arm shields and sleeve and feldmutze eagles. It was only in recent years that I have heard this inane arguement that Dachau insignia never existed. If it didn't, this is the world's greatest and most accomplished conspiracy, going back nearly 60 years involving what at the time was worthless cloth trinkets. There are still huge caches of this material still waiting to be located by some lucky collector.
Bob

As ever, spot on. There is another issue here: trans-Atlantic perceptions of what might be called "top dog" ism. . When I began to collect in the 1960s, the center of gravity in much of this lay in the so. German auction houses, Dr. Peter Breuer's mythical costume house also in Bavaria, as well as British militaria locales. To be sure, authors in the Anglo-Saxon world wrote about German militaria, but more or less as outsiders. Open discussion of NS militaria in the German speaking world was essentially taboo because of the immediate aftermath of the war, and the collector infrastructure there was under developed or camouflaged to the outside world, much like the true believers who soldiered on in the FRG. I think Atwood and the whole dagger thing that grew, in part, out of the presence of US forces in West Germany, then began the process of the US collecting world somehow duplicating US political and cultural influence generally in Atlantic Europe in so many fields of life. The US collector cosmos took on greater weight and the Dachau legend somehow stood for the conquest of the Nazis and the rightful extraction of militaria from the worst locale of Hitlerite evil. For those of us in the NATO business (where there is much trans-Atlantic wrangling about the efficacy of military "capabilities,") I am sure the endless stories about the Dachua lore seem to a younger generation of skeptical European like so much US self-congratulation in the mode of Tom Brokaw or the like, &c. This would be a mis-impression. Also, if one has, over the years, had no direct experience of how militaria used to make its way into collector hands in the US (and this process was once very different than it is today....pawn shops, fathers of grammar school friends who were veterans with heaps of stuff recently returned from battle, little clumps of collectors on a very, very modest basis, antique/junk shops, gun shows &c.) then the whole thing must seem incomprehensible to someone just coming to it. But I also know veterans who were at Dachau, as well as others, and these items were my own first exposure to this material in the early 1960s.

[rrobertscv]

Grave Marker

I have a unused mass grave marker that my Uncle brought back from Dachau and some photos that he brought back. He was with the 70th Div., Trailblazers. It's an interesting piece, my wife hates it because she says it feels evil to her.

[Dennis S]

Dachau

Simple Question to the skeptics. If The Dachau veterans did not bring back the stuff we call Dachau insignia.
What did they bring back then ?????????? Regards Dennis

[Alexander Zöller]

Yes, I believe in Dachau insignia.

No, I do not believe that all the insignia sold today as 'Dachau insignia' could possibly have come from Dachau. However, as Donald Abenheim has opined, the "whole thing must seem incomprehensible to someone just coming to it". I probably haven't yet realized just how much stuff got 'liberated'.

[nutmeg]

Yes, I believe in Dachau insignia.

No, I do not believe that all the insignia sold today as 'Dachau insignia' could possibly have come from Dachau. However, as Donald Abenheim has opined, the "whole thing must seem incomprehensible to someone just coming to it". I probably haven't yet realized just how much stuff got 'liberated'.

My father served in the 95th Division . He described huge mountains of captured German helmets there for the taking. He said a number of times they came across German military warehouses packed with every sort of item you could imagine all brand new. I have heard this from many, many veterans over 40 years . He said everyone took stuff. Sadly he gave most of it away before I was born except an IC 2nd class.

[junior]

Thanks for your answers everyone! I'm a believer now, you convinced me.

Regards,
Junior