Newsletter 252 April 9, 2017
Here we have a collection of sample illustrations we are preparing for use in our new work on the enormous number of fakes being made for sale to a trusting collecting world. This will run to over 100 pages, contains many clear and revealing pictures, shows pages from the catalogs of makers of fakes and the sites of those who sell them as genuine. This compendium of frauds is not intended for sale; it will be free.
The so-called “Goering Wedding Sword: made, at his order, by Colonel James Atwood and sold for a million dollars.
An advertisement by a Polish firm making fakes and showing a small sample of their wares.
An assemblage of millions of dollars worth of top-level documents, all made in China and India.
Alleged to have belonged to Rudolf Hess, all the items here are of recent manufacture.
The fantasy “prototype” Blood Order, available to the trade for less than a hundred dollars. Obverse
Reverse
The pride of Poland!
Made in Poland
Made in Poland
More Polish kitsch available at reasonable prices to the trade!
Poland again
A German custom-made rare ribbon bar set for the trade.
A 1960s Swedish police tunic altered to be a valuable Waffen-SS item.
A typical example of a misattributed “Adolf Hitler” watercolor. This was done by an artist in the 1920s, after Hitler had stopped painting, and is taken from an aerial picture made in 1928.
For comparison, here is an original Hitler watercolor, made during WWI in France.
German 
English (United States)
6 thoughts on “Newsletter 252 April 9, 2017”
I have just sent you about 50 pictures of fakes taken from the Inernet. Hope you can use them.
ED
Thank you! I can certainly use them. That U-Boat badge with diamonds is a stone fake. The real ones were cast in silver by Schwerin and the stones on the original were much smaller. The swastika on the fakes is too big.
Also, note that Reddick is selling a really first class copy of the Rommel field marshal’s baton for $1,500.
Your piece in the dealer’s “private listing” was the identical one but for $500,000!
And the thirty plus SS BeVo cufftitles are interesting. I will run these new German-made fakes alongside pictures of originals. A fake, very good copy, Norge sells for ten dollars in Germany and $1,500 to American suckers. ADR
Why don’t you set up something whereby collectors can send you pictures of items they are interested in purchasing? You have a number of excellent contacts in various fields so you ought to be able to give a quick, and honest, reply. You can say that a piece is genuine or fake or that it might be genuine or might be fake or simply that you cannot give an honest answer. You are not selling anything so you do not have a vested interest in this. Tell your communicants to just send a picture of a piece and leave off the source. Many dealers hate you and badmouth you whenever they can so if you do not know who is selling what, your answer addresses the item in question, not the seller. Besides, the market is depressed and if you go ahead with your publishing project, you will depress it ever more. But the genuine collector will then come up and deals will perhaps not be as lucrative but will be satisfactory. Your postings are not injuring genuine collectors but are injuring crooked dealers and upsetting the collectors who buy fakes from them, Just a comment or two.
Misha
A good idea. Anyone with a question can address me at; adroyster@hotmail.com and I will try to quickly give them my opinion. And given human nature, I agree that not knowing the source of a questioned piece would be the most sensible. And there is no charge to anyone but I would not be interested in hysteria and anger from screwed collectors or crooked dealers. This sort of stupidity can be dealt with in a very quick way. And I think people ought to realize that there is no such thing as internet security. One can read any email with the right kind of help from friends who are experts in the technical field. And they do help, believe me. The Bulging Bog Trotter is foaming at the mouth. If he turns a light blue, things will quiet down, ADR
I never got a response on the value of mittens recovered from Hitler’s apartment in Munich?
I have all the provenance you can want on this item, returned by Captain Mahan.
Peter Hall
I never got a message. There were no clothing or other personal items taken by any American from Hitler’s apartment on the Ausser Prinzregenten Str in Munich. Julius Schaub, his adjutant, went to the apartment and, on Hitler’s orders, destroyed all such items. Hitler’s housekeeper, Fr, Winter, confirmed this and Schaub himself told me this in ’51. It is amazing all the hats, tunics and such like that have popped up in the hands of dealers. Also, there were no personal items of Hitler found at the Berghof because the SS staff burnt all of it and set the building on fire afterwards. I hope this answered your question.
ADR