Funniest???

I think the dealer thinks it’s the funniest item because it was likely manufactured long before Hitlers rise to power, and promotion of the swastika to a sign of evil.

I know modelers who’s specialty is German WW II tanks. They are not closet Nazi’s, nor are they sympathetic to their ideology. And here is a certificate from a company printed in 1910. http://www.scripophily.net/dupadmaccom.html well before the Nazi’s rose to power.

I don’t know this guy. I could hardly guess what’s in his heart by what he collects.

Hate what HRW has become, but the politics of personal destruction isn’t a tactic I’d use to discredit them.

One reason for Nazi uniform fixations is sado-masochistic and sexual. This is the result of all those films featuring powerful, sadistic but elegantly dressed Nazi officers.

Some of you are going to great lengths to paint individuals with specific tastes as malignant entities. As a member of a community of enthusiasts I know of several people in that community that collect only German militaria from that time period, While I have only a mild interest in those things (I prefer Western militaria myself)I don’t view any of those individuals as Nazi sympathizers, because they simply aren’t. Using a collectors excitement over finding a much sought after item is disingenuous. Would you label a stamp collector a racist because they enjoy discovering postage stamps from the Confederacy or something? Perhaps a collector of Roman coinage from the time of Christ is an anti-semite?

Let a person’s actions and words condemn them instead of their historical or collecting interests. Following your logic, all Japanese are pedophiles because of their strange obsessions with Hello Kitty and other such things.

Well, it is an ancient symbol. But would anyone be collecting stuff with swastikas today if it was a still primarily known as a Southwestern Indian symbol?

David P., you’re right; this stuff is a gateway drug, and, for all their protestations, it’s pretty obvious these collectors have an unhealthy fixation on this stuff.

To show that we’re not brainwashed liberals, we must eagerly embrace Nazi artifacts, because, you know, the Germans accomplished such swell things during WWII! They made great strides in crowd control, for one thing! And they were real whizzes in the use of gas, and V-2 rockets, too!

I’ts kinda reverse political correctness here; in order to show you’re NOT liberal, you must admire Nazi ingenuity.

Also, unless we embrace Germany’s Nazi period, we are somehow rejecting the entirety of German history itself! (I don’t follow, here; are you saying that Nazis were the summit of German history? That if we don’t collect their stuff, we won’t know the true Germany? This seems rather strange. Anyway, collectors of Nazi memorabilia never seem interested in the rest of Germany’s history—its medieval history, for instance, or the poetry of Heinrich Heine; nope, it’s always the Nazi stuff they go for. You’ll never catch them collecting Hummel figurines, or WWI Kaiser Wilhelm style helmets—I mean, come on, didn’t Germany make great strides in WWI, too? Wasn’t WWI important? I suspect if you were to ask any one of them about Germany’s other periods, they’d just stare at you blankly. It isn’t Germany per se they’re interested in.)

(By the way, seems to me the allies came up with some nifty inventions in the Big Red One, too; don’t they deserve some mention? Or are the Nazis the only ones who deserve credit for their “contributions” to the war effort? I love the way you phrase that—”contributions”, as if they invented the weaponry they did just to help us. Gosh, thank you, Nazis!)

No, I didn’t learn my history from the movies. That’s why I think collecting Nazi memorabilia, and all it stands for, is, in the end, warped. And, no, someone who does so should not be issuing decisions about Israel.

Now, you run along, have a nice weekend, and, goshers, if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll find some more of that swell Nazi stuff for your fun, and completely harmless, collection.

I closely regard those items as well, in my heart I see them as symbols of the purest evil perpetrated by man in modern times. “Imagine” if I were using my imagination to believe that all nazi memorabilia collectors are simply innocent historians.

There’s a dealer in “Germania” who specializes in Nazi memorabilia. In explaining that not everything with a swastika is Nazi memorabilia, because the swastika is an ancient symbol, his web site says,

One of the funniest is the gas valve with the swastika on it from the Swastika Stove Company in the U.S. Invariably we are asked what concentration camp this originates from or, in some cases, we are “told” what concentration camp it has come from along with a story of how their grandfather ‘liberated it’ and brought it back from Dachau!

Funniest???

Also note the whiff of Holocaust denial.

I draw the line at Civil War reenacters who dress up in gray.

Also, the defense of Garlasco’s use of Flak88 as an internet ID and vanity license plate being a reference to a German artillery gun, not skinhead code for “Heil Hitler”, is a bit hollow. Those guns killed a lot of Americans.