Tiny Hitlerjugend Mitgliedsabzeichen

[Jo Rivett]

A miniature Hitler Youth membership stickpin. 12,9 mm x 7,6mm / weighing in at a mere 0,87gr.

A recent conversation about these on the HJ-research forum, brought up a period advertisement from around mid 1933-1934, which is good enough "evidence" that they are indeed not a fantasy item, and that miniature HJ-stickins did really exsist, albeit for a very short period. The problem though, is what ones are real? as they are faked a-plenty. Many of these that you see online, are post war, and give themselves away straight away by the bad quality, or "modern" look.

After taking pictures of one this morning, i saw a problem. Even though my cameras are top-dog for the job, they still only enlarge a 12mm stickpin face to a certain size, without blurring everything. And even though the following images are ok-ish, they still really dont say much about the authenticity.



I could just rely on that mentioned period "evidence" advertisement, after all, dealers do this every day to support their fake wears. But me being me - i want to be sure

With a few magnified images, i can already see what i want to, real messing, real and honest patina on both the glass enamel as well as boundaries/rim/lips.



I could also take 50 images of the center under high magnification, join them all togethr, and see what that part of the badge is telling me.



I could also, in order to demonstrate to others, take 300 images under magnification of the entire face. This would take a day to do, & piece together, and the result will be an image that measures 26`500 x 17`350 , 145MB. Too large for the net, but i can resize this to 2000. Then we end up with a larger image, but in reality you are looking at the whole face at once under magnification.



I dont mind calling this one a nice original now :-)

[Adrian Stevenson]

Nice work Jo.

Cheers, Ade.

[Gunny Hartmann]

Great photos and thanks very much!...

[Jo Rivett]

Or, we resize the massive image to around 8000 x 5000 and we take single screen shots of certain areas. And we see the honest patina, the honest wear and tear in the correct places we would expect to find it on, on items that there were worn in the manner that a stickpin was. We see the correct glass enamel and the patina on it, we see in fact, that there is still a great deal of silver wash left, allied over the correct messing base material that we would like to find for this period, mid 1933-1934. We see that the planchet, albetheblighter so tiny, was stamped under dies created in the same fashion as we find under magnification on other HJ badges, small stickpins etc etc from this period.

With these images, or, under very high magnification, dare i say it? a forensic examination, they show us everything that we need to see on a genuine item from this period, worn in this manner, and shows us not a single negative feature that is observed on fakes, repros, fantasy badges...etc.

Click on the images to enlarge, it may take a while, but it is still better than waiting for a 20`000 sized image to load.




So really, the images are telling us that, yes, i was made in 1933, i have been there and done it! And anyone who would like to say anything to the contrary, or think up some idea of how they (or even i) could recreate a honest patina like this, on such a small item - to fool, well they need to question their motives for even attempting this