Banner - Vet Bring Back

[aurelius180]

I was visiting some family friends this weekend with my mother and I got to showing my new war room. My wife and I bought a house this past June and I've been doing some work and just recently started my very first war room! While showing some pictures of my house and collection he was intrigued to know I recently started collecting WW2 militaria. He informed me that he had a collection of items his father brought back from the war. My mother has known them for over 30 years and never knew about this.

Apparently his father served starting very early in the war and enlisted when he was 15 or 16 serving in Europe and then in the Pacific. From my understanding his father had quite a collection and was proud of it but his mother grew to dislike it as the growth of the skinhead movement in the US took over. She didn't agree with the politics of the Third Reich but it went from just a collection of her husband's war mementos to the symbol of the skinheads.

Since their passing our friend came into the possession of these items below along with a couple of his father's photo albums with notes from the war and his medals, etc. I've only seen the below and the photo albums.

He's been storing them in a trunk for years and took the below out to give to me. He indicated he has more stored away and will dig them out for me. We were visiting for an entirely different reason and this just came about last night and I flew home today. Hopefully in the future I can see some more and find out more about his father's experiences.

I wanted to post these because 1. I'm very proud to take them into my possession and provide a good home for them and 2. it's my first banner/ flag!

I'm quite confident they're original but obviously would be open to any comments.

My apologies for the poor pictures. I just arrived home a couple hours ago and opened the flag for the first time. I would estimate it at about 4x7' as I'm 6'4. I'll take better pictures and a more precise measurement soon.

Thank you for looking. They're very dear friends and I appreciate the gesture and provenance. I consider them like family and as if an immediate family member passed them down.

[Erno]

Nice flag! You should definitely write down all the information you know about it and keep that information with the flag.

[aurelius180]

Thank you! I very much plan on doing exactly as you suggested. I try to keep or research as much history as I can about all my pieces...even if it's just basic enlistment records. He showed me the photo albums and his father was everywhere! It's really neat. He also has a canteen his father engraved with all the places he was during the war.

It's pretty neat that these things are still out there.

[Walkwolf]

VERY nice pieces - great that you have a known provenance.
The flag is quite impressive. I'd keep that rusty scabbard
away from all the cloth items so they won't
become discoloured.........!

[aurelius180]

VERY nice pieces - great that you have a known provenance.
The flag is quite impressive. I'd keep that rusty scabbard
away from all the cloth items so they won't
become discoloured.........!

Thank you! The rusty scabbard and HJ Knife are sitting by themselves on a shelve in their display bookcase. My kamfbinde have their own shelve as well. The banner will eventually be hung properly but for now is folded and stored. That picture is just as they were placed on the table today before I packed them in my luggage.

The kamfbinde is a nice three piece construction that unfortunately only has a small remanent of the RZM paper label. Otherwise it is pretty nice.

In about a week or two my war room will be structurally complete and i will post more pictures in the proper board here for collections displays. I've been very much looking to do so but this just kicked it up a notch!

[dramos]

Nice pick up! I have wanted a Third Reich flag for a while but they are all either to big or to expensive! Even better that you know where the items came from. You could possibly frame a picture of the man that brought them back with a little info about where he served and where he may have picked them up?

[aurelius180]

Thanks Doug! I was in the same boat. Until recently I was looking at smaller ones as I thought they would be easier to display but it's amazing what you can figure out once you have one this size!

My wife is very supportive of my collecting but she said she was a little "creeped out" by it. It really does have an effect on you seeing something like this, what it represented and that it survived. Banners like this really represent what was going on at the time and it makes you wonder how someone like him was able to do what he did. You would like to think it cant happen today, at least on that scale, but that's why we preserve this history so that we don't forget and let it happen again.

[Scout]

Look forward to more items and more pics.

[Anzel]

Congratulations!!!

[maximus71]

Things like this just sitting around in a trunk somewhere undiscovered is what keeps me going in this hobby! great stuff!