The first Stahlhelm I ever held.

[TWS]

I had put this up on WAF, but figured it might be worth a cut and paste over here.

Story time.
As a little kid, one of the favorite pastimes of our neighborhood cohort was "playing army". We'd dress up in our father's fatigues and webgear and grab our plastic rifles and machine guns, divide into teams, and run around the fields and woods playing war. Movies like Kelly's Heroes, the Guns of Navarone, The Great Escape, etc. fueled our imaginations.

Well, one of the kids lived with his grandparents in our neighborhood and the grandfather was a WWII ETO veteran. One day he shows up with a "German helmet" that his grandfather brought back. We oooh'd and aaah'd over it and then decided the "enemy" team had to make one of their members wear it. Only later in life would I know how to correctly describe it. It's a no-decal M40 reissue with a 1944 dated liner band and thick dark gray reissue paint. It's stamped ET64 and the lot number is lost under the thick reissue paint. The liner was already long gone and the kid who got stuck wearing it had to wear a knit cap underneath to avoid a headache. That wasn't a problem as "playing army" was more often a winter distraction for us while on hiatus from sports.

We wore this thing for a couple years through many a battle with no thought that it could be valuable. Heck, the kid said he'd found it in the attic above his grandfather's garage. But this helmet opened my eyes to the concept of G.I. bring backs. It really sparked in my young mind the idea that this stuff was out there and later I resolved to collect some of it. It's not too much of an overstatement to say this helmet is at least partly responsible for me becoming a collector.

Well, after grade school we stopped "playing army" and around early high school time the kid with the helmet and I went our separate ways in life. That was a nice way of putting it. Later I heard he'd died of a drug overdose as a young man.

Fast forward to years later. I'm already a collector and I've bought some helmets among many other items, but I still vividly remember this helmet that I'd played with as a kid. I'm home from college for Christmas break and I decide to make a run down to a coin shop in town because I knew they did militaria on the side. I walk in there and I see this helmet, the helmet from my childhood war games, sitting on the shelf along with a few others. I recognized it even up on the shelf. It was like a small electric current went through my body. Trying to really play it cool, I ask to see a couple items out of a display case first before casually asking them to pull the helmet down from the shelf. I turned it over in my hands.... this is it... this is the one! I knew 100% from the dents that as kids we imagined were WWII battle scars, but more likely some family member or even the grandfather himself had taken it out to the family farm and tried their .22 rifle out on it. Still playing it cool I reveal no prior connection to the helmet and negotiate the best price I can. In fact I bought a 1916 WWI trench helmet along with the M40 to disguise my particular interest and get a discount for buying both! This helmet had vanished from my life once, I wasn't going to let it get away again. I was quite the happy camper to bring it home that day.

It's not a very valuable piece as far as TR combat helmets go, but it means something to me.

[MAP]

Fantastic story and nice helmet. You know it's history which is wonderful. Sometimes even the least items in our collections are the most valuable to us.

[Rescue190]

Good story and great find.
John

[Neil Hever]

Great little story. It made me think about a Polizei helmet I encountered as a kid. We would don it from time to time for fun. I later sold it after getting married and having kids. I needed the cash. Kind of regret parting with it. NH

[Danmark]

Nice that no one messed with it over the years ( repainted or tore out the felt ) & you kids weren't as rough with it as i thought you'd be!

[TWS]

I left out something as I felt the story was already long enough: A few years later my buddy (the grandson) and I were bored on a rainy day and we rummaged in a large walk-in closet upstairs in his grandparents' spacious house (mansion-ish actually) and we came across a box of medals, documents and currency that his grandfather had also brought back. In the box were the capture papers! I didn't even know that capture papers were "a thing" (as kids say these days). I wish I had them! However, I vividly remember that the papers stated the helmet was taken in Halle, Germany. The medals and documents were taken when his grandfather was in Berlin after the capitulation and it stated he took them from the Reichskanszlei! I know it sounds incredible, but I remember those papers vividly. We asked his grandfather about them and he pointed to the foot-high metal statue of Hindenberg on a marble base sitting on his huge old roll-top desk in his study. He said that came out of there too!

[buellmeister]

TWS,

It was fate that reunited you to the helmet. I'm a firm believer of that! What an interesting story and thank you for sharing.

Regards,

Joel

[FALLSCHIRMJAGER]

Brilliant that you were reunited with this helmet as only you and your mate had the all important history that goes with it. Well done. Leon.

[Pauls1970]

Fascinating story, the chance of coming across it again all those years later, wow, glad you was able to get it, talk about fate !!
Regards
Paul

[TWS]

Thanks for your comments gents. I am glad you enjoyed my story. It's one of the least valuable, if not the least valuable, helmet in my collection money-wise, but none of my others have a back story even remotely approaching this one.