SS-VT Germania ID tag

[machal]

of my SS ID tag..

[Dimas]

That looks like a original Germania tag

[Matt L]

Very nice

This is a good example of one of the basic ways to spot fakes- compare the disc above, 1. Kompanie, to mine below, which is 3. Kompanie- both are authentic and notice how the 'font' is completely different; this is a fact among real Erkennungsmarken- that even different Kompanien often had rather different stamps for marking their discs. There were no 'standard issue' alphabet stamps so one should virtually never expect to see the exact same letter style on discs from two different units. I've had over 400 discs in my collection all-told, and I've seen many hundreds more to be sure, and not once did I ever find two that were identical save when from the same unit.

Fakers, on the other hand, have only one or a small number of stamp sets to use so they make all kinds of different units with them- which is how you can spot them; if you ever see two very different units with the same letters, you should immediately wonder about the authenticity of both. Or, if you see what's clearly a fake, you can use it to detect others because a faker won't have used those stamps just to make one- they'll make lots of different ones. The so-called "Rokas" fakes are an example- a large number of bad discs that can be easily recognized by their lettering.

With respect to recognizing real discs however, one cannot truly speak of a 'correct' letter type except in the case of the specific small unit; so here there is no correct letter type for the Germania Regiment, but only for the 1. Ersatz or 3. Ersatz (and, presumably, 2. E. as well) Kompanien. That being said, there are rare cases of the lettering switching at some point in a single unit- maybe the stamps set was lost or stolen or something and a new one came into use- so one cannot categorically use lettering as an indicator of real vs. fake just on style alone. That is unless there are examples of one style with Stammrollennummern that flank the one in question- it's highly unlikely that one type would be used then a second and then the first again.

[wiaderny]

[Matt L]

That's an excellent pair of examples wiaderny- it illustrates my point perfectly Note how his and my 3. Ersatz-Kompanie discs have identical stamps, as would be expected, and some his 1. Ersatz-Kompanie stamps differ from those on machal's disc- but the difference is understandable; the numbers do appear to be from the same set (the style and size appear the same), but because the Stammrollennummer is half that of machal's example, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that somewhere in the intervening 5000 discs, the letter stamps changed. Were the numbers not the same, it would be harder to consider both discs as authentic, but the partial consistency helps a lot.

Also of note is that wiaderny's disc is one of the early types pre-stamped with 'SS-Verfügungstruppe'- in most cases I've seen, SS discs have 'SS-VT' or 'Waffen-SS' on the reverse, so the consistency of having it on the front, even when it was the large pre-stamped text, suggests it was a specific unit marking choice. They clearly ran out of these pre-stamped discs, and simply moved to stamping 'SS-V.T.' but continued to keep it on the front.

So here are more useful photographs one can use to match fonts and either support a disc as being authentic or suggest there's a problem.