SS Erk ?

**Thanatos** · 11-20-2013, 06:48 AM

Hi Gents,
I was hoping for a little help on this one.
Just a simple good or bad ?

Thanks in advance

All the best
Dave

**Espenlaub Militaria** · 11-20-2013 06:48 AM

We also buy and trade your items and full collections!

**Woolgar** · 11-20-2013, 10:05 AM

I like the mottled camo effect on this!

Nick

**Thanatos** · 11-21-2013, 12:48 AM

SS Pea dot Nick

The fonts look OK I think but not 100% confident by any means as these are a grey area for myself.
Cheers mate
Dave

**Eike41** · 11-21-2013, 01:05 AM

Simple good or bad is hard to come by. This looks OK to me The unit existed part of the 5th ss panzer division "Wiking" I have never seen any other examples of that sub unit of Wiking so I cannot tell you that it is 100% original.

**Thanatos** · 11-21-2013, 08:26 AM

Thank you Eike41.
Appreciate your opinion.
Cheers mate
Dave

**Glenn66** · 11-21-2013, 10:45 AM

Quite a high stammrollen number, I wonder if that may tell a story. I could expect an ersatz unit to rotate a high number of men through the unit but was is an 'Inst' abteilung anyway?

**Matt L** · 11-21-2013, 03:40 PM

Sorry Dave, but unfortunately that's a fake- I was shown two other discs from very different units a few months ago that have the exact same really weird font- and if there's one truth about Erkennungsmarken, it's that no two different units have the exact same font; but fakes regularly do. Here's one of the identical font bad discs, with three small insets cropped from the other disc- supposedly SS-Artillerie-Regiment 3:

It's probably the weirdest font I've ever seen- it looks like the letters were made with a rotary pantograph- the ends are round, and the lines are 'v' shaped; but here it's clear stamps were used, so they're definitely industrially-made and very crude.

The SS-Erbsentarn look of the 'corrosion' is really weird too- I've never seen an original that looked like that. It's good though that now we have one more artifical 'age' look to recognize.

Glenn's right about the Stammrollennummer being ludicrously high for such a small unit type; that is a common problem with fakes- the scumbags who make them don't understand and just put crazy high numbers on field unit discs like they've seen on Ersatz unit discs, which makes no sense. That was one of the problems with the fake SS-Artillerie discs I mentioned- it's marked to the 5. Batterie, and yet is numbered 561; they'd have had to go through their full strength several times over to get nearly that high and that doesn't even take into account that the vast, vast majority of men would have discs already from their Ersatz units...