Article about: This is a SSCH-39 helmet wich I bought from a belgian lady some months ago. I am sure all of you fellow collectors know the maxim that says "you buy the item, not the story". I bou
This is a SSCH-39 helmet wich I bought from a belgian lady some months ago.
I am sure all of you fellow collectors know the maxim that says "you buy the item, not the story". I bought the helmet by it´s own right and did not pay an overprice for the story, but in any case the background is interesting IMO. It seems the lady´s father was a a child of 12 at the end of WWII, living in a small belgian village. Few months after the war ended, a belgian soldier which was a family friend returned from the eastern Europe bringing the helmet with him as a souvenir and at some time gave it to this child as a gift.
He had kept it ever since, but her daughter apparently did not want to keep it after her father´s death and sold it. I asked the lady exactly to what army did this "belgian soldier" belonged to, but she did not know, she only knew that he returned from "the russian front".
Considering that the belgian Army did not fight in the eastern front, only one explanation comes to my mind : This belgian man was fighting with a german uniform. Maybe some other member has an alternative explanation. Of course all this can be an invention of the lady, but she only told me the story AFTER I bought the helmet, because I insisted in knowing how she ended up with a soviet helmet.
As a curiosity, the helmet has a painted flag with the same shape as a german tri-colour decal on the left side, but with what seems to be the belgian flag colours. The lady said that the helmet was untouched and that she knew it with that paint ever since she had memory.
Very nice helmet! Sometimes foreign helmets was used by the german police, and used with police decals, probably that one was the police reissue, then decals scratched down?
Tres beautiful helmet! Etre can that the owner was a legionnaire on the Russian forehead(front) either a war prisoner to liberer by the Russians.
You are from Belgium?
Marc, I live in Spain, but I constantly browse through sites such as Ebay Belgium. There is where I found it.
Dimas, you mean it could be a post war re-issue, or a wartime re-issue? . Firstly I though about it being a wartime german re-issue, but this tricolour painted crest has the colours the other way around (the red stripe is on top and the blue stripe is on the bottom). A friend of mine said that dutch troops serving in the German armed forces in the eastern front had that precise crest, but I cannot figure the way it ended up in the hands of a belgian. Sadly we will never know.
I forgot to comment something that puzzles me about the helmet liner. It has a white string coming out of the outer edges of the liner (which I have seen in other helmets as well).
It looks like a field modification, but I don´t know what is the exact pourpose. At first I though it could have been made to tighten the liner to adjust to the head crown of the soldier, but the liner is quite stiff, no significant reduction in head size is achieved by tightening the string. Wouldn´t it have been easier for the soldier just to get a smaller sized helmet?
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