As I've stated many times before, this blog focuses on the beginning and novice (like me) helmet collector. Here is some valuable advice for you
Our hobby suffers a plague of highly-priced fakes and tampered-with helmets. This is no more true than in the category of German helmets of the Third Reich. It is a minefield for beginning and experienced collector alike. The problem is of such magnitude that one is justified to believe that any German helmet is fake until proven otherwise. That sounds extreme, but even some of the leading "experts" in the field have been duped by unscrupulous dealers, and more tragically, some of those trusted experts have been knowlingly dealing in fakes themselves.
That preamble leads to this: if you are embarking on a collection that includes TR (Third Reich) helmets, proceed with great caution, the risks and the potential for financial loss are high, not to mention the regret and embarrassment you will have when holding that $2,000 fake in your hands.
Seasoned collectors have a mantra for novice collectors of TR helmets - educate yourself. Now many of them will simply say "buy books", that may have been good advice at one time, but these days many of those lavish, large-format books with page after page of beautiful helmet photographs, are little more than helmet pornography - very little information and beautiful pictures of helmets, many of which are fake. This leads us to ask "Whom can I trust?"
For me, the simplest way to have confidence is to go to the back of the book and look for a bibliography and cited sources, that is the mark of a scholar and a true expert in the field, and sadly these books are very difficult to find. Less than a third of the books on my helmet bookshelf are authored by these scholar-collectors, and that seems to be the standard today. The self-appointed experts do not attend to the basic standards of research that any highschool freshman is accountable for using.
That leads me to the book The History of the German Steel Helmet: 1916 - 1945, published in 1985, by Ludwig Baer.
Baer has been established as the leading authority on the subject, he is totally legit and a wealth of good information. His analysis is sound and based upon exhaustive research of primary documents - something you seldom find in other helmet books (excluding the excellent work of Mark Reynosa and others).
This book has been out of print for many years, and I have seen copies of it selling for up to two-hundred dollars. This may seem like a lot of money, but it pales in comparison to the loss you will take by buying a very convincing fake of a TR helmet. I cannot overstate the essential value of this book. If you want to enter the risky area of TR collecting, you simply must get this book and do the research.
Buy it.
See you next time with another cool helmet from the collection.
Mannie
