My Fake German M42
by Michele Tagliavini

A few years ago I bought from a friend a wonderful M42 German helmet. He had got it in Germany and, apparently, it was part of a lot of German helmets recently found in an Austrian depot. Bound for the Italian front, their journey was interrupted by the end of the war...or so the story went.

What a great helmet, everything was perfect about it: late-war grey colour, pigskin liner and....my strong desire for it to be all true. There was, however, one striking feature which left me a little bit wondering. The liner still had a strong leather smell, a smell that stayed in my mind. I had smelled the whole helmet like a hound (I know it sounds crazy, but it's a good habit) trying to be sure that the paint had not been newly applied (paint can still smell fresh for a few years, especially if the helmet has never actually been used).

So I gladly added the M42 to my growing helmet collection and considered myself lucky for such a find at such a good price (about ITL 300.000 or € 150).

After a couple of years I happened to buy a Czech M53 helmet in almost mint condition. Very nice helmet from the 1960's, it is a good example the Cold War period. Some time went by before I noticed that something was....strange. The liner had a funny smell, yes, that smell. As soon as I realised I compared the two helmets: Mamma mia! They looked identical! And they smelled the same! Coincidence? Hardly the case.

On closer inspection I noticed a few things about the "German" liner that should have gotten me thinking some time earlier.

The stitching of the back seam seemed to be handmade. Not surprisingly, since the Czech liner is not stitched in the back and has a few pressure buttons for fitting adjustment.

There was a black ink stain on the reverse of the "German" liner. Not surprisingly, again, the Czech liner is usually marked with black and blue stampings on the reverse.

The eyelets at the tip of the "German" liner flaps had small marks around them, as if metal eyelets had been taken off. That's right, the Czech liner has those metal eyelets....

I had been fooled and my pride was more hurt than my wallet. I was lucky though, since the seller was in absolute good faith and he was happy (well, that's probably an overstatement) to take the helmet back and refund me the full price. He was also interested in knowing how I got to that conclusion and, as far as I know, he sold the helmet as a repro to somebody else for the same price...

What went wrong with my judgement?

Well, first of all I was too keen on the helmet in the first place. I loved the story and the fact to be lucky enough to have found an almost mint helmet. I wanted it to be true, so I ignored the small "gut feeling" that was trying to tell me that not everything was convincing. It is true, we collectors can rarely be 100% sure about everything we encounter, and that's exactly when experience and common sense should come into play. First hand experience on German helmets I had really little, while common sense was "asleep". I did not suspect the fact that it is very unlikely for a wartime depot to be discovered today (despite all the stories we sometimes hear), nor the fact that the liner had that stain. I did not question the fact that the liner band was dated 1939 on a supposedly 1945 production helmet because at that stage of the war everything left in the warehouses was being used. I did not question the poor quality of the chinstrap (the long strap being formed by two pieces glued together) for the same reason.

My mistake, in short, was to concentrate on the positive elements, such as the colour, the rivets and their leather washers, the shell stampings, and ignore all that should have suggested otherwise.

A final word of caution: since then I have seen many similar German helmets being offered in shops and auctions as originals. They were grey or sand coloured (allegedly Afrika Korps helmets found in Italy), all looked to be brand new. The word is that some people in the Czech Republic have been doing some "fine work" putting together what they found in their country being sold for scrap.

In the past years in fact thousands of German helmets have come out of that country, where they had been reconditioned and repainted black for use by the Fire Brigades. Furthermore, the liners of the Czech M53 helmets are an almost identical copy of the German M31 liner. You don't need to be a genius to draw your conclusions.

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