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I am currently trawling through some effects from a recently deceased uncle.
Amongst all his own personal documentation, and papers relating to other family members' Australian service records, which are very interesting in themselves, is a small paper in German.
This is a certificate of some sort titled "Ludendorff Spende" and appears by my rough attempts at translation to be a certificate / receipt for donations to an appeal for "war-wounded", presumambly from WW1.
Any clues?
Bruce,
Right first time.
It was an appeal brought into support the German wounded a bit like Help for Heroes, after WW1 by General Erich Ludendorff as the country was on its knees financially :thup:
I'll have to dig a bit deeper and find out if any of his relatives were in the Australian contingent of the "occupation" forces post WW1.
On the other hand, another uncle had, amongst an "interesting" collection of Japanese goodies collected through the SW Pacific, some interesting German bayonets. These were your basic Mauser 98 bayonet. However, the wooden grip panels had been replaced with a thick, transparent material. Under the grip panels were little strips of photos showing scenes from German cities. The story was that his father, an Australian soldier, had ended up in Germany post WW1 and picked them up. Were they made by "locals" as souveniers for the occupation forces, or in an Australian field workshop? Who knows!
Another interesting source of WW1 souveniers was the Australian War Memorial. My brother has a little booklet (circa 1930) from the nascent memorial that describes its intentions and proposed scope. In the back was an illustrated "catalogue" of goodies for sale for fund-raising. Lots of German helmets were offered. One nifty item was an early pattern German "Stahlhelm" that was inverted and suspended from three thin steel rods and offered as a pot-plant holder. An actual specimen of one of these souveniers was hanging in my grandparents garden for many years, until the late 1960, when my brother and I "rescued" it, removed the hanger rods and cleaned off the rust.