Many, many knives, swords, bayonets, etc that were brought back from WWII ended up being chromed or nickled plated. At the time these were just spoils of war and had no particular collector's value. Kind of like the multitude of Romanian AKM bayonets from Iraq that have been around for the past ten years. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it greatly diminishes the value to collectors. Unless a piece is super rare or scarce I won't touch it if it's not in VG+ or better original condition. I'm sure there are others that will disagree, but most of my collector friend feel the same.