I’ve been in touch with an eBay seller named Evgebij Suhanov from Latvia; he’s sellling some Tiger and Panther tracks which he’s found in his area of Latvia. He igs around the “Kurland” area of the final battles of the Reic, and he’s sent me some photos of some amazing finds. He said his “ultimate goal” is to find a whole tank or plane buried in some much somewhere.
I wanted to share some of these with you…
Here he is with a shovelfull of iron crosses he found.
Helmet with decal still visible;
Mortar;
MG’s;
And now for some really cool stuff! Panther tracks!
And bunches of stuff! [:P] Tiger tracks, too!!!
AT gun cradle;
And check this out–can you imagine finding this!!! A Pz IV front hull…
Tiger cupola!!!
Some of these photos are from a post he had up on"Wehrmacht Award.com; here’s the link to it–check this out, you won’t be disappointed!!!
He won’t be able to sell the Iron Crosses on Ebay because of their stupid “no swastika” policy… I had two ads for WW2 German badges and equipment pulled off by the admins for that. One belt buckle and one an infantry assault badge…
OMG that’s one successful ‘treasure hunter’! Interesting info Karl. I sure hope he’s got a backhoe…tryin’ to dig up that stuff with that ‘lil ol’ shovel would kill me!..lol
That is just amazing. Not many people can go out around were they live and dig up an almost complete MG-42 or the front hull from a Panzer IV. Hopefully he finds a tank or plane. Now that would be cool.
Awesome stuff there Doog, way cool, thanks for the link.
I dug trenches in a few army bases in Canada, and the amount of stuff you find is astounding. And that’s only on a training site. I can’t even imagine what you can find on an actual battle site [:O]
Doog those MG’s the top 2 are MG42’s top one was probably a tank mounted MG42 the second one is definitely a tank mounted MG42 probably the CoAxial mount or the Radio operators Ball mount MG.
The 3rd gun is the MG34. looks like once the MG34 and MG42 get cleaned and taken apart to checked for damage it might be possible that they can be fired again. The one on top is definitely damaged by fire and unusable except for display.
it seems rather errie to find a number of iron crosses like that.makes you wonder if they were takn from the dead and later lost /discarded ?just imagine what lay on that battlefield.why no russian artifacts?
I remember reading a book about the Kurland Battles, and remember specifically a passage about commanders just taking entire shipments of Iron Crosses and discarding them; just throwing them away, because the plaintruth that the war was over was so evident, That, and the fact that the battlefield was in such dissarray and chaos that there was no chance to disseminate them. I’ll bet that’s what he found here.
Kurland was designated a “Fortress” if I remember correctly, and the Iron Crosses were doled out in huge numbers to boost morale.
PS> —check out the link I provided–there are plenty of Russian artifacts as well.
When I was in Germany, I know that they had a German helmet and an MG42 in a display case they found in the Reichswald. This was in the HQ building of the 3GAF.
My friend and I went out there one weekend. We found a BREN gun magazine, a buttload of .303 casings, a crushed German gas mask canister, slit trenches, and an unexploded anti-tank round.
That brought the relic hunting to a screeching halt for the day.
I’m curious as to what rules diggers must follow regarding war dead. I recall reading that an easy way to find if a corpse was German or not was if it had rotted teeth. It seems that German youth were terrible about candy and had bad teeth. The average Soviet had none of that so if a skull was found with good teeth, it could be safely assumed to be Soviet.
