Prohibition of Nazi German items on Internet Auctions.

While members are talking about the Gulag,who has read 'The Gulag Archipelago'?

 

When I was in the Soviet Union, I noticed gulags all over the place. They were also in plain site of the Red Star train line from Moscow to St. Petersberg. One did not have to go far to see them. I also had first hand accounts of former red army officers who had spent time in german pow camps but were never sent to gulags after the war and some who were. I also have a wife, who I met in New York outside of Trump Tower, who's family contained alot of known war hero's and high ranking officers but lived in dread of being taken away in the night. Stalin was always the gangster from the first bank he robbed to the theft of a nation. As far as the naxi thing goes, I think that it is the best interest of the good is to wipe out the artifacts that praised the evil. As far as forgetting, Eisenhower made sure that every concentration camp that was liberated by the US was documented on film so the whole world would know what happened and that the nazi party was indeed pure evil. Never mind the home movie films the nazi's made themslves showing their horrors across europe as well.

Now the question is, why is there such an interest in nazi artifacts. Not every purchaser is as noble as the members of this forum. I am not concerned about a neo-nazi movement as much as I am concerned about evil itself and how it could grow from a small seed to a big weed.

Which is the basis of this thread. Should nazi coins like original Hitler art, etc be sold or destroyed?

 

I am an independent researcher who worked in Russian archives. That's my credentials.

As to your comment on being skeptical: I think a solid approach to be weary - but you don't seem to wonder where these documents are and how you can look at them. I would call that being ignorant of, not skeptical.

As to credibility of the cited documents, all but one or two were published. Most in Russia, a few in Poland/Russia, and Russia/Britain. The others I have copies of at my house, and do plan to publish. My first major publication came this past year in a periodical called Histrical Archives, and there are references to it on the internet, in both Russian and English. And please do not go the route of altering my statements to huddle yourself in a stereotype. All the information I provided I stand by.

Please share what area of study was your PhD in?

-David.

 

There is also a large footage segment of liberation of Auschwitz and the surrounding camps and factories made by Red Army. I found it a tough documentary to watch.

I think the cult with German memorabilia has strong roots in the telling of German army history.

 

So should we ban the trading/sale of Confederate money? How about coins of the Roman empire?

 

Good question and I say no because the Roman Empire for the most part was protrayed in a way in the show Star Trek with the Borg, "Assimulate or be destoryed". A nation could live under Roman rule as a roman vassel nation with their own gods along with the roman gods. The South in the civil war, one could debate, did not fight so much to keep slavery but more as wanting to be independent from the north and a central government. That is why the north was the Union and the south was the Confederacy. There is some debate if the south would have phased out slavery themselves based upon letters of Jefferson Davis and others on the matter. They were concerned about demographics and being overwhelmed.
The Nazi's however offered no assimulation, just brutal death to millions of Jews, Gyspys, Slavs etc. Hilter wrote in his book and stated in his speeches that the nazi goal was to extinct "races" and enslaved others. The movies that were produced in Germany showed the visions of the new world that the nazi's wanted and it did not include Christianity by the way either. The nazi's were unique as a ruling body of a modern nation in their brutal plans on just extermination and enslavement of the world. Notice I say nazi and not german, for the first people the nazi's went after were the german's who did speak out or held known alternative political views.
For me the Nazi's are pure evil and I aliken them to a devil's cult. That is why I feel all nazi artifacts should be destoryed and the memory of their evil could be displayed by the victims horror.(eg allied film documentaries and survior's taped statements), and it is the victims and those who resisted and fought who should be remembered.
Bottom line: I would not collect nazi coins and would not mind if the whole lot was smelted.

 

Very interesting discussion. When I registered here I thought the members of this forum would discuss numismatic issues.

There is no excuse for the holocaust and all the atrocities committed during WWII. BUT - coins from that time are today part of history, coins did not commit any crimes. What's wrong with collecting Nazi Coins (as you call them) as long as they are not used for propaganda purposes? Nobody is forced to collect those Nazi coins.
There are unknown numbers of people collecting US-coins. Coins from a country where American Indians were slaughtered just because they were Inidians, because of their gold, because of their land ........ Should those people stop collecting US-coins?

(Hope my English doesn't cause any misunderstandings)

P.S. I do not collect Nazi coins.

 

Well, I do - simply because I collect German coins. Mostly those of my country (the Federal Republic of Germany) but I also have quite a few from the Empire (Kaiserreich), the Weimar Republic, and the GDR. One day I may have a complete collection of post-1871 circulation coins (one can always dream, hehe). While I am not interested at all in collecting nazi memorabilia, leaving the coins of Nazi Germany out of such a collection would be quite odd in my opinion.

Another question is whether my purchase of a coin would in any way "support" a dictatorial regime. For example, I know (West) German collectors who refused to buy GDR (East G.) commemorative coins before 1989/90, because the country issued those commems mostly in order to get "hard" Western money for them ...

Christian

 

"Another question is whether my purchase of a coin would in any way "support" a dictatorial regime"

Interesting point. When one buys diamonds one is supposed to see the paper work of where the diamond came from, if there is any paper work to begin with. To avoid the war diamonds of Africa. Should coin and stamp collecters of the free world have a responsibility to avoid buying coins that support present day dictatorial regimes as well.

I wouldn't buy.

 

I am not bothered one bit by your decision to not collect Nazi coins, but the idea of trying to erase Nazism from hostory by destroying all physical mementos of it is not a good idea. First, it will not in itself erase the sentiments, and second, to try to forget something that bad by destroying the physical memorabilia ia counterproductive. Each coin with a swastika on it is a reminder and a learning tool. The fact that it represents a failed regime is a tribute to those who defeated it.

 

Good point. There are collectors today who won't collect Nazi coins because the Nazis did evil things 60 years ago, but they will buy modern, current coins from Cuba, North Korea, Chine, etc. which are doing evil things NOW and are using hard currency proceeds from coin sales to fund these atrocities.

During the Cold War I bought a coin from the USSR by depositing some US dollars intheir NY bank account and then the coin was shipped from Moscow. Who knows what my few dollars funded? Oppression in Afghanistan? Communist revolution in Central America? Spies in the US?

Nazi coins are relics, and based on the huge numbers that are available in recent years, I assume that some broke loose when the Berlin Wall fell. Maybe the old E. German government had hoarded them for the metal content, and the new unified German govt sold them off and used the money for something positive.

In any case, buying a Nazi coin doe snot in any way benefit Nazis. Buying a Cuban, Libyan, Chinese (Pandas!!!!), North Korean, etc. coin does support oppressive regimes. I do have a tiny silver Chimnese commem that I bought once. I wonder if it was made by slave labor in some prison for political prisoners.

 

I understand and respect the intellectual reasoning here, but I do not agree.

Oppressive dictatorships that offer assimilation as an alternative to death are no better than the Nazis. "Live in slavery or die" as a motto does not legitimize a dictatorship in my opinion. For blacks in the Confederacy, there was no assimilation. For armies the Romans conquered, there was no assimilation. For millions of people who did not agree with the Soviet line, there was no assimilation.

A person killed by one of these dictatoirships was just as dead as any victim of the Nazis. It is true that the Nazis were probably worse in many ways to these other examples (maybe much worse than soem of them), dictatorship and oppression is not acceptable.

If we refuse to collect coins from any dictatorship, or from any power that someoned somewhere thinks is a dictatorship, then there would be nothing left to collect.

Of Osama bib Laden had his way, no one would collect US coinage. To him, the US is the worst thing that ever existed on the face of the Earth.

Having said all of this, anyone is free to chose to collect or not collect, and their opinions should be respected.

 

I completely agree with this statement, there are legitimate reasons why somebody would want to buy nazi coins, and if you take away all the legitimate places to buy them, you force them to resort to the illegitimate and that's were the real problems will begin.

 

Since it's not possible to get rid of all Nazi coins at once, the only other option is to melt them one by one. All that does is make the remaining ones that much more valuable.

 

European Ban on Nazi Symbols Shelved

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=518&e=3&u=/ap/eu_anti_semitism

 

You like the idea, don't you??

 

Basically fine with me. However, I do not think such a "ban" would have covered Third Reich coins anyway. Even in Austria, France, and Germany (where nazi symbols are unlawful when used for political demonstrations, for example) you can buy and sell such coins or notes. And of course nazi symbols are OK to use for educational purposes, in movies, etc. Now wearing a swastika badge in the street would be a different issue ...

But you cannot ban nazi ideas or racism by merely banning some symbols. Make one symbol verboten by law, and they will pick the next one. For example, it had become fashionable, among German right wing extremists, to wear Lonsdale shirts partly covered by a military style jacket. If you left the jacket open "the right way", only the letters NSDA were visible, suggesting NSDAP of course. Well, after a while Lonsdale (a British company) noted what kind of reputation they were getting here, and then started a big multi-ethnic campaign. Since that time, their shirts are not "en vogue" among nazis any more ;-)

Christian

 

I do not collect nazi coins and wouldn't mind if the whole lot was smelted. This is my viewpoint. Could it be a reality, of course not. For even if all the orginal coins were smelted after WWII with a coin exchange, I'm sure reproductions would have been made. But that is my viewpoint. As far as learning from history. It seems to me that the best of people fail to see the worse of others or are blind to it for being such nice people themselves they can not understand why someone else couldn't be nice themselves if reasoned with. And the worse of the human race tends to use the evil of the past as blue prints for the future. There is a common phase and that is history repeats itself. Mainly because time marches on but people basically stay the same. As for an evolutionist approach, even they would say that change usually takes a long, a very long time. So keep your nazi coins in your collection and wonder if the person who owned that coin before you was responsible for the deaths of innocents. Which includes millions of children who were starved to death in concentration camps in Poland or just had their heads smashed in by the butt of a rifle after seeing their mother violated in a village in the Ukraine. Just think of the possibilities of who held that very same coin in his hand that you could hold today. To me owning a nazi coin would be aliken to buying a Charlie Manson painting and then posing it as art and part of history of the time.

 

That could be said about almost any coin from any time and place. You do not know who had it before you. Like for example 3 out 4 US bills have traces of drugs, does that mean you should not use US paper curreny, because of whom might have had it before.