(Ebook) Faking the Afrikakorps: Contextualizing the Manufacture and Trade in Imitation Afrikakorps Material Culture by Mike Seager Thomas

(Ebook) Faking the Afrikakorps: Contextualizing the Manufacture and Trade in Imitation Afrikakorps Material Culture by Mike Seager Thomas

Almost every day on eBay there is an Afrikakorps fake for sale. These include everything necessary to equip and Afrikakorps soldier and range from genuine continental and later tropical items, described as Afrikakorps, through reproductions, which were not originally intended to deceive, but later passed off as real, to out and out fakes—non-tropical items modified to make them look tropical and reproductions modified to deceive or intended to deceive from the start. All of these are common on the market; and all have crept into collections, onto online collectors’ forums, into the literature, and even museum collections as the real thing. This essay considers their nature, the purpose behind them, the methods used by fakers to purvey them, how to distinguish them from the real thing (and visa versa), and how it is, given the wide knowledge of the collecting community and the free availability of this online, that they continue to circulate and fool. It also considers their wider implications for the understanding of World War 2 material culture. The faking of Afrikakorps material culture is undermining both our record of the period of the past to which it belongs and the emotional link that it provides to this. As with other categories of faked material culture, collectors are complicit in the trade, albeit unintentionally, and while their contribution to the study of Afrikakorps material culture is applauded, it is suggested that its study should not be left to them alone.