There are others that he identified as clear fakes. It’s so contrived and ridiculous that it couldn’t be authentic.” Here’s another: a harmonica set in a case with a smiling Hitler Youth image on it. “What the hell is a hippo doing on a Nazi piece? It’s so cheesy, there’s no sense to it. “Here’s a desk statue of a hippopotamus behind a fence, surrounded by swastikas,” he said, looking through a file of images on computer. Sometimes, Panagopulos is able to tell an item is a fake at a glance. For instance, the Knight’s Cross was the highest award in the military, and the highest prices are for those that are accompanied by a document that validates the medal and identifies which important soldier it was given to. The most sought-after German World War II items that Panagopulos sells are soldiers’ medals (ranging from $30 to $200,000), helmets ($300 to $15,000) and daggers ($300 to $300,000), with the wide price differences based on condition and the importance of the individual who originally owned the item. There’s an incentive to copy this material, obviously. “Some of it is faked so well that it is difficult to tell.” “A lot of fake material, ersatz garbage, is coming in from Bulgaria, Poland, the Ukraine, even Pakistan,” said Bill Panagopulos, owner of Alexander Historical Auctions in Chesapeake City, Maryland, which sells Nazi artifacts among other items. Like in the market for more traditional art and collectibles, there is so much demand for this stuff that inauthentic objects and forgeries are a large part of the trade. The revelation underscored a surprising fact about Nazi paraphernalia. Ahead of the scheduled opening of the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum’s exhibition of 72 Nazi-era artifacts next week, the museum revealed some shocking news: all but 10 of them have been declared fakes by an international group of European experts.
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