Hi, dear friends! First of all, my best wishes for an happy new year to all of you and your dears!

Then, I'd like to share with you one of my most interesting finds of 2010: a relic DH watch, recently escavated from a bunker belonged to the Wehrmacht, 121st Infantry Division, 70th Werfer, in a forest near Libau.
In Kurland pocket more or less 300.000 german soldiers surrended.
Many of them used to throw away their own decorations and any signs of their grade or status, because officers, SS and decorated soldiers could receive much worse treatment by the enemy. Not all the soldiers survived in the prison camps and went home after the war...
Wristwatches and pocketwatches were very sought after by enemies and could be a sign of being a specialist or an officer, for this reason it was not very wise to keep them.

Anyway, as you can see, now we can understand why relic DH watches are very difficult to find for sale: they are well preserved, because very wellmade, so it is still possible to restore them! Of course sellers prefer to sell them restored and with some parts replaced.
This watch hasn't been almost cleaned nor polished at all. Only washed in the water and gently cleaned in the back. Half of the wrist band was in very bad conditions. The other half was missing at all. Bars were too fragile and went lost during escavation.
The back could still easily be screwed and opened, the chrome is worn, but still present and it can be rechromed, the dial and hands could be replaced...
I think that this is a pity, because some important informations are lost, in this manner.
I think that this is another proof of the evidence: DH watches were REALLY the issued watches of the Wehrmacht!
I sincerely cannot imagine any other reason because it was in a German bunker, thousands of miles far from Switzerland, in the '40s...

Here's the back:as you can see, it is still in very good conditions and declares good quality. I haven't tried, but i think it is still openable.
Rest of chrome is still visible.
The watch is still dirty with the original dried mud of Kurland. The same it met in the '40s.
War finished at half past ten, an unknown day, for this watch.

If the back does not come off easily I would suggest that you leave it as it is. If you try to force it the threads and case of the watch may be damaged. The movement inside is most likely badly rusted since water could have easily penetrated from the front over the past 90 years. I think that your best choice would be conservation which is to gently clean the dirt from it and dry it with a soft cloth. It tells a story as it is.

Some other possible reasons for it to have been in that bunker are:

1) It broke and the soldier threw it away since he no longer had a use for it.

2) The strap broke and it was lost.

3) One of the strap pins (both are missing) broke and the watch was lost.

4) The owner had removed it for some reason, such as washing himself, when an attack started and he ran out to fight leaving the watch behind since there was no time to stop and put it on.

5) The owner had several watches that he had been collecting as the war went on. It could have been a man from either side of the fighting who was gathering them as plunder with the idea that they were valuable and could be used for trading during the war, or for selling after the war. It might have simply been dropped or lost along the way.

Or it could have found its way there by some other method. The important thing is that you have a relic that you know for sure was actually used in the war which I think is great.

In the last ten years or so there has been a lot of digging in Russia and other Eastern European countries for WWII relics. Helmets, belt buckles, awards, etc, have been dug out of forgotten bunkers and trenches. There is a good market for these things and the diggers often need the money.

Relic diggers are supposed to report the location of any human remains they find. But given the piles of military identification tags these people often have for sale it is clear that they often neglect to report unmarked graves.

Several years ago, on another watch collector site, a collector/digger posted that he had a DH watch which was found attached to human remains in a former German bunker located in Eastern Europe. There was a lengthy discussion regarding the ethics of such a relic. And some of the participants in the discussion where relic diggers. As you can imagine, most collectors were opposed to digging up graves for war relics.

I cannot say that your watch was found with the bones of the man who used it, but it is most likely that the last man to wind your watch died in battle before the watch ran down.

Greg, I sincerely don't think so.
Why do you? We all should stop to collect anything from the war years.
I think that Jim is right.

Some people who are detectorist, in Europe, write in another forum.
During the years, they have found sometime dogtags.
They always search, using the fora, too, for the people written over the dogtags and very often they found the descendants who tell them that their ancestors safely went back home, after the war.
Only once they realized that the soldier was death in action, but hundreds of miles away, maybe months after having lost the dogtag.

A watch and a dogtag is just like any other stuff: you can lose it, in the same way you lose the key of your car...
You don't need to die, to lose the keys of your car, of your home or your wedding ring or your watch...

This is even more true with timepieces.
Yes, some of us collect military timepieces.
If you buy a DH watch in a internet auction house, from USA, in UK or in a flea market you could be buying a watch stolen to a dead soldier or to a prisoner.
This is theorically possible, but not very frequent, I think.

Anyway, for this reason I usually want to buy DH in Germany and American timepieces in USA, for example.
I would really stop to collect and I would sell all my collection, to donate the money to poor people, if I only would have any solid or real suspect.

I wouldn't be so sure that for any relic watch this sad probability would be more frequent.
I think it is much more frequent the contrary: sadly not many death soldiers were buried with their own timepieces.
It is sad, but the timepieces were very sought after by friends and by enemies...
So... I think that it is more frequent to buy a "sadly lost" timepieces in a auction than in a battlefield....

Why do you think that the original owner of the watch could be died before the watch ran down?
He could have lost it or thrown it away because a soldier with a watch is an officer or a specialist and these conditions usually aren't very popular between enemies...
In the same manner... I wouldn't be sure that each dogtag seems a death...
If you were a SS soldier, you would bury your dogtag very deep in the ground, before to surrend...
If you were a high rank officer, a sniper, a war hero, you would throw any awards, any medals and any signs of your status very very far from you before to be captured...

The detectoris who found this Silvana seemed to be sincere and honest what he told me that he has never found any human rest and I believe in him.

I did not mention the possibility that Greg does - that this could have been dug from a grave of a soldier - because I find that idea repulsive and I try to think the best of people. However, he is absolutely correct that there are more than a few relic hunters who do dig up graves to loot the relics from them. I am not talking about graves in cemetaries, though I know that happens as well, especially graves of higher ranking officers who may have been burried with rare medals or daggers or other high cost objects. Rather, I am referring mostly to unmarked graves - where battles were fought and bodies were not recovered because they were buried by debris or dirt when an artillery shell or bomb struck nearby. This is why most countries now have laws against the practice of relic hunting in battlefield areas. No one knows where men are buried and it is impossible to say where unmarked graves are. Like Greg, I have read some of the discussions on those websites about such relic hunting for both WW I and WW II material. All of the relic hunters in those discussions strongly defend their right to dig for relics and say they do not care about the laws or the personal ethics of it, that they made good money by doing what they did and selling their findings, and that no one can make them stop. I think those people are not the kind of people I want to know.

I am not suggesting that your friend who sold the watch to you is such a relic hunter, but perhaps someone who sold it to him, or a person who originally found this and sold it through several people before coming to your friend might have been.

Yes, of course that one could be a possibility, but I don't think that this possibility could be frequent.
It is only a possibility between many, many, many others, much more frequent.
You referred only some of the millions of the different possibilities, maybe some of the more possible and frequent...

It is sad, but I think that very few soldiers could have been buried with their own timepieces.
Somebody buried them, of course.
Maybe many soldiers were buried with their own medals, awards, insigna, weapons, uniforms: all of these are things not very useful and valuable, during war time... but, let's be realistic... not many were buried with their money or timepieces.

Of course, I think that, in every part of the globe, a person who, in present days, finds human rests, cannot be unsensitive and ignore what is right and good to do... with no exception...

But, frankly, I don't think that a war time item like a timepieces could be more... "sad" or "risky" or "suspect" only because it is a relic...
Unfortunately it is not so simple and items don't speak...

In addition to cemetaries where men were buried formally, I was also talking about battlefields where artillery explosions and bomb explosions collapsed buildings on top of soldiers, or threw large amounts of dirt on top of soldiers, or collapsed trenches in on top of them and killing them where they were and wearing everything they had on in the battle including their watches and other equipment. Or when aircraft were shot down with the pilots and aircrew in them the airplanes hit the ground so hard they were instantly buried under many feet of dirt so often the bodies were not recovered. Relic hunters dig up these aircraft and sell everything they can recover and do not care that it is a grave of the airmen who died in it. After battles, many bodies were not recovered since they were under rubble and dirt from the explosions.

I agree: you're right, but I think that everything must to be adapted to the different fronts.
The Eastern front was very very different form all the others. It was very much harder, much difficult than all the others...
Many bodies have been left un-buried for months and months in a very, very, very huge front for many reasons: many armies were escaping in serious difficulties and ground was frozen and as hard as marble.
Angry, frozen and desperate poor soldiers had no energies to bury their comrades...
Often local civilian people, angry, frozen and desperate too, was forced to bury them, after the battles...
They were poor people, very far from any public authorities and from public helps. Public authorities themself were in bad emergency conditions and not able to help civilian peoples to clear the fields for ordnance, weapons, bodies.
Don't forget that USSR had some 20 millions of death people. Half of the deaths of the second world war were russians. German, Italian, Rumenian, Spanish, Ukrainian armies have had some other millions of deaths.
Not many people, I think has been buried under dirt or collapsed buildings, there...
Cold, hunger, mud and ice killed much more than artilleries...
Many people were buried in common graves, after the battles, by the poor heroic civilian people who lived in the different sites, long the way of escapments.
Maybe, sadly, those poor people couldn't read a foreign dogtags. Maybe they simply couldn't know or understand what the dogtags were used for...
They maybe wasn't able to tell if a soldier was friend or foe, foreign or not...
But...
Shoes, clothes, timepieces were very precious in those very sad, cold, hard and difficult times...
Innocent civilian and military people finished everyday their own lifes because frozen or angry...
I don't pretend and I don't suppose that many, many, many bodies has been buried with those equipments...
I think that maybe some of the military timepieces we can buy today could are from those clearances... Who knows?

I mean:
When the criminal searchers find, today, those common graves they maybe could find medals, awards, weapons... but not many timepieces, shoes, boots, I think.
If timepieces are found, they very often are in very good conditions, so they are quite simple and cheap to be restored and sold to collectors.
I wonder if it is really more frequentand possible that a "relic" watch is from a death soldier than a "not relic" one, maybe "captured" during the war, maybe recovered during a clearance or "restored", cleaned, rechromed and re-dialled in recent times...

quote:

If timepieces are found, they very often are in very good conditions, so they are quite simple and cheap to be restored and sold to collectors.
I wonder if it is really more frequentand possible that a "relic" watch is from a death soldier than a "not relic" one, maybe "captured" during the war, maybe recovered during a clearance or "restored", cleaned, rechromed and re-dialled in recent times...

A point well made.

I might add that unless you know and trust the person who found it, the watch could have come from a trash bin at the city dump. Dishonest sellers know a watch might have more value if it came from a famous battlefield and so they sometimes make up stories....

Regarding your point about renovation. As legitimate provenance adds value to a watch, rechroming and re-dialling detract from the value of a military watch. Dealers who are not collectors do not appreciate this.