I must admit that the signs of declining hobby is already present. The availability of german helmets in almost all configurations is quite good, and prices are on its way down.
This is of course the sad reality since the community stewards has chosen to not confront the obvious frauds which was and probably still is ongoing. Some people at WAF even ridicule those who has spoken out about the issues with the Shampain Ruin scandal.
Is a similar scandal in the field of camo helmets likely to be revealed and equally be obscured by a smoke screen..??
I see a close similarity to two old acquaintances of mine; one a collector who did not know a lot about German helmets but was very interested and had plenty of money to spend, the other a prolific helmet faker from the earlier days. The two were good friends and the collector trusted his friend to sell him authentic helmets. He sold him dozens of all types, SS camos, you name it. Years later, the collector had them independently appraised and found them ALL to be Norwegian reworks that had been painted up and decaled. These were clumsy fakes by today's standards but did fool many back in the 70s-80s.
The collector confronted the dealer and told him that he knew his collection was fake, but if he would just sell him an authentic M38 SD para helmet, he would forgive him for the fakes. I visited this collector after our mutual friend, the dealer, had passed on and he showed me the M38. It was an emotional time as the dealer was our dear friend and we were saddened by our loss, but I did not have the heart to tell him that his M38 was an older forgery from the 1970's produced in England. These particular fake shells were marked 'T64' on the roll of the rim with a lot# at the rear also marked on top of the roll.
I suppose the moral of the story is that you don't trust the cat to guard your chicken-house and expect your investment will be intact when you return. In the same vein, you don't trust forgers to sell you authentic TR militaria and expect your investment to increase in value over time. You don't walk into a card game when everyone is in ca-hoots against you and expect to legitimately win.
Apparently, these "community stewards" that you speak of were a group of dealers, mods, admins, forum members, collectors and such who were busy building trust and reputations and establishing themselves as authorities in the hobby, people to be 'listened to' and trusted. Since forums were behind them, they had the power to abuse, sensor, and ban all serious dissent, and so those left were those in ca-hoots against the unwary and uninitiated, long on cash but short on experience. When inexperienced moneyed-up collectors stumble into this looking for an unissued example of a SD SS M42 for example, they are 'turned on' to some good sham-pain ruins that have the backing of published works, forum vetting, COA's, SS helmet "experts" and "scientific testing" - XRFACTS.
