There are many fake and reproduction Third Reich style eagles currently in collectors’ hands and for sale on the open market today. Some fakes and reproductions are legitimately purchased by collectors that are fully aware that the eagle is a reproduction. Collectors maybe happy to purchase a reproduction for various reasons including to fill a gap in a display that cannot easily be filled by an original item due to scarcity and expense, or for use in re-enactments, movies, TV show’s etc.
Some fakes and reproductions sadly however are produced, sold and traded for the express purpose of defrauding the innocent collector. Often the fakers as well as the sellers and the dealers are only too happy to make a profit from knowingly selling the fake and reproduction eagles as original examples. Fakes and reproductions can vary considerably in quality and accuracy and this section will investigate some of the most common fakes and reproductions and seek to explain the differences between them and the originals. Firstly however, there are some differences in the terminology used to describe non period original eagles as ‘Fakes’, ‘Recreations’ and ‘Reproductions’:
Fakes can be classified in three ways:
- Post-war period manufactured copies of original eagles sold as original
- Fantasy or fiction eagles produced post 1945 that are not of any known Third Reich period design
- Altered or modified original period eagle. The alterations and modifications are not original to the period and designed to increase the value and/ or desirability of the eagle. Eg adding a swastika to a non-swastika version eagle
Reproductions can be classified in two ways:
- Post 1945 copy or re-cast of an original eagle, sometimes from the original moulds, sometimes by the original artist for sale as a tribute or ‘estate cast’
- Period copy or re-cast of an original eagle, often in a different material than that of the original manufacture. Obviously these examples are the most difficult to authenticate as there is often no easy way other than the items provenance to determine whether it was manufactured during the period or more recently.
Recreations are defined as the following:
- Copies that have been made to exact proportion and exact detail of the originals– so what is the difference between a ‘Fake’ and a ‘Recreation’? – nothing other than the description given by the manufacturer to give little deserved credibility to the ‘recreated’ eagles they are selling.
Here we show just a small sample of some of the more commonly seen fake & reproduction eagles seen for private sale by collectors and dealers and at auctions, select from the pictures (below) that represent some of the styles of reproduction eagles available on the market today to see additional examples:
Note: We could easily find many hundreds of fake and reproduction eagles to post here, but the Third Reich Eagles site is primarily focused on displaying examples of the many wonderful original period Third Reich eagles. As such, we will only post a few representative examples of reproductions to assist collectors identify some of the many fakes and reproductions seen today. To be fair, many of these reproduction eagles have been openly sold as reproductions or sold without any warranty to originality meaning that both the sellers and buyers are aware that they are openly seen as examples that may not be original to the period.