A collector of Nazi artifacts

Recently, I got an email from a man named Darrell English who had read my blog posts from some months ago about an auction of Nazi paraphernalia.

I had written emphatically that I could never collect such evil stuff and wondered how anyone else could. I’d even gotten a few emails from readers who vilified me for that post – one of whom ranted that the Civil War was not about ending slavery. I have no idea how the Civil War and the Nazis are connected.

Then I got a much saner email from English, who’s been collecting Nazi, World War II and Holocaust items since he was 5 years old. “Google my name Darrell English to learn more about me and my work,” he wrote.

And so I did. One site told about a talk he had given at a community college, with photos of and text about his items. His local newspaper in North Adams, MA, wrote an article on him back in 2007. In several instances, he offered comments on stories about collecting World War II and Nazi stuff.

Intrigued, I wanted a collector like him to explain to someone like me the whys of collecting Nazi artifacts. So I asked him to answer a few questions by email.

He told me that he has 10,000 items in his collection, not all of them Nazi-related, and he’s been collecting for 40 years. He gives talks on the Holocaust and other subjects, and brings along items from his collection.

He collects, English says, because he has to. Many of the WWII veterans are dying off and he wants to make sure the world does not forget what the Nazis were and did, he said.

“You have to show it for what it is,” he said. “We’re not all insane. We’re not Neo. We’re just historians.”

Here are the answers to the questions I sent him, along with answers from a follow-up telephone interview:

How long have you been collecting Nazi memorabilia and how did you get started?

Blame Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes,” English said. He recalled Wallace doing a show in the 1960s that included items from World War II. English found some Nazi coins in his mother’s sewing basket in the attic that her uncles had sent her as a girl from the war. Then he went around his neighborhood asking for similar stuff.

“It kind of took off from there,” he said. “It started innocuously. … We just clicked.”

What was your first purchase?

“The first item I bought it was a belt buckle. I think I paid $2 for it.”

Why do you collect Nazi paraphernalia? Why is it important to collect it?

“The Nazis were fascinating, macabre, sick, twisted,” he said. “They started out in a benign way of trying to be this great society. They were going to elevate man in all society to its greatest ethos. Along the way, they twisted things, they subverted things.”

“Fifty million people were violated. They did it in such a manner that it was all legal,” he added.

Nazi soldiers would roll into a town and the killing squads – made up of men with law and medical degrees – would round people up and kill them, English said. “How can you get into their minds and tell them it’s acceptable?” 

He considered the Nazis “the most fascinating study of human nature. How a society could … go to the darkest realm of the human mind and get people to go along and make it seem OK. I don’t think anyone has come to the point where they’ve understood the why.”

Hitler is “our psychological bogey man. He’ll haunt us forever.”

What makes you a different collector, one who’s not mesmerized by the Nazis?

“Some people are transfixed the wrong way with the Nazi stuff. I’m not what I collect. I’m not a Nazi. I’m just an average guy who collects. I’m confident with that.”

“I collect to save a part of time in human history most folk would rather see burned, and I say if you do that, then you are only aiding the naysayers who are out there waiting for time to do its work. Once anyone who can remember what took place between the years 1919-1945 to 1948 (have gone), then the ones who say it never happened will stand up and say show us proof.”

“… I’m a preserver of this history.”

How many items do you have in your collection? Where do you store them?

“About 10,000 items, not all of them are Nazi. I collect everything that deals with World War II, but the Nazi are my personal fav. They are a study in human nature – an odd bit of human history.”

English says he has 300+ uniforms that he keeps in his attic. Other items are in rooms in his home, including 300 to 400 books. He was told that a museum to hold his collection would need 40,000 square feet of space and would cost about $60 million to build, he said.

Where do you buy your items?

Yard sales, auctions, antique shops. Ten years ago, he said, he got a call from a man who was clearing out an estate. The man had letters from GIs pleading with Virginia de Luce, who appeared in movies and Broadway shows, to send them pin-up photos of her. She had kept hundreds of the letters. (De Luce later infiltrated the American Indian Movement as an informer for the FBI.)

What’s the value of your collection?

“I do not put a price based upon what others might. To me, each item … tells a story all its own.”

What items do you have in your collection? The most historic? The most horrific?

“Photos/posters/uniforms/and a whole lot more. The Zyklon-B can must be the most horrific, although the photos of a (concentration) camp inmate at the time of liberation is the most gripping and sad. There are four pictures of the naked skeleton (of a man) walking around the yard. He is bending into a barrel looking for food. His dead body on a pile of other dead bodies. The last 40 seconds of this person’s life taken by a GI at the time the camp was freed.”

English sent me the answer to this question in an email. I had never heard of Zyklon-B, so I Googled it and saw that it was gas that the Nazis used in the gas chambers to kill humans. When I interviewed him, I asked him about the can.

Zyklon-B, he explained, was crystallized blue-green cyanide pellets that turned to gas when exposed to air. His can is empty. An Army nurse picked it up at a concentration camp, and years later gave it to him. For about a dozen years, it was on exhibit with about 60 other artifacts at a Jewish community center’s museum in Springfield, MA, he said. The exhibit has now closed.

What types of response do you get from people when you first tell them you collect Nazi paraphernalia?

“Most people are glad that someone like me is doing what I do. I have only run into one so-called Neo. A sad case in itself. He was a WW2 re-enactor. I met him a dozen years ago at a small museum a few friend of mine ran for about three years in Vermont. A lunch at an event we had going on, he started to talk to me that the Holocaust never happened. I went to one of the guys in his unit and told him what he just told me. He was kicked out of the unit.”

The man, a German-soldier re-enactor, told English that he had photos of Olympic-sized swimming pools in the camps, of ovens for baking bread, he said. This is the type of mis-information he wants to dissipate, English said.  

Where do you give your talks? How often?

He gives about 10 talks a year on the war at museums, schools, for organizations and more. He does a Holocaust presentation each year for a friend’s eight-grade class as part of a program in which the children participate. He brings his artifacts and is joined by a Holocaust survivor.

Do you collect other items?

He collects 18^th-century medical items from the Revolution, and anything dealing with the Free Masons “since I’m one,” he said. He also collects slave documents (he has a “Negro Passport” issued by the Confederate states), Ku Klux Klan memorabilia from the North (from places like York, PA) – “places people didn’t realize had Klan activity.”

He collects items starting from what he says was the official day World War I ended – 11/01/18 – to the day the second world war ended – Aug. 1-12, 1945. He has papers documenting both, he said.

His wife collects “home-front stuff” from WWII, including letters and jewelry, he said.

Tell me a little about yourself. What’s your background?

He’s loved history all his life, and it was his major in college. His father was an auctioneer, and so was he, though the field has gotten slow and he hasn’t done it in a couple years. He thinks he’ll collect for another 15 years and then call it quits.