INGO BLASS & THE OMSA CONNECTION

Readers who keep an eye on the international militaria auction scene may have noticed the sale in December 2011 by the German auction house Andreas Thies of “The Ernst Blass Collection, Part 1”. Ernst Erich Blass, sometimes known as Ingo, was a Hamburg dealer and collector who died in 2010. His shop, Militaria Ernst Blass, was on the Schauenburgerstraße in the city’s Altmarkt district. He was also known for his reference works, like Die Orden und Ehrenzeichen von Thailand, and occasional reprints of period references, like Der Lohn Der Tat, although the Blass edition was a smaller format monochrome reprint of the 1944 original, which was in colour. Blass also collaborated in the production of reference works, like the Hamelman-Martin book on the Orden Pour le Mérite, The History of the Prussian Pour le Mérite Order 1740 – 1918.

A Blass fake that caught out quite a few collectors in its day was the so-called “Reproduction Type 2” of the First World War Siamese Victory Medal, of which just 1,500 genuine examples were struck by the Siamese government after the war. However, Blass excelled when it came to the orders and decorations of his own country and of the states and principalities of pre-1918 Germany. Not that all of his output involved outright fakes. He produced Imperial medal bars comprising genuine orders and medals, using period rangliste to make up medal bars as worn by famous recipients at various points in their careers.

Blass was known for his large collection of Imperial German orders and decorations, as well as his knowledge of the orders and medals from other countries like, for example, Thailand. But some collectors and a few of his fellow dealers also knew old Ingo through his activities as a master forger. Perhaps it is going too far to describe the old scoundrel as a master forger, given that he merely commissioned top quality forgeries of various orders and medals, his talents lying in the care with which he picked the handful of dealers, auctioneers and collectors he trusted to pass these fakes off on unwitting buyers in Europe and the United States without flooding the market.

One of Blass’s associates in the United States was the late S. Gregory Yasinitsky, also known by his nickname of “Yash”. A former Military Policeman who served in World War Two and in Germany in the early years of the American occupation, afterwards joining the San Francisco Police Department, Yasinitisky was the founding member and longtime President of the Orders and Medals Society of America, or OMSA, which he set up in 1949. 

Born in China in 1927 to Russian emigrés, Sviatoslav Gregoriyevich Yasinitsky was also a militaria dealer, running The Medal Exchange in San Francisco whilst not really serving the city's taxpayers as a police detective. Yasinitsky is reported by someone of his generation who knew him well to have sold a considerable number of high end fakes. These included at least twenty “Godet” Oakleaves and Oakleaves and Swords, around forty Hero of the Soviet Union insignia and other Soviet orders from Rudolf Souval and around a dozen Medals of Honor supplied by a firm in the United States. Dr Kurt-Gerhard Klietmann who, like his compatriot Blass, was a member of the OMSA, supplied the "Godet" awards. Klietmann also supplied Yasinitski with very convincing Orden Pour le Mérite. And when Klietmann ceased trading, Ernst Blass stepped in to keep several of Klietmann’s trade customers, including the OMSA founder, supplied with equally convincing fakes and restrikes. 

OMSA Founding President Yasinitsk

Yasinitsky was described in his OMSA Journal obituary as an “energetic, funny and interesting individual”. Contemporaries certainly remember his amusing tales of carrying a pliers for gold from corpses he encountered whilst making his rounds as a policeman and detective. He was also known as a young patrolman for rolling drunks and robbing them. Fairly typical FSPD stuff of the times and doubtless very amusing to some of the social misfits who make up the ranks of the OMSA. Yasinitsky also invented all sorts of interesting stories to explain the fakes he sold through The Medal Exchange and the OMSA network, the Legend of Schloß Klessheim being one such fairy tale, which can be traced to an article by Yasinitsky in a 1972 issue of a magazine entitled Der Gauleiter. 

Several of the Imperial German medal bars presented on the Wehrmacht Awards Forum and the Gentleman's Military Interest Club (GMIC) websites over the past few years by various self-styled 'collectors' and 'historians' rang bells with anyone familiar with Blass' handiwork. Some readers may recall a lengthy debate on the GMIC in 2009 about a medal bar purchased at the Gunzenhausen militaria show in Germany by the American collector Paul Chepurko, known for his reprints of Imperial German rangliste and his involvement with the late Rick Lundström in relation to the Eric Ludvigsen archives, entrusted to Lundstrm by Ludvigsen’s widow through the intermediary of fellow OMSA luminary Jeff Floyd. 

Walter Model's medal bar? 

Chepurko put forward an argument that the medal bar had belonged to Walter Model at some point in the future Generalfeldmarschall und Brillantentrager’s career and that his knowledge of Imperial rangliste had allowed him to identify it as such. If some cynics were tempted to retort that this might be a tactic aimed at promoting interest in Imperial German medal bars and Chepurko’s intended sideline in digital copies and reprints of rangliste, they kept it to themselves for fear of being accused of ungentlemanly conduct by Chepurko and his sect-like fellow travellers from the WAF, an accusation bound to worry the GMIC management, which has never made any secret of its aversion to any controversy that might lead to ‘forum wars’ between the GMIC and its rivals. Those who wondered about the plans Lundström and Chepurko seemed to have for the Ludvigsen archive also remained silent out of respect for poor Lundström’s severely impaired mental state, which certain senior moderators on the GMIC did their best to conceal from members and which was rumoured at one point to be due to untreated Cat Scratch Disease. 

Rick Lundström

The widows of the late Eric Ludvigsen and George Seymour had entrusted their husbands' life work to Lundström on the understanding that it would be made available to collectors. Paul Chepurko did publish a limited edition volume containing some of Ludvigsen's work but some observers felt that his promotion of the alleged Wilhem Model medal bar on the pages of the GMIC website amounted to an admission that he was merely enrichening himself using the material in Lundstrom's care rather than helping the increasingly incoherent Lundström to realise the plans for the Ludvigsen and Seymour archives. Fifty copies of this book were published and sold for $31.00 each. When a few GMIC members challenged Chepurko, Lundström managed to get online and suggest that material from the archives had been misappropriated. When members engaged with Lundström, senior GMIC management figures sent them messages reminding them pointedly that Lundstrom was an asset to the forum. Asked directly if he had paid a percentage of the gross revenues from the book to the OMSA or to the Ludvigsen heirs, the normally voluble and volatile Chepurko never responded. 

Those familiar with the slick activities of crooks of the ilk of Blass and Klietmann probably felt a sense of déjà vu as they contemplated what seemed to be the promotion of Imperial German medal bars as a ‘new’ field of interest for the Anglo-Saxon collector. These medal bars have long had a following in Europe whereas Anglo-Saxon collectors have tended to dismiss them in the main as unattributable collections of baubles. The marketing of Imperial rangliste was bound to change these attitudes and to encourage collectors priced out of the Third Reich market by soaring prices to take an interest in this exciting new area of phaleristics. And promoting this new avenue on the GMIC rather than the largely discredited WAF made sense, especially as the management of the GMIC was increasingly unlikely to tackle anyone using their website for such purposes. 

Having created the market, of course, there would be a need to supply that market, which made certain militaria dealers very happy indeed. However, there was nothing new in this. Some readers of the thread about the alleged Walter Model medal bar on GMIC could have shed more light on the bar’s probable provenance were it not for Blass’s reputation for litigiousness. However, Ingo Blass was more likely to threaten lawsuits or have his lawyers send the proverbial $100 letter than to actually go to law. After all, he might have found himself having to explain some of his activities to the court and that would not have been useful to him. In any event, he died the following year. If Blass read the Walter Model Medal Bar thread, he probably smiled at its lack of subtlety. For readers familiar with the antics of what one wag has dubbed "the Wafia", it is a classic example of the usual suspects from the Wehrmacht Awards Forum playing away from home, using another forum as a proxy platform for their purposes. 

Blass specialised in putting together Imperial German medal bars as a sideline. His work was very convincing and his modus operandi consisted of flying just under the radar, so to speak, by introducing them to the marketplace without commentary. If people saw a medal bar like the alleged Model piece, with a decoration that caught their attention and pushed them towards a conclusion, it was not because Blass or whichever dealer acting as his frontman had made any claims about it. It was a smart way to sell unattributed orders and decorations for more than their individual worth. The buyer, believing he was getting a high-ranking officer’s medal bar for a bargain price, handed over his cash and scampered away with his prize as fast as his feet could carry him. 

If the lucky man then told all his friends that he had found General Freiherr Dr Affenschwanz's medal bar as worn from 1932 to 1937 and that it was a unique piece of history because Affenschwanz had been identified by  GMIC resident expert and "Yankee gentleman" Rickie Bonkers as a newly identified recipient of the Swabian Order of the Privy, that was entirely up to him. It should be noted that this is not to suggest that the alleged Walter Model medal bar promoted by the Wafia through the pages of the GMIC forum was made by Ingo Blass but a couple of readers familiar with Blass's wares think he probably made it. It may have been the work of an Englishman now living in California who was prominent on the London scene in the 1970s. One thing is fairly certain: it did not come out of the Godet ateliers in the late 1930s.

The alleged Walter Model medal bar "by Godet" 

An original 1930s medal bar by Godet

Making up medal bars was just a way for Blass to sell spare and, in the main, authentic orders and decorations. Blass was into more advanced fakery. Back in the 1960s, when Dr and Frau Klietmann were producing their own wares, Ernst Blass was having all sorts of orders and medals made by contacts of his who worked for the Madrid firm of Cejalvo. Blass later sourced his wares in Thailand and, interestingly, Kathmandu. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc provided Blass and others of his ilk with new sources for high end fakes of Imperial and Nazi German orders and decorations, including the Pour le Mérite, the more recent examples produced to Blass’s orders by skilled artisans in Hungary.  Blass’s fakes were very, very good but not perfect, which is why the old ploy of introducing variants described as previously unknown or unnoticed made sense.

The "Rounder": an Ernst Blass product made in Hungary

As readers will recall, one of the so-called Rounder KCs presented as a wartime piece by the Third Reich militaria world's newest expert Dietrich Maerz in his article on the Rounder variant was said to have come from the hoard of decorations liberated by American soldiers from a walk-in vault at Schloß Klessheim. The West Point Museum has three examples of the never-awarded German Cross with Diamonds, confiscated by the FBI from US Army veterans after the war. Mr Maerz has in the past asserted that twenty such German Cross insignia were found in Schloß Klessheim and was involved in authenticating several items from the alleged Klessheim "hoard" for the American dealer Jason Burmeister. 

The truth is rather more prosaic: There was an office in the Klessheim building in which stood a safe of fairly normal proportions. It is probably true that US Army combat engineers cracked this safe open. They certainly had the means.It is known that a number of GIs made off with valuable decorations and other objects made of precious metals, some inlaid with diamonds, from this safe. It is a matter of record that the US authorities tracked down these soldiers after the war and confiscated these items, some of which are on display in the West Point Museum. Some of the unawarded, cased Knight's Crosses of the War Service Cross and other items in circulation said to have some from the safe at Schloß Klessheim could have done so but the safe was not the Fort Knox-style walk-in vault of the legend invented by the founder of the OMSA to make it easier to place various high end confections emanating from Klietmann and other forgers with moneyed American collectors. 

Authenticating the Rounder

As for the 'Rounder' Ritterkreuz that had so many people hoping it was a genuine wartime variant of the award, two well-placed sources in the trade who prefer to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, have confirmed that these crosses were supplied to the late Ernst Blass early in the 2000s by the same Hungarian outfit responsible for the better quality fakes of German, Austrian and central European flight badges of the Imperial era, as well as the World War Two-style Hungarian Parachutist and Master Parachutist Badges challenged by at least one time-served collector and student of the subject but not before several dozen 'advanced collectors' had apparently shelled out five-figure sums to the cabal of usual suspects in Europe and the USA. 

One of the sources suggested that forty to fifty of these crosses were made in two runs, with half a dozen prototypes to test the market. As per the usual modus operandi, trusted dealers and collectors were used, as well as an up and coming new expert on the Knight's Cross who claimed in his seminal article to have the only known example bearing the PKA code number 7 for Paul Meybauer. More than thirty of these crosses are believed to have been sold at average market prices, which represents a gross of more than $200,000 against an estimated outlay of rather less than 5% of that sum. 

More recent attempts to pass high end fakes into the marketplace include the SS-Ehrenring and the SS Dinner Jacket or Mess Dress badge but the culprits, lacking the education and refinement of polished conmen like the late Ernst Blass and his predecessor Dr Klietmann, put too many of these fakes out at the same time and were rumbled. The Internet has made it easier for genuine collectors and students of phaleristics to expose fraudsters and conspiracies like this but the fact that we tend to end up having to do so via blogs because we are excluded from the mainstream forums should tell you most of what you need to know about the majority of military forums. Even when they start up with the best of intentions, they have a tendency to go bad, lending themselves to exploitation by bent dealers and their shills, who will take their persecution of anyone they perceive as a threat to quite extraordinary degrees.