H is for Heilpflanzen Des WHW

A bit of a bitty post, but like yesterday's it gets them in the tag-list and adds to the 'whole' on that tag - which you can find under each post (specific to that post) or down the right hand column of this page (all, alphabetically).

Taken from recent acquisitions and Adrian's stall at Sandown Park recently it's a return to the Winterhilfswerk Abzeichen or 'winter-help-work tokens'; some of the earliest plastics in our hobby, although there are a few non-plastic ones today.

Here we see five of the 1942 Berlin Guard set issued by the Gau (regional authority) of Berlin with one of the Police figures from a 1940 issue; he still has his hanging cord - with this you could pin the token to your collar or lapel to prevent yourself being 'button-holed' by another fund-raiser/seller down the road or the next day.

The military set; it's funny we've looked at these before briefly I think, and I now have a full sample of the foot figures in storage, but even with this post we still haven't seen them all here, the half-track is still missing as is the two-man vignette setting-up a range-finder, and this stick-grenadier is broken, so we will return to these at least once more, one day!

This was actually issued by the Deutschen Roten Kreuzes (German Red Cross) in 1941 and titled 'Examples of the Armed Forces'. Also absent are a second, more streamlined submarine (which - having no bow-wave - may be from the question-mark set we looked at ages ago, with the KMS Hitler-like carrier) sand a motor-boat with troops in.

It can be seen that propellers suffer loss and here all three types are missing parts of propellers.

On the left is a few more from the above set which have come in over the last few years, a Heinkel Bomber (early version with open roof-gunner position) which seems to be missing its propellers, but may have been converted to take little clear discs - now missing? The paratrooper - who was the largest-scaled figure in the set at around 35mm - is one of my favourites; this is my second, for painting at some point. Also a badge of a German soldier from a set for which I don't know the details.

On the right are various oddments; The bisque trawler-man comes from the occupations set of 'Industrious Germans' issued in March 1939, it was one of the larger sets with 20 figures (I think we've looked at the coal-miner before?) and all were given a pin-broach fitting on the reverse, again for wearing as a 'badge of contribution'! An earlier, similar set of regional costumes from 1937 in the same style look like a technicolour take on the Commonwealth dancing dolls!

The terracotta plaque has no method of wearing and was a common meme in WHW's, there being various sets of buildings, people, shields etc in the material, while the base-metal dog with semi-precious stone eye was part of another series of similar tokens which included sets of 'Germanic Swords & Daggers' (1939) and ' Historical Tomahawks and Battle-axes (1940), they're from page one of the 'how to militarise a nation' book!

Finally a vulcanised-rubber (or ceramic - it's hard to tell after 80-odd years) chicken's head which may or may not be a WHW token and may or may not be meant as a pencil top?

Some close-ups; The four artillery pieces donated to the blog by Wouter Wyland, shot from the other side from last time! My two planes, head on, and another submarine. The Pak-36/7 is almost HO-gauge compatible (wheels are a bit close together due to the semi-flat nature of the sculpt) and has a cavity number '2' on its underside.

The Stuka is slightly smaller that the MPC-Minis one we've looked at before, and both examples in these images seem to have miss-moulded wing-tips. Unsurprising in a nascent technology, and most are well formed with little flash or other signs of production problems; a few of the ships are miss-registered down the mould-split/join-line though.

The badge looks like it could have been made yesterday, not by a regime consigned to history 72 years ago! The glued-in sub-assemblies of the Stuka dive-bomber - if you invent polystyrene you have to invent polystyrene cement! - which has run up the sides of the fuselage, just as it would on my Airfix Boulton-Paul Defiant 30-odd years later; Doh!