Tuesday, 5 January 2016

"Nazi War Diggers" Laundered?


Change the writing, and hey presto (from Conflict Antiquities)
As is already being retweeted about, this made its way to UK television in the end: Channel 5 Saturday, January 9th, 2016 on from 7:05pm to 8:00pm World War II Battlefield Recovery (Documentary) . This scramble for WW2 relics in eastern Europe is described by the production company as a:
History series following the work of a team dedicated to saving the history of WWII's Eastern Front before it is lost forever. In Latvia, the team unearth what they believe to be an intact timber-walled German artillery command bunker abandoned in 1945. Illegal looting of WWII sites is rife in the area, so the team must work quickly to record and recover the contents. The finds include pristine magazine pouches, bayonets, gas masks, mess tins, hand axes, a soap dish and a watch.(Subtitles, Episode 1)
This is nothing more than the cancelled "Nazi War Diggers" with subtitles intended to give the impression that the filming does not show the whole story. One of the leitmotifs is that although the film suggests that the hoiking on each site was a relatively quick affair, each project took longer than the film suggests. That seems an odd way to go about making a "documentary" about responsible metal detecting - to make it look at every step as quite the opposite. If that is the case, those diggers must have been getting pretty smelly, putting on the same sweat and dust stained clothes day after day so as to make it look as if everything was filmed on one day. Let us hope the dirty diggers at least changed their underwear.Yuk.

Now this has been shown on Polish TV and I have watched most of it. My promised writeup did not appear, I found the notes the other day, I'll see if I can resurrect them. Meanwhile I will be watching again because, readers may mention, the Poles inexplicably pulled some of the scheduled episodes, including the one filmed in Poland itself. I will be watching out for that one, I have a letter to the State Prosecutor already written in a stamped addressed envelope and will not hesitate to send it if I see what I fully expect to see in the case of the dig on Polish territory. I also expect to see the permits these four diggers claim to have received posted online.

Please everybody tune in  and see what metal detectorists in action on a cemetery site are capable of, where two decades of PAS laissez faire masquerading as 'encouraging best practice' has got us (and what Britain is exporting to the rest of the world as "saving history"). Scandalous, pathetic, gruesome, appalling, disturbing, disgusting, negligent, insensitive, ignorant, and crass are just a few of the adjectives that came to my mind on watching this. See for yourselves which ones you would apply to what you are about to see. Most metal detectorists of course will be applying "diffrent ones M8".

Some of the coverage of the aborted Polish emission:
PACHI, 17 September 2015: 'The Return of "Nazi War Diggers" as "Poszukiwacze wojennych skarbów"
PACHI, 30 September 2015: 'Clearstory Statement on "Nazi War Diggers"
PACHI, 2 October 2015: 'How to "Recover History"from a battlefield?'
PACHI, 4 October 2015: "Nazi War Diggers" too bad for even Polish TV?'

Ambassadors for the hobby. According to the subtitles supplied
by their production company, these dirty diggers kept putting on
these same sweat-soaked and grubby clothes day after day. Yuk.

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