Out of curiosity, what are the legalities of simply possessing these types of things. I know someone who has a Nazi Walther P38 that was taken off a dead Nazi by a now-deceased relative. Is it legal to have in the US?
That one should be. The laws on importation were generally lax (until 1968), and WWII bring-backs are not typically a big deal. Vietnam bring-backs are generally the same, not seen as a big deal. A police officer is far more likely to admire the weapon than he is to arrest you for possession of it. You have nothing to worry about.
Now, if you have an automatic weapon that your family member had in storage all these years, that has been illegal the whole time because it is required to be registered and the amnesty period for registration lapsed 24 years ago. Something like that will get you some serious jail time if you’re caught with it.
I’ll echo Doors here. WWII guns aren’t usually a big deal, unless, as he said, it’s an automatic/machine gun. Bad news there. You don’t want anything to do with those.
As to value of the typical WWII Luger/P38–they bring between $500-1000 US, depending on condition.
My dad brought home from WWII the air-cooled barrel and moveable bipod of a Japanese machine gun that he picked up off a beach when he was in the Pacific. No mechanism to it, of course, but he just put it in his footlocker and brought it back with him.
A lot depends on local laws. When my father passed away, his caregiver called me with the news and had a police officer there to fill out the paperwork. Dad had his M-1 from WWII with a lock on it to prevent firing. The police officer told me that if I wanted it, I would have to get a license from my county (same state) but the caregiver wanted it for her husband. I told them it was okay for her to have it.
Dad used to say he had brought home a Lugar but threw it away when my parents had children. He had kept the M-1 in the attic for decades until he had it cleaned out shortly before he died.
On a somewhat different note, when I was in the service in the early 1980s stationed in Japan, we were allowed to ship home items in what we called a FIGMO (have no idea what it stands for). One of the E-6 was trained to do customs work. He told me that he refused to allow the CO to send home some bags/camera cases that he bought in South Korea because they were obvious counterfeit items. The CO ended up mailing them home (different person ran the post office).
You’re kind of low on the Luger. They are among the most collectible handguns and I haven’t seen a $500 Luger in some time. At the last few shows I attended and on the auction sites they seem to be starting at around $800 these days with specimens that are in excellent condition going for much, much more. For rare variants and specimens of known provenance connecting them to somebody famous, the sky is the limit.
How “non functional” is enough to qualify? I mean, I assume you couldn’t bring an AK-74 that just had the trigger removed, but what if you had one that’d been completely crushed, or twisted (the whole thing, not just the barrel) into a pretzel shape? Does that even get flagged as a “deactivated weapon,” or is it just considered a piece of modern art at that point?
When I was growing up in the early 60’s most of the neighborhood kids fathers had been in WW2 or Korea.
There were a couple of boys whose fathers smuggled some pistols home when they got out of the service. They were in a bit of rough shape but still fireable weapons. Their dads removed the firing pins and glued a block of wood up into the magazine well and the kid had a real gun for a toy to play cops 'n robbers or cowboys 'n indians with. Not one of those kids robbed a convince store with it or got shot by a jumpy policeman. I don’t recall anyone questioning the practice of turning real guns into toys. Seeing that many toy guns looked very real back then, I don’t know if many people even noticed.
I’ve often wondered what happened to those “toys” after those guys grew up. But I don’t have any contact with them any more to ask them.
If you looked at the weapons they had for sale, exceedingly few of them appeared capable of firing, and even if you could fire it you would never want to. Most had rust, misaligned barrels or broken lockwork and all of them were around 100 years old. As I said, there were no functional modern weapons available for purchase. They were sold as curios, something you could hang on your wall as a discussion piece when you got home.
You would be arrested if you tried to ship an AK-47/74 in any condition whatsoever. I suppose you could argue that if the whole thing is messed up it’s useless anyway, but court-martials are not noted for their acceptance of semantic arguments.
One of my teachers fought in Europe in the Second World War (and was captured as a POW in the Battle of the Bulge). He once said that when his platoon found a house/bunker that had a number of “souvenirs” in it, they would pull the pin on a grenade and threw it in. More times than not, there was a second explosion indicating the Germans had booby-trapped it.
Period articles from Stars and Stripes that I have read clearly state that there was a thriving market for souveniers among US military personnel during WWII. They bought, sold, and traded extensively among themselves. This is why I find it humorous that almost every family heirloom war souvenier (but especially Lugers) has the same story attached “Grampy/dad/Uncle Zeke took this off a dead German officer.” I’ve heard a different story exactly once: “Dad’s unit captured what must have been an armory or arms repair depot. There was a whole pile of P-38’s and each of them took one.”
I’ve never heard, but hope to, “Grampy/dad/Uncle Zeke won this in a card game with a truck driver from Peoria,” or “Grampy/dad/Uncle Zeke traded a bottle of scotch for this.”
That was a plot point on an episode of “Black Sheep Squadron.” They were swapping “genuine Japanese battle flags” (made by them out of surplus materials) to the REMFs for scotch.