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I had begun walking back to the base camp to collect my stuff and go home when I dug a good signal. It was a fragment of a Nahkampfspange! The needle was twisted, so force had been used to break it in parts. I spent the next hour trawling the spot, piling any finds onto a rock so as to not dig them twice, but the rest of the badge was nowhere to be found.

Most of this week the weather was wet and nasty and I had to work a bit, so the only summery day I spent searching in the gebirgsjäger camp. I usually dig on most of the beeps given by the metal detector, and have found many treasures checking bad signals, it is an exhausting strategy though. Having found so many erkennungsmarken on my last searches I decided to go exclusively after good ones on this trip.

A little bit later the detector presented me with another strong and good signal. I cut open a piece of the ground and made eyecontact with half of an Erkennunksmarke. That was a surprise! It was dirty and looked a bit deteriorated so I couldn`t read it other than that I could spell `Geb`. I stuck the pinpointer into the ground and

The first signal the Fisher F5 picked up was a helmet! It was even visible as part of the back rim was sticking out of the ground by several inches. I got it out of the ground and shook out the soil that had accumulated inside it through the decades. In the helmet-shaped mass of soil and roots I could see parts of the leather and aluminum liner, but most of that had rotted away, only the chin strap was still intact.