NSKK Button Hoard

It has been a good week for searching. Four days I spent roaming the woods for rust, plus a few hours one rainy morning for some blueberry harvesting. Three of the days I zig-zagged my way through a vast forest, and dug lots of signals, so it was good I had work on thursday so that I got some relaxation too squeezed in this week.

Oh, and we had the first mornings with fresh snow on the tops,,feels a bit early.

Even though I lost count of how many signals I dug those days, I didn`t find many interesting relics. The best was perhaps a Notek lamp, a canteen, a bunch of cream tubes, two-three coins and some bayonet leather scabbards.

I alternated using the Fisher F5 and the Nokta Legend, using both in All Metal mode, and I can`t shake the feeling that I am getting more hits with the Fisher..

One of the days I spent a lot of time and energy on a rock filled ditch, only to uncover three large barrell bands deep underground, and the day I picked blueberries I collected a nicely preserved wehrmacht boot some other digger had left behind, so this hobby is quite the lottery.

And the blueberries, sooo many. I spent a couple of hours picking, and soon I had five or six liters, so in the afternoon I made the house smell delicious with lots of jam for the winter.

K98 scabbards and a Finnish or Norwegian canteen.

The little bell had some initials engraved.

Notek lamp.

A single gaming piece was all that was worth saving in a burn pit.

A well preserved soldier boot which I found next to a dug ditch.

A mystery part.

On Friday it was supposed to be raining a river, but it was dry and nice when I was driving to the site I was going to spend the day metal detecting, some bright blue holes in the clouds could even bring hopes of sun.

Halfway into the forest, on route to where I was making base camp, the river burst and it poured down with a fierce intensity. Luckily I had been caught in the wet before, so packed in my gear was a pair of rain trousers.

Since my digger-smock isn`t very waterproof I had ordered a rain jacket a week ago and as I got myself into the leg wear, my phone lit up with a notification that the parcel with the jacket had arrived...oh, the irony, why not an hour earlier??!!

No way if I was going back to civilization now as I was ready to search, so it was just embracing the suck and get digging.

The first few signals was a trail of crate parts, ending in a small dump with lots and lots of only crate corners, really strange.

Around a shrubbery I dug up a rifle cleaning kit and the handle from a mess kit, and under a large old birch the detector picked up some small aluminum and iron signals.

Buttons. Small aluminum buttons for shirts and trousers were hiding under the birch. I opened up some more of the ground and a uniform button jumped out. It was made of glass, and had text on the back. Kriegsmarine, I thought.

I tried cleaning away the wet soil and saw that it said NSKK Transportgruppe Todt !! Interesting. I had only found one of these before so I was pretty chuffed.

I scraped soil away with the bayonet and I found more and more buttons. Now also small zink buttons.

It took two hours of careful scraping to produce a large pile of buttons, many of the shirt ones but also a decent pile of the NSKK ones.

Later in the evening when I cleaned and sorted them I counted it to a total of 201 buttons, of which 60 were of the NSKK type!

In between all of them I had found parts from a single crate which I believe had held all the buttons, coz there were no signs of cloth or fire.

I was hoping to find a NSKK eagle or belt buckle so I spent the next hour checking signals around the place, and found a blank EKM, but what a rush it was the second before I turned it over to discover it was an unissued one.

Nearby I found a small pit with several glass bottles and one german canteen. Two of the bottles had embossed text, and when googling the name later I learned the bottles were from a British brewery, Mitchells & Butlers LTD.

Both were from 1942 and it made sense to find them there as the Brits had overtaken the camp in 1945 and used it to filtrate wehrmacht troops.

I was soaked and covered in mud as the rain never stopped, but I had a lovely time anyway. I had strayed off my original plan for the day, which had been to search a specific area of the camp, so now with the evening approaching I hurried over there to check if my theory would hold.

The theory was that this slope which I had never searched could be the home of a thousand relics, and a few meters down it Herr Metaldetektor shouted out loud.

Here were relics! I opened up a section and brought food tins and bottles to the surface. The lid of a Norwegian mess kit, with a strange looking shaving mirror ( I think..) and parts of a crushed radio,, definitely going back there one of the next days.

Thanks for reading :) I hope you have a great week :)

Handle from a mess kit.

I found a patch of tiny strawberries, yummy.

Uniform button made from glass.

NSKK Transportgruppe Todt.

Lots of buttons.

Sadly it was a blank tag. The adrenaline was running freely as I turned it over.

Bottles.

Is it a shaving mirror? It is foldable.

Plastic placard.

This is how dirty it became after rolling in the mud all day.

The first snow on the tops.

201 buttons.