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272VGD. · #1 (**permalink**) April 9th, 2008, 10:12 PM

Hi guys, here another topic dedicated to my(our) "dug up" work.
In 2006 we were invited by a friend who lives in the Amersfoort region (central Holland) to dig in some of the biggest dump holes in Holland. Where after the German surrender in 1945 many of the material of the German troops where dumped in a massive dump hole. Mostly just the standard gear, helmets, K98 ammunition bags, gasmasks + containers, hautentgiftungs sticks, weapon magazines and other material! Of all kind of troops... Luftwaffe / Fallschirmjäger, Heer, Polizei, etc.
The spot is well known nowadays to many people, but we got there just in time to find some nice items...
The place was a huge rectangle ditch, and not a small one. Several meters wide (say maybe 15?) and a small 100(!!!) meters long!
All the material lay about 2,5 / 3,5 meters deep in the ground. But unfortunately that was just good news...
As I said the stuff lay about 3 meters deep, above that many rouble; bricks, barbwire, tar, rubber and even asbestos! Also unfortunately was that because of the weight of the rouble (and the Canadian Bulldozers) many items like helmets where cracked or where out of shape...
You can imagine the work we had to do to get near the good stuff. Because of all the rouble and the depth of the items a metal detector could not be used... so we had to dig on good luck. Taken the risk of finding nothing at all. We mostly dug in the middle of the night, because the spot lay next to military terrain. To give you another idea of the work we had to do, on our 3rd trip we started off on 07.00 am, it took us till 18.00 pm(!) to find our first helmet... meanwhile we where digging and digging... You can imagine this could not be done alone so we went with 3 a 4 friends every time we go.

We did 4 trips to that location, here you can see my part of our findings. This x 4 / 5 will give you an idea of the "total picture". And than imagine that many people where before and after us there on that spot!!!

Here some global pics of what came out and is in my posession.