Flea Market Found Battle Damaged German M35 Single Decal Army

[Airborne-Hunter]

My dad and I always split up at the flea market to try and cover more ground. So today he stops at the first booth and I quickly buzz the whole flea. While I've whipped through the whole place my dad somehow managed to find this one at the very first booth. It has somewhat unusual damage. It looks like it was almost clamped on each side and squeezed. Whatever did it, put a lot of force on it and put a massive crack down the back. The pressure points on each side are awfully similar so I do not think it was run over. Its like it got slammed between two symmetric points as the pressure points are nearly identical. In any case, it is pretty severely deformed, has a nice look and was surprisingly cheap.

Initially, when first looking at it, I thought the liner might have been Norwegian because of the color, but the more I looked at it, I don't think its been replaced. Its been in there a long time, there's plenty of rat poopy and spider nests in there still so the liners been in there for quite some time. The liner has a faint ink size stamp and two spots that appear to have names (only one shown - the other was too hard to photo). The piece of tape on the back skirt seems to be an American name and I think it either the vet who brought it back or his kid's name when he showed it at school. 

Any thoughts on what could have caused the damage? Best ABN  

[Mr.Jerry]

Neat helmet!  I would think this is what happens when you "get caught between a rock and hard place"

[qed4]

This may have been used in a test to see how much pressure a German helmet can take before it cracks. The US Army tests foreign equipment all the time looking for ways to improve our equipment.

[MichaelSemann]

Besides pickaxeing confiscated helmets, I seem to recall reading that the Soviets (and other forces) damaged helmets, bayonets etc. in this fashion to render them useless. Am I in error here?

[Airborne-Hunter]

Theres a couple great photos on the internet of turning German helmets in to colanders and pans. I have seen a photo of WW1 helmets being destroyed by pickaxing, but I don't think this was done on purpose to destroy equipment because the points of pressure are so small...putting this into a press with two sharp points like that would seem to be very dangerous...if it slipped it could shoot out and hurt someone....think of using a wood splitter, but with a point where the base would normally be. It wouldn't work very well or at all...and I wouldn't want my hand there to steady it either. 

As to testing, I would think it possible, but there were caches of unused equipment recovered. It would make more sense to use an unused helmet, as is done today. 

[bolo]

looks like it got damaged from heavy equipment , maybe after the war the helmet was in a  huge scrap pile and the machine they used to scoop it up smashed it, they didnt care much about scrap back then , they were probably stacks of war material in the scrap pile / junk yard.