Have just started reading a biography of Jim Atwood. He would be considered one of the founders of WW2 German blade collecting, as well as other 3rd Reich memorabilia. He was stationed in Berlin in the early sixties and began searching out ex WW2 dagger and sword manufacturers in Solingen. Uncovered amazing things, one offs and vast quantities. Ran afoul of the law on import issues but continued to be an early if not controversial force in collecting. A fascinating read. available on Amazon.

I have been waiting for this to come out.

 

Supposed to be a big section written by George Petersen from when George worked for him in the 60's.

I have been waiting for this to come out.

 

Supposed to be a big section written by George Petersen from when George worked for him in the 60's.

Yes there is a section with George and a few other names we will all recognize. There was no deal too big for Jim Atwood or no item too rare. amazing heady stuff.

I tried looking for it but only articles about Atwood pop up. What is the name of the book?

Thanks.

Amazon has it, search in books with his name, that is the title. I downloaded the Kindle version for $9

Amazon has it, search in books with his name, that is the title. I downloaded the Kindle version for $9

Jim Atwood is the title

https://www.amazon.com/Jim-Atwood-Entrepreneur-Risk-Taker-Artist/dp/1729167934/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Jim+Atwood&qid=1562968840&s=gateway&sr=8-1

I just finished slogging through my copy of the "Jim Atwood" book by Kenneth Alford and it is interesting. It was clearly written by two people, as indicated in the book, as it changes styles in a rather maddening manner as one reads from front to back. Alford will not win any literary prizes and frankly I would have thought twice before putting my name on this book.

 

Having said that, the book names names and is pretty up front concerning Jim Atwood's various shenanigans as a collector and arms dealer. I knew Atwood very slightly back in the sixties and had a couple of unsatisfactory deals with him back in the day. For a time he was considered a fraudster villain and there was an attempt to resurrect his name in the later part of his life. He was certainly a fascinating character and that does come through in this book although it is hard to read.

 

Just don't expect a literary masterpiece or even a competent narrative.

Sources:

 

https://johnsonreferencebooks.com/product/the-daggers-and-edged-weapons-of-hitlers-germany-by-james-p-atwood-30514/

 

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/49002954/james_powell-atwood

 

 

"NEWSLETTER NO. 209 AUGUST 2, 2016

 August 1, 2016 

Fake and Fantasy German Edged Weapons for Fun and Profit

 

The faking of German swords and daggers began in the early 1960’s when an enterprising American, Lt. Col James Atwood, once of the United States Army and later of the Central Intelligence Agency, then resident in Germany, went to the German city of Solingen and bought up as many bits and pieces of Third Reich German daggers and swords as he could find. The great majority of these surplus pieces were factory rejects. Missing parts were newly manufactured and the completed items were sold as “parts daggers.”

 

As the original parts were exhausted, new ones were made until, in the end, the entire dagger was constructed of totally fake parts.

 

Not satisfied with copying pieces which did exist prior to the end of the war, unscrupulous dealers began to invent items which did not such as the “Himmler Damascus Presentation Letter Opener” and the NSKK “prototype” dagger and to put these into books allegedly produced as “historical reference” works.

 

An enterprising English author of a work on fake daggers once grafted a poor copy of a rare “diplomatic bayonet” grip onto a pre-Third Reich police bayonet, without bothering to remove the police markings from the scabbard. Although the hilt was crude and the fit was terrible, this piece was sold to a California collector for over $7,000 and is to be found in a standard reference work as “the only known example” of a very rare item. After the death of the owner, it was resold for $15.000.

 

It is, however, in the area of fantasy pieces that the great bulk of the fakes are to be found.

 

For instance, a copy of the so-called “Göring Wedding Sword” was hand crafted by the Solingen firm of Carl Eichhorn (before it was closed for fraud) at the order of an American dealer, James Atwood, in the early 1960’s, and it was conveniently “discovered” in the hands of a willing ex-GI friend and, after considerable helpful publicity in several books, sold and subsequently resold for bigger and bigger, and finally, enormous profits.

The original of this sword, presented to General Göring by his staff on the occasion of his wedding in 1935, is in a West German collection where it has been since 1948.

 

Another fantasy piece attributed to Göring is the so-called “Industrial Dagger” alleged to have been prepared for presentation to Göring by a group of German industrialists. This piece is a fantasy although a photograph has surfaced allegedly showing the piece on the wall of the original plant. It should be noted that faked photographs are extremely easy to produce by even a semi-skilled photographer.

Also forged has been the so-called “Reichsmarschall Dagger” the original of which was made for Göring by the students of the Berlin Technical Academy in 1940.

 

The fake piece, once in the hands of the notorious dealer in fakes, “Roger Steele”, has a serious error in the marking on the cross guard. On the original, there were two Balkan crosses engraved on the top of the cross guard, one on either side of the grip while on the fake, these crosses are replicas of the iron Cross. The amusing story connected with the “appearance” of this rare piece is that it was “discovered” in a London costume shop, covered with brown paint!

 

Roger Steele (aka Gaylord E. Wessock) of Hollywood Military Hobbies was known to have well-developed sense of humor when it came to inventing stories to accompany his exotic fakes.

Other Third Reich fantasy pieces include the “Sepp Dietrich Honor Sword”, the “Sepp Dietrich Honor Dagger”, the “Theodor Eicke Honor Dagger” and a number of Damascus-bladed SS officer’s swords alleged to have been made by the craftsman Paul Müller and presented by Himmler to various SS officials. At least one can say of these swords (most of which were alleged to have been made after the Müller forge at Dachau was closed permanently in the year 1940) is that the fittings are generally original even if the overly-antiqued blades are not.

 

Another incredible fantasy item is the “Adolf Hitler Ehrenburger Sword”, a copy of a 14th century piece which appears on the cover of this book. This piece was originally presented to Hitler by the city of Solingen and photos of it can be found in the city archives. However, that having been said, the one shown in a number of books on German edged weapons is not the same one show in period photographs. Col Atwood had one of these made at the same time he had the Eichhorn factory manufacture another copy of the Göring Wedding Sword and the Göring Industrial Dagger. A quick comparison of the Damascus patterns on the pictures of the original are sufficient to expose the fake.

 

There is also an Italian Fascist dagger with an ivory hilt allegedly presented by Mussolini to Hitler in 1937 and last, but by no means least, a so-called “Eastern Official’s Dagger” made from a wartime drawing of a proposed item which was never produced."

 

Source:

 

https://adroystermilitaria.com/newsletter-no-209-august-2-2016/

 

"JAMES P. ATWOOD: The CIA'S Dagger King

 

A most interesting individual was James P. Atwood (April 16, 1930-July 20, 1997).

 

During the Iran Contra affair, General Secord's arms shipments, arraigned through the CIA, transferred weapons destined for Central America to Merex Corporation, (Merex International Arms) of Savannah, Ga. The Merex address was occupied by Combat Military Ordinances Ltd., controlled by a James P. Atwood.

 

Atwood, a retired Lieutenant Colonel of U.S.Military Intelligence, (and later a CIA contract worker), stationed in their Berlin office, was involved in major arms trades with CIA-sponsored international buyers, specifically Middle Eastern Arab states.

 

Among other titles, Atwood became known as the 'Dagger King' because of his manufacture and merchandising of a large number of German ceremonial swords and daggers from the Third Reich period.

 

As a top US Army Intelligence agent and important CIA contract worker and former FBI employee, Atwood ran guns, drugs, counterfeit rare German daggers, stolen archives and much more in and out of various countries from his headquarters in Savannah, Georgia.

 

Merex systems was founded by Otto Skorzeny's associate Gerhard Mertins in Bonn after the war and was considered a CIA proprietary firm. Merex was close to and worked with the BND, the German intelligence service evolved from the CIA-controlled Gehlen organization and currently heavily under its control. Monzer Al-Kassar utilized the Merex firm for some of his weapons transactions with the CIA-controlled international weapons cartel.

 

Atwood was involved with Interarmco, run by Samuel Cummings, an Englishman who ran the largest arms firm in the world. Sam Cummings got his start working with the CIA to procure weapons for the 1954 coup in Guatemala. Cummings died in Monaco Carlo with a country place at Villars in the Swiss Alps where he resettled in 1960 because he had looted his CIA employers and found European residence safer than Warrenton, Virginia.

 

Interarms (formerly Interarmco and officially the International Armaments Corporation) was the world's largest private arms dealer, and once had enough weapons in their warehouses to equip forty U.S. divisions

Also connected with Atwood's firm were Collector's Armory, Thomas Nelson Prop, and a George Petersen of Springfield, Virginia, and Emmanuel (Manny) Wiegenberg, a Canadian arms dealer and look into Atwood's role in supplying weapons and explosives to the Quebec Libre movement.

 

Atwood's activities are linked to the CIA's Robert Crowley, Deputy Director of Clandestine Affairs (who knew him and disliked him), to Jim Critchfield and a number of other CIA luminaries.

Arrested by the Army's CIC in the early 60s, for misuse of government mail, tax fraud and other matters, Atwood got the CIA to force the charges against him dropped. All the paperwork was supposed to have been destroyed but a copy of the 62 count indictment, plus the Chicago Federal judge's orders, have survived.

 

Atwood operated in the Middle East, Germany and Central America. He sold US secrets to Marcus Wolfe of the Stasi and the BND photographed them together in East Berlin.

 

He smuggled guns into Guatemala and Nicaragua and drugs into the US.

Atwood's role in supplying weapons and explosives to the Quebec Libre movement. The head of the Canada Desk at the Company was actively encouraging this group to split away from Canada. This is a chapter that the CIA does not want discussed.

 

Atwood's connections with Skorzeny and the IRA/Provo wing make dramatic reading. One of Atwood's Irish connections is the man who ran the cell that blew up Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1979. There is also the shipping of weapons into the southern Mexican provinces by Atwood and his Guatemala based consortium, Oceanic Cargo.

 

Atwood had a number of ex-Gestapo and SD people on board, some of whom were wanted for war crimes.

Both Schwend and Klaus Barbie formed Transmaritania which was a shipping company that also generated millions of dollars in profits from the cocaine business. They purchased their weapons from another SS colleague, Colonel Otto Skorzeny who had been head of SS Commando units towards the end of the war, later worked for the CIA and had started the Merex weapons business in Bonn after the war. Another Atwood contact was one Walter Rauff, a senior SD officer, friend of Dulles and once head of the SD in Milan (after a tour in Tunisia as head of the SD there during Rommel's campaign in Africa.)

 

The Rauff story is even more entertaining than the Barbie one and more disruptive when it becomes public. Rauff worked for the CIA, lived unmolested and well-protected by the CIA, in South America.

 

While Atwood was involved in supplying weapons to Cuban insurgents for the Bay of Pigs incident, he stated to a number of his associates that he learned of highly classified information on the accidental release, in Florida, of deadly toxins that the CIA was planning to use in advance of the invasion to "soften up" Castro's militia.

 

The designated head of the CIA, Porter Goss, was a CIA agent in Florida at this time, was involved in the planning and expected execution of the Cuban invasion and suddenly became "very ill", as his specs on Google point out, and had to retire. Atwood told his friends that Goss, later a Florida political figure, was a participating party in this specific part of the CIA invasion plans.

 

The head of the Canada Desk at the Company (CIA) was actively encouraging this group to split away from Canada. This is a chapter that the CIA does not want discussed.

One of Atwood's Irish connections is the man who blew up Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1979 and there was also the shipping of weapons into the southern Mexican provinces by Atwood and his Guatemala based consortium. Atwood had a number of ex-Gestapo and SD people on board, some of whom were wanted. Klaus Barbie was also connected.

 

Barbie, who was Gestapo chief in Lyon, France, during the war, worked for the CIC after the war and fled to South America when his American handlers tipped him off. Barbie took some of the hidden Nazi gold and invested it in several businesses and also continued to prosper by starting the Estrella Company which sold bark, coca paste, and assault weapons to a former SS officer, Frederich Schwend in Lima, Peru. Schwend had been trained by the OSS in the early 1940s after he had informed Allen Dulles that the German SS had hidden millions in gold, cash, and loot as the European war was winding down.

 

Both Schwend and Barbie formed Transmaritania which was a shipping company that also generated millions of dollars in profits from the cocaine business. They purchased their weapons from another SS colleague, Colonel Otto Skorzeny who had been head of SS Commando units towards the end of the war, later worked for the CIA and had started the Merex weapons business in Bonn after the war. Also a person to consider is one Walter Rauff, a senior SD officer, friend of Dulles and once head of the SD in Milan (after a tour in Tunesia as head of the SD there during Rommel's campaign in Africa.)

 

The Rauff story is even more entertaining than the Barbie one and more disruptive. Rauff and the notorious Mengele worked for the CIA.

 

In 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was considerable concern expressed in US intelligence circles about the whereabouts, and also the security of, certain ex-Soviet military tactical atomic warheads. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union launched R&D to miniaturize and improve reliability of nuclear weapons.

 

Development activities included strategic systems for the Navy; cruise missiles, aviation bombs and artillery projectiles [the smallest nuclear charge was developed for a 152mm artillery projectile]

The model is based on unclassified data on the components in an atomic artillery shell, to see if such a system could be reassembled in a suitcase. Indeed, as it turns out, the physics package, neutron generators, batteries, arming mechanism and other essentials of a small atomic weapon can fit, just barely, in an attache case.

 

The result is a plutonium-fueled gun-type atomic weapon having a yield of one-to-ten kilotons, the same yield range attributed in a 1998 US media interview by General Lebed to the Russian "nuclear suitcase" weapon.

The smallest possible bomb-like object would be a single critical mass of plutonium (or U-233) at maximum density under normal conditions. An unreflected spherical alpha-phase critical mass of Pu-239 weighs 10.5 kg and is 10.1 cm across.

 

In 1992, following a successful treasure hunt in Austria, where he and author Gregory Douglas located and dug up a small fortune in gold and silver coins buried in the last weeks of the war by SS General Odilo Globocnik, James Atwood, the former Interarmco people and an Israeli Russian named Yurenko (actually Schemiel Gofshstein) formed a consortium in conjunction with James Critchfield, retired senior CIA specialist on oil matters in the Mideast to obtain a number of these obsolete but still viable weapons.

 

Both Critchfield and the Interarmco people had, at the behest of the CIA, supplied weapons to the rebels in Afghanistan during their protracted struggle with the Soviet Union. Critchfield worked with the Dalai Lama of Tibet in a guerrilla war against Communist China and headed a CIA task force during the Cuban missile crisis. He also ran regional agency operations when the two superpowers raced to secure satellites first in Eastern Europe, then in the Middle East.

 

In the early 1960s, Critchfield recommended to the CIA that the United States support the Baath Party, which staged a 1963 coup against the Iraqi government that the CIA believed was falling under Soviet influence. Critchfield later boasted, during the Iran-Iraq war that he and the CIA "had created Saddam Hussein." With the growing political importance of Middle East oil, he became the CIA's national intelligence officer for energy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, then an energy policy planner at the White House.

 

He also fronted a dummy CIA corporation in the Middle East known as Basic Resources, which was used to gather OPEC-related intelligence for the Nixon administration.

 

Critchfield was the chief of the CIA's Near East and South Asia division in the 1960s and a national intelligence officer for energy as the oil shortage crisis began in the early 1970s.

 

Officially retiring from the CIA in 1974, Critchfield became a consultant, corporate president of Tetra Tech International, a Honeywell Inc. subsidiary and which managed oil, gas, and water projects in the strategic Masandam Peninsula.

 

It sits on the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the West's oil is transported. At the same time, Critchfield was a primary adviser to the Sultan of Oman, focusing on Middle East energy resources, especially those in Oman.

 

Since at least 1981, a worldwide network of independent [i.e., no direct U.S. government ties] companies, including airlines, aviation and military spare parts suppliers, and trading companies, has been utilized by the CIA and the U.S. government to illegally ship arms and military spare parts to Iran and to the Contras.

These companies were set up with the approval and knowledge of senior CIA officials and other senior U.S. government officials and staffed primarily by ex-CIA, ex-FBI and ex-military officers.

 

CIA-controlled companies include Aero Systems, Inc., of Miami, Arrow Air, Aero Systems Pvt. Ltd of Singapore, Hierax of Hong Kong, Pan Aviation in Miami, Merex in Georgia, Sur International, St. Lucia Airways, Global International Airways, International Air Tours of Nigeria, Continental Shelf Explorations, Inc., Jupiter, Florida, Varicon, Inc., Dane Aviation Supply of Miami, Parvus, Safir, International Trading and Investment Guaranty Corp., Ltd., and Information Security International Inc., Zenith Technical Enterprises, Ltd., Mineral Carriers, Ltd. Air America, CAA, and Information Security International Inc.,Air Asia Co., Ltd., Arrow Air, Civil Air Transport (CAT) , Dane Aviation Supply, Intermountain Aviation, SODIMAC Southern Air Transport

And they control another three hundred committees, 'institutes', media entities and other ventures.

 

Atwood had a bad habit of talking entirely too much while drinking and when his interesting conversations, filled with unwelcome detail, got to the ears of senior CIA officials, poor Atwood had a sudden "brain embolism" while lunching with two CIA friends and fell face-down into his salad.

 

Sic transit Gloria mundi!"

 

Source:

 

https://forum.germandaggers.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showthreaded&Number=333064

 

 

Addendum:

 

https://www.warrelics.eu/forum/book-discussions-reviews/jim-atwood-biography-kenneth-alford-803769/

 

https://www.warrelics.eu/forum/book-discussions-reviews/jim-atwood-biography-kenneth-alford-803769-2/