East German/Polish Fallschirmjäger Wz.63 Helmet

Hi guys, today we're going to be taking a look at a pretty cool piece of Cold War history. Now this is a Polish WZ-63 paratrooper helmet and it was also prominently used by the East German paratrooper battalion Fallschirmjäger. So I have a pretty clean model that I would like to show to you. Now a little bit of background getting into this. One of the coolest details about this is that it was actually used in Poland up until March of 2015 until they received their new equipment. So despite being, you know, at that point 50 years old, they were still using this helmet. And you'll notice that it's a pretty, you know, round shaped helmet. Very, very round and not too many, you know, crazy features. It's basically just a bump helmet, you know, protect you from hitting your head, stuff like that. Not really too much ballistic potential. It's just, you know, hard steel. It does have a very nice little leather cushion around the edge. One note about these helmets, it's very hard to find larger sized ones. Allegedly, they're all made from the same size steel and the only difference is the interior lining. I'm not sure if that's correct though because allegedly there are larger sizes. I personally have a very big head so this doesn't really fit me very well. I have to really force it on in order for it to fit. As you can see, this is a very clean example though. The leather is very soft, still very colorful and there's very little signs of use or wear on the helmet. You'll notice that it does have a few nets. This outer one is like the outer shroud. I'll take it off and it's basically, you know, you can put foliage on this main green net and then cover it with the other smaller net. I'm just trying to get this smaller hook taken off. There we go. You can see here, we've kind of got this smaller shroud, I guess you can call it. You can probably put this over your face or on the neck. It's very small and it basically only has these small clips and then it also has these other, I wouldn't call them clips, but they're just little things that you can use to hold on. So that's pretty neat and then here it is without that. Just the green, you know, band and the way this goes on, it's actually a little tricky at first. I couldn't really figure out how, but it's basically you just tie it pretty tight around the helmet and then kind of force it on. In order to get this on, you really need to have it very tight so it won't go on unless you have it tight enough. If you have it too loose, it'll never go on and I guess I'll try to demonstrate it to you. So if we loosen it up, we'll see it, you know, it kind of comes off. So the key is really to get it on one side and then you really just have to keep it very tight and then as you tighten it up, you can tie it. You can do a square knot or whatever you want, but basically the key is keeping it very tight or else it'll just come right off. I'm going to take it off anyway for the purposes of this video so you can just get an idea of what it looks like there. So the only really way you can tell the back of the helmet versus the front of the helmet, the back of the helmet has this, you know, string right here to adjust the, you know, side leather pieces which cover your ears and there's also a strip of foam in the back right here, you can see. Let's see, yeah, so there's foam back here to protect the back of your neck and yeah, that's pretty much the way you can tell and then obviously this is the chin strap. So in order to secure the chin strap, you got to put it underneath these two metal buckles kind of and then fold it under itself and then depending on, you know, how long it is, you can tuck it underneath here and then this goes underneath your chin and then this is supposed to go over your ears. So yeah, one of the things, you got these two, you know, ventilation holes, a few rivets on each side and then a final one in the back right here and then you do have this kind of like leather padded material that goes all around the edge. Basically, the way to adjust it to fit your head, if you have one small enough that can fit because the most common sizes you're going to find are size small to small medium, 56, 57, you adjust this interior leather lining and the way you can tell the size, FYI, is by flipping this upside down, this leather lining and you see here it's stamped 57 and that's about a medium, I guess, but it's still a pretty small medium at that and then you have these other markings, I'm not sure if you're a manufacturer but a lot of these were made, so who knows exactly, so we have like one one here and honestly, not all of these will have the inner stampings, some of them don't and honestly, the stampings themselves can be deceiving because I actually bought a helmet on eBay that had a stamping of 60, however, the size is exactly the same as this helmet, there's no difference in the size and maybe I'll make a video comparing them and, you know, wondering how they got to that conclusion, how they got to the conclusion that, you know, this was a size 60 or why they stamped a size 60 when it's really just a size 57, that was a little disappointing because it didn't really fit but, you know, it is what it is, I'm trying to see if there's anything on the inside but I haven't really found any sort of stamping on the inside of the helmet, so I'm not really sure if there's any information there but overall, you can tell that this is a very clean piece, there's just very minimal wear on all the leather, probably unissued and then the paint has like no damage, no scratches or anything of that nature, so overall, just a very good example, you could almost say museum quality but yeah, maybe I'll try to show you how to put this back on, so, you know, what you got here is basically just two pieces, you got the main net piece and then this little string which basically just goes all throughout the inside, so what you got to do is, you know, tie it to an estimated tight, you know, how tight you think it might be, so we'll just tie it around like this, this tight and then the net itself, we'll get, we'll try to put it from, you know, one side on the back and you might have to use other things around you to maneuver it on because it can be a little bit tricky, so right now, I think we have it a little bit too loose, it's not tight enough, so we're going to have to get it a little bit tighter than this, so we'll go back to our thing, try to tighten it up a little bit more, so make it pretty tight and we'll try to pull it over the edges here, pull this side over, pull that side over and then we'll just make it like that and then tie it, so there you go, it's not super hard once you know how to do it but if you don't know the trick of getting it really tight, it can be very difficult to try to get this on and keep it on and it was very frustrating at first when I didn't know that you had to just make it really tight, so I was like why is this thing not staying on, like I thought you had to make it looser but no, you just have to make it tight and yeah, there you go, but overall, pretty cool piece of cold war history in terms of pricing, these things are a little up there now, you can find them, you know, anywhere between, you know, like 70, 80 dollars to like 110 dollars, people just charge different amounts, if you search more specific terms, just if you search like WZ-63 or Polish paratrooper helmet, it could be a little bit cheaper but if you search stuff like East German paratrooper, then it's going to be a little bit more expensive just because people know, you know, that East German stuff is expensive nowadays, so there you have it folks, WZ-63 Polish helmet, hope you guys enjoyed this video, thank you for watching.