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I'm accepting offers through the end of January 9 for a 1943 Olympia no. 8 with the SS runes. The current high bid is $250. If you're interested, please contact me by e-mail at polt@xavier.edu.
Photos and my reasons for selling the machine are here:
Richard
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Thanks for the link, and your interesting comments (as well as others'). An interesting ethical question being posed.
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I don't know if I have an ethical gene missing, but I cannot clearly comprehend a moral or ethical issue here at all, unless one is of opinion that anything related to the fouler events in history is to be removed from sight as though it did not exist, which I am not. I believe that daemonizing such objects may actually generate an unhealthy interest, and that this attitude to history can only result in a distortion of one's understanding of it.
I don't ever hear anyone comment that a military typewriter of the same period from Japan should be similarly shunned, even though gross evil must be associated with that too. Personally, I put this down to the mass-media's insistence on a simplistic view of any and every topic; easily comprehended and easily recited, but that's just me.
I can, of course, understand someone not wanting to own this machine, but cannot see an ethical issue. Perhaps some think that simply possessing such a thing implies a certain concordance of outlook with the Nazis, or that ownership may create some such. I don't, and don't see how such could ever be assumed.
Several of my family died fighting the Nazis, and, for the record, I am no lover of those banal and filthy Nazi politics.
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Although I fully agree with Beak, and would like to comment at greater length about the odd practice of selectively singling out certain evils while completely ignoring others (there wasn't one country involved in the war - on either side - that wasn't guilty of heinous war crimes), I want to remind everyone that politics and religion are verboten subjects here because of their incendiary nature.
An Olympia Model 8 in nice condition can be had for $100, so whatever this particular machine ends up selling for, the difference will be the premium that its buyer placed on owning a machine specifically because of the runes.
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I sometimes see Enigma Machines floating around Ebay. I don't know, but I imagine some people would see it as Nazi memorabilia. I have German ancestry, my family came here after being disillusioned with the Nazi regime. I don't collect Nazi related stuff, but I find I'm curious about what role my family had in things.