Scott, you may want to reach out to these folks at the Commemorative Air Force (FKA Confederate Air Force) and consider donating them.. You might get some sort of tax incentive?
Commemorative Air Force
Great. They atleast might know if it is just a box of garbage, or if it is worth anything.
I am kind of a WW2 buff. I wanted to start collecting stuff. I found a guy selling 180 piece Italian medal collection for $750 for the whole lot. Figured it was a good deal, so bought it without identifying any of them. Turns out, it is more of a WW1 collection, with many German pieces too. It was his great uncles collection that he collected during his service. I got as much info as I could about the uncle and found his eulogy placing him in Italy during the liberation of Italy from Fascism. My best guess is that during the raids of Italian officers houses, the medals were collected. That explains how he got many WW1 medals in the collection. From lower ranked military positions in WW1, that were now officers in WW2. Long story short, it ends up being one of the largest collections of Italian medals I have seen in one place (outside of an Italian Museum), and were all collected by one man, during his actual service, not an interested collector who had collected them over the years. In my eyes, it makes the value and the collection that much more special.
After roughly 100 hours in deciphering them, I have only been able to catalog 80 of them. So, the last 100 are either super rare, or were never cataloged in Italian medal books. Based on the 80 I have cataloged, the sold auction value of the pieces is roughly $18,000. I am projecting the whole collection to top over $30,000. While this sounds great, it was not the purpose to make a profit on it. More of my interest is in keeping the memories going of when we were a great nation and all of the sacrifices made around the world to get that shithead Hilter out of power.
I have had collectors ask if I would sell certain pieces, but, I refuse to break up the original collection. I catalog each piece, number it, write down the explanation, and record current sold auction values. This info gets printed out and displayed under the display of medals I have made. The display case is made by me, and has unbreakable plastic on the front, and all fasteners are tamperproof, so they cannot easily be removed from my wall. This is only the first one with 50 pieces, I will need to build 2-3 more of these. Once I can decode all of them, and have them in display cases, I will probably loan out to display in museums.
Here is a pic of the first display. One German Deathhead squad badge in there is worth $900 by itself. CIL and GIL Hitler youth badges also. Quite a few of the medals are also from the Africa campaign, where the war really started for the U.S., but that part of the war is not spoken about much. The Italians volunteered to help Germany defend Africa. Africa had to be taken from the Germans to clear the shipping lanes we would need to make it to Europe. During this time also, the U-boats were at their high point of taking out allied shipping. Also, the place where Rommel got his name for being a great tank commander.
Here is 30 more that have been cataloged, but not enough to build next display case.
One of the really cool pieces is old Italian Air Force badges. When Italy was under fascist power, there was a fascio log in the eagles talons. Once liberated, the pilots became allies and they individually ground off the fascist log in the talons. Here is 2 examples. One gold plated.
One of my favs. Appears this SS officer had a pretty bad day. On fire and all.
Sorry for the derail, but, it is a pretty cool thing to me. Can't all be about cars! (yes it can)
