Magdeburg, Germany—Construction workers discovered the rusty ruin of a saber while excavating a broken water main. The newspaper Volksstimme speculates that the artifact could be “400 years old” — a relic of the Thirty Years Warm when “Imperial troops under Pappendem stormed the Protestant city”.
We hate to burst that particular bubble by pointing out that the remnants of the hilt indicate what’s left of a Schläger, at best a basket-hilted Korbsäbel. Rather than having been lost by a Pappenheimer in 1631, it is more likely that it dates from the early 20th century and was buried by an Alter Herr of a dueling fraternity in anticipation of the Americans’ (or Russians’) arrival in 1945.
Since the subsequent Soviet occupation and the fraternities-hating Commies of the GDR made retrieval and exhibition at home inadvisable—and there were no dueling fraternities permitted in the totalitarian Worker’s and Farmer’s Paradise—the attempt at preservation from looting GI’s or Red Armists appears to have been counterproductive.
Correction: Of course, GI’s didn’t “loot”. They “liberated”.
