This was not talked about much because it was a criminal offence, but growing up at that time in that area we were all the same and I could tell you a bunch of other stories like that.
Collecting the rounds was like a sport. The one with the biggest collection was the winner. Sometimes we found elements from ammunition belts too. They were rare and because of their small size and dark color much more difficult to find than the larger untarnished brass colored cartridges. One of the boys from my town had the perseverance to collect enough elements to assemble a belt that he could wear over his shoulder. He looked like John Rambo.
All of this wasn‘t a local phenomenon either. Much later I learned the story of a boy from a different area whose house was searched for pirated home computer games. Police didn‘t find any pirate copies but they found the blanks he had collected. Strict as the gun laws are he got a young offender sentence for unauthorized possession of a firearm (unerlaubter Waffenbesitz).
And this was all only about thrown away blanks from NATO maneuvers. When it comes to all the weapons that “disappeared” basically over night at the end of World War II, I know there is another trove of stories, but these are for someone from another generation to tell.
You might have heard about the BBC serial The Machine-Gunners, which tells a related story from the British perspective. It was very popular with us kids in Germany at that end of the Eighties. The opening theme Colonel Bogey March is now stuck in my head..
