The German helmet m/16 aka. the “Stahlhelm”

The German steel helmet of the model 1916 also known as “Stahlhelm” was developed during the 1^st world war in response to the massive increase of head trauma and brain injury caused by debree, shrapnel and other material during trench warfare. Independent research was conducted by the French, British and German scientists and they all made notes that a helmet with some padding made from steel decreased the number of head and neck injuries by a considerable rate. Soon all the combatants in the world war were using a steel helmet design of their own. The first helmet was fielded by the French, who introduced their M15 Adrian helmet in 1915. The Adrian helmet is the second of the common models shared by other countries, and the Russian helmet in our museum collections next to the German one is basically an improved clone of the design.

The German scientists were not far away from the French and kept developing their helmet simultaneously. The German model was introduced a year later with the moniker Stahlhelm M/16. The model became very popular among the Central Powers and some neutral countries of Europe already during the war. Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empire soon produced their licenced copes of the helmet. Millions of helmets were produced in these three countries, and in addition to them, it was also produced and used after the war in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Persia, Finland and even in one occasion, produced by Vickers of England for the Irish Defense Forces. Germany also sold the manufacture rights to the Republic of China, and sold them some helmets during the 1930s. During the Civil War and the war against Japan, the thousands of surviving helmets ended up in use and mobilization storage of both Peoples Liberation Army and the Taiwan based Republic of China Army by the 1950s.

The helmet was nicknamed the “horned helmet” by many countries, for it had the two lugs in the ventilation holes. These lugs were designed to apply and hold an additional layer of forehead armor in place over the helmet. The intention was that the extra armor would protect machine gunners, snipers and observers from shrapnel and sniper fire. Even though a rifle bullet did not break the added armor plate, an unfortunate side effect of the extra armor was usually a strained or broken neck, severe injury or instant death, and in some cases even decapitations were reported. The extra armor plate therefore was quickly abandoned by the armies using the helmet. In many countries during and after the world war, including Finland, the lugs were therefore sometimes removed from the helmet as useless because of this.

In Finland the M/16 helmet was first seen when the German Baltic Division invaded Helsinki and Hanko regions during the Finnish Civil War in 1918. Soon the newly established Finnish Army got equipment from the Germans and fielded the helmet as a part of its basic equipment. After the war, thousands of German and Austro-Hungarian helmets were bought as scrap metal to the Finnish armed forces from France and the UK. Also, some German private companies sold Finnish armed forces and police thousands of helmets during the 1920s. By the late 1920s over 80 000 were acquired by the Defense Forces. The helmet model served the Finnish Defense Forces and the Civil Guard all the way through the 1930s and the winter war, continuation war and Lapland war. Hundreds of helmets were lost in the winter war and continuation war every month, but even after the wars had ended in 1945, tens of thousands of original M/16 helmets remained in storage. According to several sources, the Finnish Quartermaster Depot did not make a difference between the older M/16, M/17, M/18 helmets or the more modern Nazi-German or Hungarian M35 Stahlhelme purchased during the 2^nd World War, but LtCol Stig Roudasmaa (1926-?) a military historian of note, has found sources indicating that the oldest helmets from the 1^st world war era were moved to war time stocks in the late 1940s. Nevertheless, from the Defense Forces picture archives, one can still find rather curious looking photos, where an M/16 Stahlhelm is worn by a reservist in a refresher training or by a conscript as late as 1980. Undoubtedly some of the better condition helmets remained in circulation alongside the M/35 an M/55 Stahlhelme. Some of the older helmets were refitted with new leather and fabric lining on the inside at the QM depots and various leatherwork factories in the mid-to-late 1960s, and they were re-painted in the same process. At the same time though, tens of thousands of M/55 helmets were bought from West Germany, of which many were put to the war time storages directly, only to be later sold to the surplus market. The helmet in our display is one of these examples refurbished in the 1960s, and the Museum Curator has purchased two separate helmets from Defense Forces auctions as late as 2017 and 2020 with the same refurbishment being made to both of them. So, in some plans, the M/16 helmet seems to have been hanging in the equipment roster for almost a century! Many reports say, that even as late as 2005, some units were still issued the M/55 helmets during reservist training, especially in the more second line units like cooks, anti-aircraft artillery, mechanics, field hospitals and such.

The official end for the Stahlhelm type helmets in Finland finally arrived in 2006-2007, when all of the helmets of model “Stahlhelm” were decreed to be sold as military surplus in auctions or sold to the surplus market.