Just recently I was looking at a German dagger from the 2nd World War. It was certainly an impressive blade obviously designed for an Officer however even more interesting was the inscription on the handle of the dagger. It was written in a very elaborate type script which I didn’t recognise and some German friends couldn’t help either.

However after some research, and a chance viewing of an old documentary about handwriting which I saw repeated on the BBC iPlayer site, incidentally I was in Dublin, Ireland at the time but used this interesting application to access BBC iPlayer in Ireland.

Here’s the font and an example of the script –

It’s called Sütterlin script and was one of two distinct styles which were commonly used around the WW2 era. It was designed and created by Ludwig Sütterlin in 1911 and was actually commissioned by the Prussian Minister of Culture. The script was designed to be a very basic one which school children could use to develop their own particular style of handwriting.