Welcome...

 

...to LusitaniaMedal.com, a website about the Lusitania medal. The iconic design of the original medal was created by the German medalist, Karl Goetz (pronounced "Gets", or at least that is as close as my American tongue will allow), and was later copied by the British for propaganda purposes during World War I and by others for their own reasons.

 

Regardless of what you may have heard on Pawn Stars (season 5, episode 43, "That Sinking Feeling"), the medal isn't worth tens of thousands of dollars. Most go for a couple dozen or so. The fella on the show should have taken Rick ("The Spotter") Harrison up on his offer of $100. True, it was a rather common British propaganda copy worth maybe $50 (though oddly enough, it was one of the scarcer British pieces with the month spelled "MAI" in German), but certainly not the $150 that Rick mentioned. Though he had many of his other facts right, Rick was also wrong when he said the German ones were made of bronze and the British of iron and that one could tell the difference this way, because Goetz also used iron like the British for some varieties, so a genuine Goetz can either be magnetic or not.

 

Click on the links to browse around the site. I have plenty of information here: a short biography on Karl Goetz, images and descriptions of the basic design of the Lusitania medal he created, a summary of the different varieties of the medal, including various producers, as well as sales information for a book I've written and some of the duplicate Lusitania medals I've collected. Click here to go directly to the book page, or...

 

Finally, I also have links to some of the sites that helped to get me started on my research on this medal and the great Cunard liner, as well as others that are useful or just plain fun.

 

Enjoy your visit, and I hope you find enough of interest here to want to collect some of these miniature works of art yourself...

 

 

 

 

 

Greg Burns