Panzer tinplate sparking tank (Gescha Toys)
A rare clockwork steerable Panzer Tank toy with sparking guns and rubber tracks, made by Gesha Toys in Germany in the 1950s, with a single large turreted gun barrel and two small machine-gun ports.
The toy is fairly large at ~194×111mm, and is missing a few accessories, such as the tools that were meant to fit into the two holders on the front fenders.
Gescha Toys
Nuremburg toy company Gescha Toys seems to have been named after the standard German-language patent markings on their toys, which foreign buyers tended to mistake for a German company name. Nuremberg was home to a number of tinplate toy manufacturers who sometimes made quite similar-looking products, and by actually calling their company "Gescha", they may have been trying to make use of this misidentification - if foreign buyers are retailers were familiar with the "Gescha" markings on their or other company's similar tinplate toys, and enquired about a "Gescha" toy, then perhaps a company called Gescha Toys would be more likely to get the business.
This resulted in the odd situation of having Gescha toys also marked "Patent" in English, meaning "Patent, patent". The confusion also makes identification more difficult, as the fact that a "Gescha-looking" toy has "Gescha" stamped onto the base doesn't necessarily mean that it was made by Gescha. The risk of misidentification isn't helped by the fact that Nuremberg had become a toymaking centre partly because of the number of skilled toymaking craftspeople in the region, who sometimes moved between companies - since these companies were often trying to produce similar products based on the same real-world objects (such as a Panzer tank), and since their personnel had basically the same training and the same local traditional stylistic influences, it's sometimes difficult to tell who made a given item without relying on the manufacturer marks.
Gescha later got into diecast models, and changed their name to Conrad.
