I'm surprised nobody has considered the possibility that the razor has become falsely associated with a 1945 box. I have seen just that sort of printing on 1930s technical drawings, and as a forgery, it wouldn't be a very alluring one. Why not choose a suitably marketable and conveniently defunct admiral by name? It is even possible that a sailor nicknamed his small child "the admiral". I think it very likely that there was a razor (or a pen, or anything else of similar size) in the box, which got lost, damaged or worn out.

I'm sure Manah is right in saying that items like the razor were faked in Texas, and this is extremely likely to be one of them. I'm sure modern technology has made a style of inscription common which used to be uncommon. It ought to be possible to find out at what date it started to be used, if ever it did, on mass-market Melchior razors.

But impossible in the 1940s, I do not believe. I can remember seeing similar paint-filled inscriptions on promotional pens etc. in the 1950s, and I'm sure it was done, as it was done long before on horn, with a hot die. A pantograph engraving machine, such as is used in the US-style military ID badges I've seen in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, would do it too. I would acid-etch a die, press it hot till it bottomed on the etched ground, and then polish the celluloid flat until the roughened surface was gone, leaving only the unlamented reichsfuhrer and the writing.

People say Germans don't have a sense of humour, but I have known good many, including my wife, who could give you an argument, and never more so than at the notion of badges of rank on one's razor. All else apart, as well we know, straight razors outlast any rank the owner might have. I know there were plenty of Nazi sympathisers long after the war, and perhaps even a little after too, so long as they could do it in the privacy of their own bathroom, without the inconvenience of being shot at. I'm reminded of Garbo, Britain's male Catalan double agent, who ran a network of totally fictitious German agents in the UK. The Germans even awarded a pension to the widow of one who had to "die" in hospital, after he missed reporting a convoy departure he would surely have seen, and someone may be receiving it yet. But when Garbo later met his German handler, he was given the Iron Cross which had been awaiting him in a desk drawer until 1949. A German origin for the inscription is far from improbable.