AgProv, I'm a military model fan myself.
Haven't done much in recent years, but I do occasionally visit the Figure World fair that is on every July in Oundle.
Most of my figures I did when I was a teenager, and my parents have them.
I did think of buying that fairy model a couple of years ago. I like anything that's fantasy or SF.
I know and sympathise. it's addictive. Forty-odd years on I'm still doing it. I'm also sure there's a Fortean angle in this - how military modelling relates to this thread. "Toy soldier" collecting being the male manifestation of doll-collecting - it doesn't seem so "girly" if serious weaponry is involved and you can dress them up, symbolically speaking, in attractive military uniforms. (Action Man/GI Joe as a doll for boys). Also the whole MM thing of striving for uncannily life-like representations in small scale. There has to be an "Uncanny Valley" aspect to all this, especially when it doesn't quite work. And while I know it's perfectly possible for a modeller/collector to be obsessive about all things Third Reich - (there's a whole sub-industry out there dealing with all things panzer and Waffen-SS, preferably together) - I've hardly ever met modellers who incline towards the Nazi end of the political spectrum. Well - one South African who was, shall we say, "socially unreformed" even after the end of apartheid. Which is pretty much it.
But within the hobby, one which prizes the skill and talent to create lifelike representations of real people, there seems to be an unspoken taboo. Just about everyone you can think of who was prominent in history, especially in WW2, has his (or her) small-scale representations in commercially available figures and busts. You can get Patton, Montgomery, Rommel, a clutch of German generals, Zhukov, Churchill, Roosevelt, even Joe Stalin. You can get relatively obscure Italian and Japanese generals, admirals and political figures. But. Can you think, off-hand, of a model sculptor or manufacturer who markets a figiure of Adolf Hitler? Or a character bust of Heinrich Himmler? People in the hobby get distinctly uneasy about this, as if a line is being crossed somewhere. Okay, part of it is maybe down to Germany being a big market and that country having strict laws about what aspects of the Nazi era you can and can't represent commercially. But what if... the thing about your toys coming alive at night, the uneasy suspicion we all had as kids and cannot shake off as adults, applies. And that the more accurate a representation is, the more likely it is that the "mana" that went into creating it will imbue it with a soul and give it life and vitality. And as form follows function, what sort of life would a model of Adolf Hitler develop... (This comes from the same place as the idea of the voodoo doll? The more lifellike your doll is, the more likely the person it represents will feel the pins as they go in..)
And i've got a big wargames army of WW2 Germans. if I stop and think about it, adding a character figure of Adolf Hitler would be asking for trouble, on the "what if your toys came to life at night" superstition.... and could anyone who collects military models sleep at night with a character bust of Adolf in the display cabinet?
I helped write this article for tvtropes: it touches on the "
being interested in WW2 German stuff does not make you a Nazi" theme of military modelling.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoSwastikas