Man sentenced for stealing WW2 dog tags from National Archives to give as gifts

A Virginia National Guard sergeant was sentenced to 18 months of supervised probation for stealing World War II-era dog tags from the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Md., The Associated Press reported.

Robert Rumsby, 30, of Fredericksburg, Va., was ordered by U.S. Magistrate Court judge Thomas DiGirolamo to pay a $5,000 fine. Rumsby pleaded guilty to the charge of stealing public records in November, avoiding the year of incarceration time he could have faced.

According to court documents, Rumsby allegedly took the dog tags and gifted them to his wife, who is the great-niece of one of the men the dog tags belonged to. He claimed that he asked the National Archives if items in their collection could be released to the family’s relatives but never got a response to the inquiry. 

The College Park facility stores thousands of dog tags seized from German forces in WWII.

Early in 2017, National Archives staff discovered that the dog tags from a WWII aviator, Theodore Ream, were missing while investigating other possible thefts of artifacts. Ream was the great-uncle of Rumsby’s wife, the news source reported.

According to the complaint, Rumsby had accessed that box weeks earlier, and investigators found the dog tags of Ream at a relative of the aviator’s home in Chesapeake, Md. 

This was not the first time that Rumsby sought to obtain these artifacts from the Archives. 

In 2015, Rumsby accessed a box that contained dog tags for three airmen who died in a July 21, 1944, plane crash. When questioned about the missing tags, Rumsby gave two of them back, retrieving them from a shelf in his home and said he had given the third dog tag to a relative of that airman, according to the complaint.

Rumsby has been assigned to the Virginia National Guard’s 116th Infantry Brigade Combat Team.

According to the AP, National Guard spokesman A. A. “Cotton” Puryear has said Rumsby’s unit leaders were tracking the criminal case and would determine whether any military administrative action would be appropriate once the case is resolved.