All US made VCR’s had a circuit in them called macrovision. Its what caused the distortion in the copies when the tape was recorded with it. The German units did not have this. He purchased them through friends who were in the military. They bought them from the base exchange or px I don’t remember which. As far as PAL and NTSC I’m pretty sure he had something to deal what that as well. The guy bought the second VCR in the state right behind some super rich guy. He still had it in the 90’s and it took up most of a fairly large table.
Up until he died he made copies of everything he could get his hands on. He lived right on a county line and arranged it with his neighbor across the road in the other county to drop his netflix DVD’s in his mail box for pickup. He would get his DVD’s in the morning rip them and then put them in the neighbors mailbox before noon. It would be picked up that day and he would repeat the process. When he died I ended up with a huge amount of ripped DVD’s that I eventually gave to someone just to get them out of my way. I kinda regret that sometimes.
You should probably read that wikipedia link. I built some of the blockers or stabilizers as Wikipedia article describes them. You could see the pulses described in the output of a scope that messed up the AGC in the VCR. All the blocker did was blank out the pulses and that was enough to prevent macrovision from working on the VCR when making a copy.