Authentic SS General Schirmmütze Thread

[Friedrich-Berthold]

An interesting question. It is difficult to impossible to tell the exact number, although I would place it at higher than 300.

The aluminium piping was authorized for the senior SS officer ranks from Oberführer upwards.

The SS-Dienstaltersliste of 9 November 1944 has 738 names of this rank group.

Of course, this included a substantial number of men who only held honorary SS rank and in the majority would have retained their black uniforms (and caps, obviously). Hard to come up with a figure, but I would estimate their number at around perhaps some 200 to 300 men (and will gladly stand corrected if other members have more reliable data!) This number would have to be subtracted from the 738.

Then we would have to add the number of those belonging to this rank group who did not or no more appear in the Nov. 1944 DAL, i.e. the retired, dismissed and dead ones and those who were foreign Waffen-SS officers. The total number of these cases could not be huge, though.

I would tentatively place the total number of potential grey Oberführermützen owners at around 500.

(Like I said, only a guesstimate!)

As ever, a fine and acute analysis by our pillar of intelligence, wit, and linguistic grace.

In any case, the number is quite small. And, to this analysis is added the fact of how many caps total one had over the epoch from 1934 until 1945 in which such caps existed....

That is, a person might well have had a couple or more of caps.

Thanks to Andreas for all his generous aid.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

The officer corps of the SS was also not especially large, actually, and it existed for what, in historical terms, was to be a brief period of time. Notice this man's SS number, and his cap ca. 1935 at a time when the officer corps of the SS was ca. 4850, and, in which year some 160 or so left the SS for various reasons, honorable and not.

Mr. Derek has included the tables of equipment for such persons, whereby certain officers had at least two caps, if I infer properly from the data, and I have read elsewhere that a cap was to last for x months (not several years...) etc. etc.
The issue of wartime rationing adds another factor, that is, one could not buy one's self twenty caps like the shoe locker of valley girls and such. Textiles were rationed.

The other independent variable is the percentage of such items destroyed during the war, and, of course, after the war.

My man Dinkel lived in the environs of Heidelberg, which was more or less spared the fate of, say, Cologne, or Pforzheim, or you name it, in which the regalia one sees in the photos was likely pulverized.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Here is an SSVT clothing locker in the epoch. A senior officer would have been more lavishly equipped.

This locker has more than the average, it seems to me, of caps and tunics etc.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

If someone wants to know why our site leads the parade in the digital cavalcade, contrast this informative thread to the lord of the flies discourse found on the ding dong thingy, where one seeks knowledge in vain in the face of promiscuous chest thumping and nerve wracking digital grunts.

[stonemint]

Here is what one skeptic had to say about this event.

"So...eventually 25k for a hat that will sit on your shelf...and for an hour or so when you get home from work...dinner. ..wife, kids, you can stare at a seventy year old ccombinaton of vulcanfiber...wool...leather and aluminium.
Thats just insane....I think some people have taken leave of their senses. "

He also had this gem of a follow-up to that post:

"No I don't think so because although I also covet it, it has no real value, no intrinsic qualities that say a piece of Cartier jewellery or a work of art has.
It really is lunatics only at that price for what is at the end of the day an old cap.
Its value dictated not ny what it is but by who wore it."

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Thanks, colleague, your enclosure is exactly what I had in mind with my generalizations about promiscuous chest thumping. Too droll.

Shea sold a 1935 era black officers cap for a princely sum in about 2005 or so which prompted the same kind of paroxysm of envy and self righteous abnegation.

It was a total bore then, and it is more of a bore in the present, where the class war, social friction thing has gone into over drive and most of us are faced with downward pressure on the social and economic scale.

The same process in another epoch gave rise to the NSDAP and the SS and we all know how that ended up.

If you find out who secured said cap, please let me know.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

The Shea cap anno 2005 or so (I cannot recall actually when I bought it....) that caused a great spasm of indignation about greed and misplaced priorities......