Once again, we are going off on a tangent, but that is what makes this thread so interesting.
These are from the Moritz-Ruhl series, with illustrations by Paul Casberg, the premier dagger-designer of the Third Reich:
Those illustrations are as much a part of the Uniformen Markt piece as any. The journal was somehow associated with the Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Heereskunde, a group devoted to the study of historical militaria. The journal reported extensively on uniform o logy and the meetings of various learned groups that dealt with same. We are doing the same thing, in our own peculiar way, though it is neither as genteel nor as polite as I would want.
In the history of art and politics, these artists were a part of the aristocratic order prior to 1918, if a subset of a group who got commissions from court and whose art embodied the grandeur of the dynasty, in this case the Hohenzollern. The Nazis merely followed in the foot steps of the pre-1918 princely houses.
To get some idea of how bureaucratic was the party and estate/guild/corporatist superstructure for the retail of uniforms, equipment, insignia, orders, decorations, see this list of RZM Einzelhandel license categories. This list is from 1942, which suggests that things were still clicking along with this whole system, despite the progress of the war.
That is, there were SIXTEEN kinds of licenses for retail sales of various items.
Collecting these would be more fun than stupid cap badges, and more challenging of one's command of Nazi bureaucratic German.
UM had various columns of helpful hints on how to make and retail regalia in Hitler's Germany, which was more complicated than merely throwing open one's salesman's trunk in the Bahnhof.
Each edition had a report on aspects of Uniform und Waffenkunde in detail. That is, the scholarly study of uniforms and weapons in history, culture, usw.
Here is one for the textile and clothing industry in 1937, an exhibition that surely would have held many remarkable insights for us likes. It took place in the exhibition grounds at the Funkturm in Westend in western Berlin.
The requirements of daily life and trade in such RZM establishments were a theme in each issue, as well. This article treats the officially frowned upon tendency of shops and stores with RZM material on sale to refer to themselves via their adverts in anything other than the ponderous bureaucratic retail designations of the RZM. The issue here, as with the presence of the private label in official headgear or where ever, was the tendency to masquerade as an official Nazi entity.
I imagine some of these fussy RZM souls are turning in their grave at some of the websites of certain dealers in the year 2010.
As you know, certain establishments lost their Einzelhandel licenses, or gave up, went broke, or whatever. Too bad we could not have bought all this up in early 1937 in Buetow in Preussen.
Re: Muetzenfabrik
by stonemint
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