Article about: All too true my friend. Just this very evening I tried to interact with the members of a certain musical group that I've been a fan of since I was 14 or 15. Unfortunately, the IQ of members
The sad thing is that many here rely solely on these pictures, and have no chance to compare these well made fake caps with original caps, whereby the differences obvious to you and me would become manifest. The matter of weight is naturally salient, especially if one wears something other than a baseball cap on one's head, especially if one was obligated to wear a uniform at all times, as was the case in the III. Reich in many instances. A light weight cap was a commercial advantage. Two key criteria here are the sweat band and the peculiar way that liquid of some kind has penetrated the sweat rhombus in a way that is legion on these fakes. That is, they are aged in a certain strange way, and, further, the sweat bands are all in nice shape and look similar to each other, as is the case with the shape of the crown (what some of you call the "peak") as well as the cut of the crown piping. In reality, such things vary quite a bit from cap to cap, and from how the Vorarbeiter cut the cloth with the Schablonen and the cap maker skillfully used as little cloth to achieve the neatest, most trim and pleasing elegant appearance.....more or less a lost art.
Speaking for myself I am content to merely sit on the sidelines, observe and refuse to play this game. The costs of success and the risks of failure are simply too great to contemplate. I recently got taken for $65 for a pair of post war stamped dog tags which was enough to make me want to gut the seller with a rusty garden implement, lord knows what revenge I would seek after being taken for 25 large.
To those willing to play the foetid woolen game I salute you, you are braver men than I, Gunga Din.
Glenn, I agree, at first glance it these hats will fool anyone who does not seriously study the hobby. But all is not as it seems. The fakers can never just make one hat--they have to pump out multiple examples to make money (albeit fraudulently). They all have their (as we say in poker) "tells"--they cannot vary their manufacture in terms of style and materials. The fakers also lack the training the hat makers of the TR did. Do not forget, this art was learned over many years--one first had to apprentice, then become a journeyman, and then had to sit for exams to become a master. The fakers may be tailors on the side, but they sure are not haberdashers in the true sense of the word. Just look at the 2 political caps I posted--light years apart.
“Show me the regulation, and I’ll show you the exception.”
Anyone who wishes to collect this regalia via a reliance on electric pictures and oracular pronouncements from internet cap gurus will be disappointed. The key is to examine a lot of real examples in the cloth, which apparently is unfeasible for many who want all of this to happen very quickly and very much with a brain dead check list. Mr. Mint's observation above should mention that the apprenticeship took EIGHT years in an age of non globalization, in a place without too many business schools, and without just in time logistics and other signal features of the 21st century economy. If you also examine the tailoring and hat making training materials of the time, few can comprehend them today, alone in their language and syntax. Such works assume that one has already had the eight years of exacting training, which is more or less a lost art, to be sure. The UM makes clear that the skills to make these things were at a premium even in the time, granted the want ads in UM, which, of course, only a tiny fraction here can read and understand. For the majority, such evidence is irrelevant.
Serious study is, itself, a dubious proposition, and the mark of seriousness is a far reaching familiarity with the context in which these things arose versus this self licking ice cream cone of archaeological high lights as had at the MAX or SOS shows. Just go with all the other tourists who have no idea of what they are looking at in Berlin-Mitte, to what was the garment district in the former east Berlin, and reflect on all the empty lots where these places once stood, that is, the infrastructure of the Berlin uniform trade, which was concentrated there in the golden age prior to 1914 and was reconstituted somewhat in the III. Reich. There are a lot of ghosts there, to include the ghosts of cap makers. A serious person would place an ad in the Berlin papers and try to find the teenager who was apprenticed in these firms and gain some insight there as squares with the material in the contemporary training publication. However, such is more than bridge too far for many.
Tauentzienstrasse is not in Mitte, but in Charlottenburg, where today stands KaDeWe as well as Peek Cloppenburg beneath Wittenbergplatz. I wonder if Peek Cloppenburg was there in the 1930s?
None of these images here are of KaDeWe, actually.
The food palace in said locale is amusing, if that is your thing....
Maybe the Trummerfrau here worked once at Lubstein or Schellenberg (knew the trade, as it were...) and lived long enough and well enoughin West Berlin to eat in the food palace at KaDeWe, but who knows? Or, she went to the east zone, and lived less well and made caps again.....do you know?
Moreover, many reading this have no idea what any of this means, anyway....
Last edited by Friedrich-Berthold; 05-21-2011 at 08:53 PM.
My German grammar teacher in college forty years ago had lived through all of this, and I was very fond of the stories she told of the war and its aftermath. Ergo, her memory leads me to post these images, which I am sure are of no interest to most of you people looking for the real Rudolf Hess cap had from the family still in the wrapping paper. My guest family when I lived in Bonn at the same time had been Berliners of the same generation, and their stories have stuck with me, as well, as I have witnessed most traces of 1933-1945 vanish from Berlin totally and the place fill up with perky young people, for whom war and suffering are the most distant abstraction.
More interesting than the freak show from the German dealer is this item which, I am sorry to say, appeared on the other site and I think might be real. It is an impressive piece.
The sweat band has been replace, but who cares?
One's chances of finding this kind of cap are pretty slim.
Re: Sold today for 25,000 euro!
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by Glenn66
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