An SS/Headgear Collector's Dream!

[Walkwolf]

Too bad MY closet doesn't look like that !

[militarymania]

he's thinking:" i wonder if any of this stuff will ever be worth anything in the future...HAH!...they will just say its all Reproductions!

[stonemint]

Along the same lines--the coat-check room at the Sheherazade Nightclub in Paris:

[Dimas]

I remember the time I first time visit the Leningrad filmstudio in 1986 year. There was a hundreds of original black uniforms, they was mixed together with Panzer jackets, I remember the rows of steelhelmets from the bottom till the ceiling.
But there was a Minsk filmstudio ( beginning of 90's my friend became more than a 300 of SS M42 and 43 jackets)
Also Alma-Ata ( Kazakhstan) filmstudio, a thousands of mixed german tunics which is now mostly in the west collections ( easily to recognize by long number)
Moscow 2 big filmstudios, after that film, the studio was rubbed and lost over a 1000 tunics. As most part of tunics was original, some with minor remakes and fake insignia, but original, even I had some tunics from that film in the beginning of 90's


The Gorkyi filmstudio still has a thousands of original uniforms, both the soviet and 3 Reich

I would guess that a fair amount of black things put away on the eve of the war may have survived, if they were not turned in for recycling. No doubt many gray items were, in fact, destroyed at the end for a number of reasons.

In any event, the Czech Statni film works et alia seem to have scooped up many nice things in the years following the war.

I believe F-B knows a fair amount about this.

[stuka f]

There is a guy here in Antwerp, who is well know for his costumes he hire's to who ever need some, mostly theater and film industries, but also carnival; he has more then 50 British King'own dragoons spiked helmets....
Originals I am speaking not the copies you get to see these days...
....I wunder what the story behind thise one could be.
I also wunder what else he must have, because that place is hugh.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

I owned one of the Lenfilm black SS uniforms in an unrestored state, in fact. The collapse of regimes and the disposal of their uniforms is a pretty standard procedure, especially in the case of the end of the Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Romanov dynasties. Costume houses in North America bought up all sorts of valuable uniforms in the years after 1918 which I saw as a young pup when such costume houses went out of business in the 1960s. I can recall the material from the dissolution of the MGM studios at the time, that was then retailed out in the form of all sorts of things that today would have high value. I recall piles of ex French army uniforms from MGM in the late 1960s, akin to the images shown by the Germans in the Deutsche Wochenschau of the same uniforms in 1940.

I am not sure whether the image at the head of this file is not from an ex post facto Soviet film of victory over Germany or whether it is legit from one of the scenes of defeat immediately after the war. Does someone have a verifiable source of same. More important is that colleague Dimas posted Putin's favorite TV series, which shows why black uniforms command such a following in today's Russia.

Dimas' account of the posture of war trophies is an interesting and compelling one, in fact. The accounts of Soviet looting in Germany are well known, as is Solzhenitsyn's telling of the fate of most Red Army soldiers who return from Germany only to get thrown in the slammer for being over exposed to the temptations of the west. Thus, if this image is actually of events we perceive, and not a re enactment, this guy got it in the kisser from his own government. Ergo, little joy in fetid woolens here. Such only amplifies the tragedy.

sapere aude.
I guess I shall sell my collection there.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

there=Russia.

[Walkwolf]

I also know of "S.L.A.M. Marshall" who visited the Reichtag just after the Russian invasion of Berlin, where on the floor of one office he saw a pile of Iron Crosses and other such awards, pulled from cabinets on an adjacent wall, that were P****d and S*** upon..



( In his book: "Bringing Up The Rear" )

[stonemint]

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the amount of quality TR stuff that did survive the war. You look at pics of "Gemany in the year zero", and it is empty shell after empty shell of buildings and apartment complexes. Then you have to consider the amount of items that were burned or destroyed as the Allies closed in. Then there were the items that the Allies ordered burned in massive bonfires, or run-over by tanks. Then you have the situation where clothing was civilianized and worn to make up for the clothing shortage in the immediate postwar era.

Lastly, there are the vets who let their kids/grandkids play with their souvenirs, to the point of destruction. And don't forget all those stories of TR items being thrown out by the widows or children of vets, because they "don't want that Nazi junk in the house."

I'm just happy there is some left over for the rest of us....

[Friedrich-Berthold]

The images we have of 1945 are often of the leading urban centers, which, in the case of say Cologne or Berlin had taken a frightful beating. But if you carefully read the accounts of 1945, you see that some places avoided the fighting and avoided the air war to a large degree. Think of Regensburg, which did not suffer the same fate as say Munich or Linz. And, of course, these things were mass produced items of daily life for one of the leading nations of the world, so we are not dealing with Ancient Greece or the like. Much of the rarity assigned to some of this is an ex post facto invention of dealers and also collectors intent on puffery and poseur habitus.

All the same, it is a miracle that any of it survived especially because Germans considered it as junk, even when I was a student in the Rheinland in the early 1970s. "Klamotten" it was called. You can look it up in your on line dictionary.

Now that the Soviet Bloc is also a thing of history, I wonder if all the cast off East German uniforms I also got on site in 1989 and 1990 will now appreciate, since the celebration of the end of the GDR (in which I was an active witness and somewhat participant...) has taken on particular energy with 2009.

Thanks again to Dimas for the interesting accounts of matters we in the DM zone knew little or nothing of.