The Alu Deschler badge: death and transfiguration across the gulf of time.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

[Friedrich-Berthold]

The damaged object was dug out of some battlefield and has its own poetry, surely.
The contrasts here are noteworthy from an aesthetic and contemplative viewpoint for a person alive to the past and its meaning.
I will leave the head hunting thing to others, of course.

[Stirlitz wiedzial]

Friedrich nice skull.
I like dugs.
On their surface you can plain to see a whole historu like on old man face.
Dugs have a spirit( some people hear it) and mistery.
Dugs also for me its a symbol of evanescence where we were shiny young and now ours body are hm...............
I have many many dugs and sometimes in winter nights im looking on them and try to imagin who was their owner what happen to him etc etc.
Im not going crazy but in this fast living world this is remedium on my mind.
The world on this pictures above gone but their insignia sometime in poor condition are still witch us and pls dont cleaned them guys witch WD 40 ,citron acid dont polish them heavy-this is not a Barbie.
Only cold blooded dealers make those horrible (: things
As The little Prince said :
,,What is essential is invisible for the eye,,
Summary fantastic skull
Congratulations

[Friedrich-Berthold]

The used badge is not mine. It is John Telesmanich's and you can buy it if you want.
I just wanted to counterpoise the image of the recovered object to mine, which are without such signs of age. I accept age in these things, and never insist that an object be somehow liberated from its story or the effect of decades.
The insistence that each and every item be in perfect, unused state is puerile and foolish, I think.
Amusing how so many look at these threads and offer so little additional material. Of course, the theme of age and death, decay, collapse et cetera is so central to our culture. The issue is particularly powerful in the Nazi cosmos, whereby the chance to arrange these images underscores the point, which the Little Prince can help us to understand better. Bravo.
You and I share the historical and contemplative posture about these things.
We are a little minority amid the multitude of those with their nose pressed up against the glass and their eyes counter rotating like an angry animal.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Toten Schaedel

[ToxicGas]

Friedrich, I love that Escher picture! His works inspire me. Also, the photo of the rotting SS cap is intriguing- what's the context?

My Deschler badge, my single SS piece, will likely remain my only SS Totenkopf due to the typical prices these fetch; but with the fortune I had in acquiring this one, and the potency of it's history (and how many of these things have that?), not even the most valuable Totenkopf variant could top it in my eyes, because that's just collector's value, not historical value. I don't think the significance of this piece will ever be rivalled by anything I add to my collection... at least, not known significance. Acquiring this was my personal equivalent of winning the lottery. I think the ultimate goal would be to one day own a cap such as yours, though that lies in the realm of wishful thinking rather than possibility- having said that, I would never have imagined being so lucky with this Totenkopf, so who knows?

Mat

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Your badge is quite something, and its story far more compelling than what I have enclosed. The cap with the mildew is from the Reichskanzlei bunker in the summer of 1945 as photographed by Life Magazine. SS caps are surely out there for purchase, they are just absurdly expensive. I got my first grey SS officer's cap for 80 dollars in 1970, which in today's money would be 400 dollars, so the growth in price is quite noteworthy.
Here is one that Shea has now. It costs more than eighty dollars, and more than four hundred dollars.
I have no idea where one can find these at a bargain rate. I have no idea to whom this thing belonged, nor am inclined to believe stories I hear from hyperventilating dealers and collectors.
In any case, colleague Toxic Gas has a nice piece of great merit.
And the objects found in the ground as the remnants of battle are also very compelling when such stories are ......true.
To each his own with these things.

[ToxicGas]

I wonder what became of the rotting cap in the bunker? The Adler is gone, perhaps it became someone's souvenir- maybe the Totenkopf did too.
I can imagine when you paid the equivalent of $400 for a cap, you probably thought THAT was expensive! Amazing, the way prices have risen. I've witnessed prices in some deactivated weapons I own double in the space of only four years, so I can believe it.

Mat

[Friedrich-Berthold]

I wonder what became of the rotting cap in the bunker? The Adler is gone, perhaps it became someone's souvenir- maybe the Totenkopf did too.
I can imagine when you paid the equivalent of $400 for a cap, you probably thought THAT was expensive! Amazing, the way prices have risen. I've witnessed prices in some deactivated weapons I own double in the space of only four years, so I can believe it.

Mat

No man can say about the cap in the Berlin ground water.
I imagine no one assigned it much value. My guest family in West Germany of the early 1970s reminded me that in the Berlin of 1945, heaps of dead and rubble were the norm, that no one gave much thought to the sight of a dead body and the things that interest us were no more than junk. My guest family of 197X considered my interest very odd and the uniforms still to be junk, worthless.

I paid eighty dollars in 1970 for the grey officer's cap and traded the cap off a few years later. I had several nice grey SS caps in the first years of that decade. My topos here is hardly the prices, but the struggle over a long time to secure this material and what I might have learned about it. This knowledge I happily impart to my young friends here in the hope that they will do even better. Of course, eighty dollars in 1970 might seem as no price at all, which I guess it was. But I was Mat's age more or less, (actually somewhat less....) and I stuck with it.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

I paid thirty five dollars for this cap to the same dealer who found the grey SS cap. The cap was offered again to me some twenty five years later, but I did not buy it. Silly of me, I guess. Today I would have for nostalgia, if nothing else. When I bought it, I was merely happy at its fine condition, and I did not know it was a Jaeger cap, nor anything about Wellhausen the tailor. I also did not have any idea that the same item, which I traded off for a black SS uniform, would become noteworthy or coveted.