A couple of totenkopfs probably fakes or?

[Friedrich-Berthold]

FB couldn't agree more

Dear Sir, thanks. My social commentary deviates from the norm here, but such does weigh upon me. Perhaps I am being unfair.

Or this is an image of the spirit of Totenschaedels and its effect on collectors, who are getting gunned down by the fakers.....

[carlsson1982]

The realities of collecting SS cap insignia are illustrated in these attachments depicting 18th century life.

The social estate at the bottom reflects most seekers of SS cap insignia.

The top social estate those who own same and can tell fake from false.

I think you shoud post that pic on the other forum, It would be more adequate.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

I think you shoud post that pic on the other forum, It would be more adequate.

Feel free to take the picture and post same wherever you like. It is now the property of all human kind. I only post on this site.

The artist was the German Rethel in the 1850s.

Such a fact would little interest people on the forum, which I believe you refer to here.

But please keep the following in mind: we want to keep this forum a useful and productive place, unlike the others.

I am sure that Adrian Stevenson and his colleagues agree with me.

These threads on cap insignia always, and I mean, always go south.

[carlsson1982]

Exactly. I agree. It's a mess out there. It's a pitty for the more serious collector like a very few of us indeed.

[bwanek1]

Exactly. I agree. It's a mess out there. It's a pitty for the more serious collector like a very few of us indeed.

Indeed.

[Anders S]

Exactly. I agree. It's a mess out there. It's a pitty for the more serious collector like a very few of us indeed.

I couldn't agree more.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

I note the fight on the other website about "prongs*", and what I would like to see in all of this, but never do is the following:

a.) the correspondence from the procurement people in the SS (VASS) as to who was authorized to make cap insignia.

b.) correspondence from the vendor to the procurement people on same, of any kind, i.e. contemporary proof of same.

c.) an account in primary sources, i.e. by someone of the era as concerns changes in production because of directives from the SS or from some other agency as concerns war time strictures, which, in all likelihood were enacted long before the war.

d.) Relevant passages from the periodicals and circulars that governed said regalia, i.e. from the SS or from the industry, crafts and trades that made regalia, i.e. "Schwert und Spaten." Or the Mitteilungsblatt der RZM or the SS Befehlsblatt.

e.) Relevant articles from such journals as "Der Vierjahresplan" or others of its kind with relevance to this theme.

f.) Analysis, data, something from scholarly studies of the era, i.e. National Socialist innovations in the military equipment sector, or evolution of same in the war economy.

g.) something else significant, written in the era 1933-1945 and germane to our search, which falls outside the parameters above.

h.) statements by craftsmen of the era on these issues; or statements by experts of the present in appropriate crafts, trades, industry, or museums of the former with bearing on the above.

I have never seen any of the above, save for my own discovery in the RFSS on line files of the 1935 order governing the cap eagle, for which I think I deserve at least a marzipan mother's cross or something. I note also that the self appointed cap "scull" experts on the other site have never found such a document. I do not mean you, Mr. Wanek, but the uncivil personages on said sites.

Or maybe a price break on a cupal "scull" for one my foetid black woolen caps.

Maybe...

*Postscriptum: I think the word "prong" is a silly one.

[Anders S]

I believe that you deserve at least an EK2 made of Lübecker marzipan for your discovery.

Btw, I'm trying to be civil over at the other forum. However, I'm not an expert regarding anything of this.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

I believe that you deserve at least an EK2 made of Lübecker marzipan for your discovery.

Btw, I'm trying to be civil over at the other forum. However, I'm not an expert regarding anything of this.

I am very fond of Luebecker Marzipan. You are an expert, you are civil, and also a man of good luck, too, with your nice hat at a sane price.

Where is that nice girl in the picture with the beer bottle?

My parameters of expertise are likely too far fetched, but they surely stake out a higher ground than claimed by certain 'experts' on other fora. The Bavarian Army Museum in Ingolstadt has published its catalog in several volumes, and this work strikes me as expert, and the standard against which we should judge ourselves.

But I am also too 20th century as concerns my idea of standards, evidence, analysis, et cetera.

Our evidence of the past is incomplete, however persuasive the fragment of same might be that has either been tossed up in US gun shows in the last five decades, or from the battlefields of eastern Europe in the present or from some magical collection of an Austrian son of an ex SS man in Vienna that began in 1950.

Granted the value associated with these items, I think that one has a right to demand a higher standard. If I had time, I would find some of these things, but I never have time...I am always running in circles and jumping and shouting as befits my peculiar station in society. My mind is more focused on whether the nice Lufthansa woman who guards the Senator Club lounge will let me eat the business class food there after an 11 hour flight surviving on stored nuts like a chipmunk in winter time. There is no time to sit in archives or somehow to chat up the collectors in central European cities to see their sunken treasure.

Peter J and Robert H can do so, but not I.....

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Here is a piece of cap insignia. My essay above is without point. I still have jet lag.