Allgemeine SS Visor Cap - II

[Friedrich-Berthold]

One last question this evening as I need to depart from here to prepare dinner for the wife and myself... No excuse, but that's it.

The difference between an officer's cap and a soldier's cap (when SS is concerned) is only the chinstrap, yes?

The enlisted cap had many features that distinguished it, especially textiles, construction, interior features and the chin strap, as well. See attached....

But there was also a special quality enlisted cap quite similar to the piece you posted first for senior ranks.

[d'alquen]

My goodness, what gouging. The official price in 1939, when this sweatband was dated I presume, was almost half this amount.
Hmm.
D.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

a later type of enlisted cap. Unissued and devoid of badges.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

My goodness, what gouging. The official price in 1939, when this sweatband was dated I presume, was almost half this amount.
Hmm.
D.

Thanks for this posting. I wonder what you can find in your primary sources on the profit margin allowed on these things? Of course, the question is if the price list number was for official procurement within the SS versus the market price allowed for a retailer in the regular economy (to the extent that prices were indeed controlled in the III. Reich...)
I had thought that deflation was one prominent feature of the era. I did find a really nifty book on the clothing economy of Nazi Germany on line, which I have yet to read since I have been on travel overseas. Happy headwear.

[d'alquen]

According to all I have read quite the opposite was true. The Kleiderkasse and RZM mandate together with Hitler's original directive was that profit was not to be gained from items intended for the party. In fact, the VA lost a considerable fortune in pre-war years pursuing this economic dream.
Quite frankly, I can't envisage a 100% mark-up.
D.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

According to all I have read quite the opposite was true. The Kleiderkasse and RZM mandate together with Hitler's original directive was that profit was not to be gained from items intended for the party. In fact, the VA lost a considerable fortune in pre-war years pursuing this economic dream.
Quite frankly, I can't envisage a 100% mark-up.
D.

Thanks. I do not have an answer and am grateful for your speculation. In the Bundesarchiv reprint of the narrative prepared for the SS WVHA trial at Nuremberg (where I just was a few days ago...) , the figures around Pohl asserted that the Kleiderkasse made a large profit. I shall include the citation later. Here is another price tag in a grey cap from what I assume is 1944, but I am not utterly sure. Maybe this price tag is from a militaria meeting, but it seems to include the same nomenclature of article number and year that is found on pre-1945 pieces.

[d'alquen]

Thanks, I would be very interested to see the citation you mention.
Although general in nature, a letter from Pohl to the Reich Ministry of Finance in 1941 states:
"The SS fundamentally avoids business endeavour for the sole purpose of making money...the very fact of our cultural goals leads our companies down certain paths that a purely private businessman would never dare... these goals damn our corporations to years of future losses."
Probably self serving and with an agenda in mind, nonetheless it does capture the essence of SS business motivation. A business model that doomed most SS enterprises to failure and, on the smaller issue to hand, doesn't explain the extraordinarily high price on the sticker in the hat.
D.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Thanks for the above. The volume with the reference to profit with the Kleiderkasse is:

Walter Naasner, ed. SS Wirtschaft und SS Verwaltung (Duesseldorf, 1998)=Schriften des Bundesarchiv vol 45a

It is small monograph with a lot of documents reproduced in great detail, some of which treat the SS Kleiderkasse.

Elsewhere I have cited two newer works in German that are: a.) a biography of Pohl and of the VA/WVHA in great detail and also a work on the SS WVHA in even more luxuriant detail.

The passage you cite does not accord with the scholarship of these later works, which makes clear the imperative in the SS to break with the financial bonds of the NSDAP in order to promote its organizational enlargement.

There is an older work from the 1960s on SS economic enterprises which must have been written based on the Nuremberg trial documents. I do not have a citation for it.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

I would cite three volumes on the WVHA:

Kaienburg, Die Wirtschaft d. SS (Berlin, 2003)

Allen, The Business of Genocide (Chapel Hill, 2002)

Schulte, Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung: Oswald Pohl und das SS WVHA, '33-'45 (Paderborn, 2001)

Schulte has just brought out a superb edited volume on the SS, the citation of which I shall furnish later. It was published by the government of Lower Saxony and the foundation associated with the Wewelsburg. The latter will not please those interested in occult and otherwise fetish aspects of said place, but it is filled with first rate scholarship of the finest kind on the SS and the newest results, too. There is also the Longerich biography of Himmler, too, such that the Gerrman literature on the subject of ours is in a high state of polish. I should expect that the Longerich book will get translated, whereas the other works remain in German. The Kaienburg and earlier Schulte books are superb.

[BenVK]

I'll gladly pay another 100% markup on the original price for this wonderful cap.