Black uniform

[Friedrich-Berthold]

an image of uncertain date and place, but likely of the early war as note the military style shoulder boards, which were cause of much friction with the regular army and were replaced. See cuff title. In other later images the cuff titles disappear. I cannot explain all of this, of course.

[Anders S]

Here is a cap to add Notton's badge to, and reunite the shattered parts of the German past. This not the cap to which Anders S refers, but it is sadly denuded of its cap badges by someone, somewhere, somehow. Anders has better luck with caps, badges and girls than do I.

Yes, I've been lucky and I promise, for what its worth, that I'll help you to find some badges when the time comes. However, at the moment my new home and job keep me very busy.

Your friend,

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Yes, I've been lucky and I promise, for what its worth, that I'll help you to find some badges when the time comes. However, at the moment my new home and job keep me very busy.

Your friend,

Dear Anders, your first priority should be to pay your bills. I appreciate the kind offer of help. I know where many, many loose badges are, but I am disinclined to pay 100 times their actual value as is the rage and fad today. To me they are just part of a hat.
But I am in the minority here, and the main thing is Notton's nice uniform, which we celebrate. That you have a job and a home today makes you a lucky man in a world otherwise of much needless suffering and remorse.

as ever, FB

[notton]

Thank you again Gentlemen for your input,unfortunately Sir the skull is not for sale and I am looking for a cap strongly since a long time now...

This walking trousers is a private purchase with no RZM tag or stamp and I think is period made. It is made in the exact same material than the tunic and breeches.
Notton

[Friedrich-Berthold]

The lange Hose with the Biese or Paspel also should have the Steg, i.e. the stirrup band for the Zugstiefel, i.e. elastic sided boots.

There are many examples of black trousers that have been re organized with the piping.

Thanks for showing us your things.

[Tricot]

an image of uncertain date and place, but likely of the early war as note the military style shoulder boards, which were cause of much friction with the regular army and were replaced. See cuff title. In other later images the cuff titles disappear. I cannot explain all of this, of course.

Regarding the use of military style shoulder boards, please expound. When were they used, for how long? How was the military able to force the change. And the change was to the police-style boards, correct?

I am endlessly fascinated by the internecine frictions between the SS and WH.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Regarding the use of military style shoulder boards, please expound. When were they used, for how long? How was the military able to force the change. And the change was to the police-style boards, correct?

I am endlessly fascinated by the internecine frictions between the SS and WH.

Volume 5 of Mollo speaks to this issue in some detail. The issue overall is well treated in Hans Juergen Mueller, Das Heer und Hitler as well as any sensible account of the role of the Einsatzgruppen in the Polish and later in the Russian campaign. Apparently there was also friction with the Waffen SS and the Einsatzgruppen SD/Sipo people.

Military rank insignia were naturally a status symbol and a sign of the monopoly of armed power in the state that was under constant threat in Nazi Germany from competing interests.


I am not sure when the Sipo/SD people in field grey uniform began to use the military style rank insignia, but the issue surely did not begin with the Polish campaign. Mueller describes all of this in detail. The book was first published in 1969. The fate of general Blaskowitz in the Polish campaign, and his protests against the misdeeds of the SS were also a factor in this story. The police style badges came ca. 1942. Most collectors have real trouble understanding the state and party relations in the III. Reich, and such things are but poorly interpreted in the ripping yarns approach as operates on most websites in which the heroic deeds of certain Waffen SS veterans get recycled as if straight from the typewriter of an SS Kriegsberichterkompanie, and then not in very good style or grammar.

The best literature on the Sipo/SD today is overwhelmingly also in German, and there is a huge, complex literature on the real character of the war in the east and the SS/Wehrmacht/other NS agencies relationship.

Happy reading.

PS On the world war website we have had an amusing discussion with much primary source material in the realm of confusion that operated generally at the time with SS insignia. The system was so complicated that the contemporaries could not figure it out and the directives to make policy only added to the confusion. This little fact comes as a huge shock to the gun show crowd who have seen Riefenstahl's marching pictures in Nuremberg too many times and extrapolated all of life from what they think they are seeing....or they interpret the past through the standardized, homogenized lite version of Orwell's 1984 that constitutes the dismal globalized present. The past was richer, more varied, and infinitely more interesting than the present. Where is the exit back to the 20th century?

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Confusion at an earlier date. This phenomenon hardly stopped, but became generalized. This nice extract from the RZM circular is courtesy of Wim Saris. Also, the collection of SS regalia requires an investment in a significant library of books made out of paper and card board, to say nothing of the investment of more precious time to figure out the past by reading said books and the development of a sense of history. The latter is a lost cause on websites for reasons that elude me, but I have little insight into the mind of the present other than perpetual rage and images of female pop stars covered in goo or exploding artillery shells in far off places.

The understanding of the real forces and facets of early and mid 20th century Germany are not had in a quiz show approach on websites, I am sorry to say. With this I have imbibed the same school masterly tone as Heini H, which is a natural consequence of things. Just look at the shi++y expression on this man's face. He is making marginalia with his green pencil on the day's correspondence coming across his desk. Poison green was the color of the arm employed by the SD and not wholly unlike his pencil, you know.

Sapere aude.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Life is bibliography.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

This has more pictures and less words, and serves your needs, too. I am less inclined to recommend Angolia, in fact. Mollo has much needed information on the organization here which is especially complicated. It is by Andrew Mollo, and though it does not have nifty color pictures from the leading handful of collectors in North America, it does explain a great deal and has saved my life on more than one occasion. His approach in the 1960s was to use nice drawings, which surely are not as glittering as the pictures of actual moldering woolens, but they retain their merits, too.