colored piping on cap, 1943...Sturbannfuehrer Bochmann

[BenVK]

When I was contemplating the cap above, I read pages of theories concerning the regulations of piped caps and when they were officialy allowed to be worn, bought etc etc.
If one image convinced me that it was all mostly rubbish, it was this one. Actualy, it's from period film footage in 45 of SS personnel surrendering to the Americans after crossing a half knocked out bridge on the Elbe.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Dear Ben, thank you for showing your former cap. You are not an SS collector until you sell something in need and then regret it very much later on. Such is normal for all of us. In fact, the concentration camp system was hardly a matter of hush hush in the III. Reich. The Nazi periodica made a big deal out of Dachau especially in the years prior to 1939, with photo shoots in the party illustrated dailies and what not. The extermination camps were secret, sort of, but the deportations and waves of repression and further disenfranchisement were hardly kept secret. In fact, if you look at the propaganda closely, there was a fair amount of reference to the actual extermination of Jews once same got going in the course of 1941-2. There was a huge regime of secrecy in the state and party, but the claims that all of this was unknown, as proffered after the war, is a bunch of hooey.

Yours is a very rare hat, made more problematic by the superstition and pretty unhelpful and anti historic group think that attends these objects. Any Waffenfarbe cap is surely the subject of a super scrutiny that sometimes leads, in my mind, to a pretty sad dead end. To mix the image, the search for knowledge often leads us to a gem under our very nose, and I think that many nice and rare babies are thrown out with the bath water of blind, dogmatic group think---especially connected with these websites and the fanaticism they inflame

This fact is why I posted these images, which, as near as I can tell are really from 1942-3, in fact. They are evidence of a rock solid sort that contradicts the collector group think.

We like you and accept your eccentricity, because we are also eccentric. And we also wish a happy holiday and cherish your contribution here and your keen insights.

[BenVK]

Some more pics of piped caps..

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Thank you. You are rubbing it in with that black cap with the leather peak which I did not succeed in buying. Did you buy it?

Do your images have dates?

The issue, of course, is could a cap made in 1940 survive heavy use for three and four years, when, in peacetime, the things were to be worn for a year or so? I am sure that people made due with what they had and stretched the things out somehow with repairs, but I am also sure that these things were made well after the cut off date in 1940.

All this being said, plainly, there is a heap of fake caps with colored pipings, to be sure, but there are also a small, but present minority of actual, real, authentic caps.

I also appreciated your intervention on the other site, with the silly exchange about SS Kleiderkasse vs. a private hatter cap in the hands of Jarvis and Berg, upon which others heaped their normal scorn.

I must confess that the wartime, bare bones SS officers cap which is so prized by others, in comparative terms, may be rare, but as a cap, it ain't so interesting as a cap. I guess I am a freak.

Thank you for the data. Happy Holidays. Please post more on this site.

[BenVK]

We like you and accept your eccentricity, because we are also eccentric. And we also wish a happy holiday and cherish your contribution here and your keen insights.

Probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me since I started collecting.

Merry Christmas to you and yours and best wishes from London. I will raise a glass to you my friend.

[BenVK]

Thank you. You are rubbing it in with that black cap with the leather peak which I did not succeed in buying. Did you buy it?

Not at all! I wasn't aware that the cap was for sale otherwise I would have sold all that I have to obtain it! I only found the photos..

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Thank you, dear Ben, and ein Prosit to you, as well.

The black cap came from Scandinavia, went to the USA and is now somewhere else in North America. I am chasing it, actually.

Once more, thanks for your intervention.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Bauer pictures of the KL system that got fairly wide publicity

[Friedrich-Berthold]

There is now an excellent literature on the Gestapo at the local level, especially by Gelatelly. In his book on the role of denunciation and the handful of Gestapo officers central to racial oppression and disenfranchisment, he includes the Bauer images that were reproduced in the Franz Eher Verlag Illustrieter Beobachter. And, in the early period (seen here), people got out of the camps, if they could survive. Here is an image of prisoners released for a Christmas amnesty in 1933, I think. Notice the variety of headwear, but it is otherwise an image designed to intimidate those who are not going along.

Addendum: the second image of March 1933 is surely not of a night and fog action to arrest a political prisoner. This image is from Munich in 1933, and this man likely ended up in Dachau, too, though I do not know. But it is not as if people cannot see what is before them, and this is at the start of the regime.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Here is a well known image of the SS as Hilfspolizei in 1933.....

and the boycott of Jewish stores in the spring of the same year.

None of this was a secret at all.....