"D" RZM/SS Tagged Party Arm Bands?

[DerKerl]

In this pile of stuff I got with the double decal SS helmet posted here was four Party as opposed to SS (with the stripes on the top and bottom) arm bands with "D" RZM/SS tags. Two with Hersteller M4 "189" and one each "27" & "254". Have the manufacturers numbers been figured out? Do you guys know what they would of been used for? Nice woolly four piece construction with a little mothing. I doubt that they were ever issued. Got a clue of fair market value? Anybody interested? I rather like Reichpost and DAF stuff if you guys have anything like that laying around for trade. I'm a postal union steward. Doug

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Your "M4" is really A4, i.e. Ausruestung 4 aka Textilabzeichen Hersteller of the RZM license system.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

The SS tags on what otherwise appears really to me, at least, as a non SS item has given rise to much circular and not especially revealing speculation.
The Jack Pia book of four decades ago suggested such brassards to be for SS great coats, but all the SS great coats in black I own have perfectly normal SS brassards with black stripes (though the red piece is 5 cms longer to fit the bigger sleeve circumference...), and such is indicated in the RZM documents I possess.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

an SS great coat of note....

[DerKerl]

Fascinating. After all these years we are still poking around in the dark. Thanks ever so much. Doug

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Fascinating. After all these years we are still poking around in the dark. Thanks ever so much. Doug

Thanks. We have somewhat more light in this place than found elsewhere. Some of us have been at it for a very, very long time.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

The 1935 RZM list of firms that made such insignia is quite long, and I am not sure that one maker really has any significance over another. In the ten years that followed 1935, this list changed often and in arcane ways. This syndrome of some "list" as holy write and talisman that eradicates the uncertainty of the fake and the fraud has been invented by collectors to foster a nimbus of rarity which is accidental and a source of profit for anyone but the collector. See, for example, the cargo cult associated with Lubstein caps, which are common, but somehow prized above other makers of cap for reasons that are always a mystery to me. The forehead pressure high tech thingy gets them every time.
The same generalization applies to many other items in my experience, especially when language dissolves into rapture about how the smithy finished the sacred dagger.
For me the rule is simple: real or fake.
Certain collectors wish to feign gravitas via the cargo cult of the prestige maker, who, in fact, was a hum drum source of cheap, good quality items.
This gravitas is heightened with "lists" (almost always incomplete and often filled with errors) of "makers." whereby the RZM sources, for instance, indicate often truths that diverge 180 degrees from the "lists."
Half knowledge is closer to no knowledge at all, and the contradictions and exceptions are the core of this stuff.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Here are adverts of A 4 makers.

[BOB COLEMAN]

These armbands have been the object of conjecture for many years. We have had several thread on this subject on the forum. The theory that they were overcoat armbands has been disproved as no period picture of these being worn on such a garment has ever surfaced. They were produced first with the early cloth RZM tag and later with the paper "D" code SS RZM tag for a wool armband. All of the examples of the latter style I have ever seen were unissued. Due to the SS RZM tag, it is clear that they had some purpose for SS usage. It has always been my belief that the obvious answer is that these were issued by the SS to non SS member auxillaries working a SS event. This would also explain the large numbers of the later style with the paper tag as large events occured less and less as the war went on. Here is an example of the early cloth tag.

[jHAM]

Thanks to F-B and Mr. Coleman for the benefit of their images and experience. This same thread is posted on the dingbat site to a telling silence. I feel very lucky to share this space with such qualified and generous people.