This is not my property, but it is a Mueller from 1937.
I cannot find the picture of the interior, but it is a yellow rayon or silk with the runes and the 1st species of black tag.
This is not my property, but it is a Mueller from 1937.
I cannot find the picture of the interior, but it is a yellow rayon or silk with the runes and the 1st species of black tag.
Voila....
I believe the man who owned this cap was an SSTV officer. This is a truly extraordinary piece of enormous rarity.
Is it fair to assume that certain German manufactures of that period, had, how would you call it?, had a flair for the business world and would, without a second thought, bribe any official needed to get their products offcialy signed and sealed as official Party items?
I am not sure that bribery in a kind of mafia sense was prevalent, but there was a lot of back scratching and influence peddling known then as now, as well as, of course, Aryanization, whereby ethnic elements unwanted in the state had their businesses stolen from them in quasi legal procedures. The SS had its FM system, of course, which surely had the potential for conflicts of interest.
But the use of money for political purposes under the table has a rich history in Germany from the time of Bismarck and the King of Bavaria until the deal made in the 1990s to take over the former east German mineral oil concern by a western European firm. And surely this trait is not the sole property of Germans. Look at examples elsewhere in their number, but that is a topic that explodes the confines of this site.
For those interested in the theme Ben raises: Frank Bajohr, Parvenues und Profiteure: Korruption in der NS Zeit (FFM, 2001). The book has a nifty image of C. Weber and Max Amann with some swell dames at the press ball in Munich in 1939. Weber was surely the epitome of corruption without parallel in the III. Reich. Of course, corruption in high office is as alive and dangerous in the year 2009 as it was in 1939, surely.
At one time, this was one of my old "time-ravaged" EARLY examples . . . it had a bad bird, but I still think it was quite attractive myself. It now resides elsewhere, has been moderately "restored", and no longer retains the chin-strap you see in these pictures. To each his own - I guess . . .
Brad
A nice honest piece with character. I recall it from other locales. The main thing is the object must be authentic. Afterall, look in You Tube at these people running around, heil-ing, marching, burning down things and what not. It is not as if their clothes remained pure and tidy.
Here is the interior of an early officer's cap with the mark of the decades.
I've got to say, it's so refreshing to hang out on this forum. So many beautiful caps posted just in one thread.
Anyway, FB, by bribes, I wasn't really referring to any obvious "mafia" style behavior, it was more like you said, you scratch my back and so on. What I was trying ask but my vocabulary isn't really up to the task, is whether it's feasible to assume that the regulations set by the RZM regarding not marking of it's officialy approved garments in away to promote individual makers i.e. advertising, was sometimes overlooked because of some individual "close friendships" between certain officials regulating the RZM establishment and the owners of said clothing companies? I'm sure that any perspective customer in those days would have been able to recognise the Pekuro trademark/patent mark just as easily if not more so than we can today? Prehaps I've answered my own question? Maybe it was permitted to mark items approved by the RZM with patent marks but not by their individual company names? I'm not sure.
But, if that were the case, surely we would have unearthed RZM labelled caps with let's say the HPC pattened Frischluft system also printed on the shield or prehaps eReLs own design with not only the patent mark on the shield but printed on the sweatband also?
I was in discussion recently with someone who claimed that he was in regular contact with Mr.Wilkins and apparently Gary said that we forum collectors were too anal about all the details. My answer to that was that yes, we are, you have to be don't you, otherwise, what's the point?
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