Intersting black Tuchmütze

[Friedrich-Berthold]

A rough average figure per month for an SS NCO?

My nifty handbook for the SS includes extra allowances, but I have to look carefully for the pay tables. Naturally, an Allgemeine SS part timer received less pay (or none...?) than someone in the Waffen SS in combat in extreme circumstances. I will have to look closely, as I cannot immediately find it.

[BenVK]

When you have time of course. I have a vague idea of uniform prices but it struck me today that I have no idea what a loaf of bread would have cost in 1938 for example. Why would I? but knowing this would make a remarkable difference to judging whether uniforms were affordable or not.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

My handbook is not complete, actually, which is a source of anger to me towards the vendor.
But it is a gold mine, especially in what it does contain.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

The Lexikon der Wehrmacht dot com dot DE has a pay scales table, in fact. I cannot copy the link, because I am silly, old man. The basic pay is listed, which was pro rated based on years of service, as well as many allowances of various types which increased the total. The civil service website of today for German public employees also has historical wage scales going back to the 1930s, but you have to have the key to compare civil service salaries with military ones. I am not sure whether the Org Buch d NSDAP has pay scales in the NSDAP for the full time persons.

SS people in a position of whatever did not earn poorly.

This fact notwithstanding, I am not sure whether the Allgemeine SS people got paid at all, and, as I wrote above, the problem of persons being unable to afford uniforms was a significant one to have been remarked upon constantly at the time.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

There are also scholarly analyses of the cost of living in the NS period, the early FRG and the early GDR, too, in Google books from the excellent Boehlau Verlag, whose works I esteem greatly.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

You can also google the phrase "Prussian thrift," or "Swabian thrift," in this connection for some idea about culture and money in the past.

Such contrasts greatly with the weekend supplement in the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal on the life styles of the rich and famous, and their tendency to spend a fortune on junk.

Such excess was typical of many Nazi potentates, but was scarcely the norm for the majority of Germans of the time.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

This work contains an excellent discussion of the uniform and its problem of affordability and much more., esp. p. 574 ff.

It is a marvelous book.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

For those who care, there is no "scull" in the above image. So here are some to satisfy the puerile longing for cap badges.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Maybe poor old Julius Schreck got cooties from the foetid cap badge or from the dirty steering wheel of the grosser Mercedes in 1936?

[BenVK]

The Lexikon der Wehrmacht dot com dot DE has a pay scales table, in fact.

I think this is what you're referring to?
Die Besoldung eines Soldaten der Wehrmacht

Just a quick calcuation would make the average daily wage of an Officer in the Wehrmacht be about 10 RM so an extramutze would be roughly a days wages. That's very affordable is it not?