You are leaving out all his allowances, which were many, to include his clothing allowance. The sum of his total salary was higher, to be sure. Such salary varied widely by rank. Senior officers were very well compensated.
You are leaving out all his allowances, which were many, to include his clothing allowance. The sum of his total salary was higher, to be sure. Such salary varied widely by rank. Senior officers were very well compensated.
Which all ads up to the conclusion that an Officers hat was not too expensive at all? So why go to the trouble of re-banding an NCO cap?
What you might also consider is that, from 1939 onward, textiles were rationed and severely, so that such objects as this might not have been easily had. The black SS cap was worn well into the war, actually. However, I am fairly confident that the two caps I own were amended in the period, but I cannot speculate about the piece on Shea's site.
In any case, I, for one, experienced a Germany of thrift, and am married to a Slovak, who grew up in the CSSR of a time of scarcity, and for whom thrift is the norm. Even in the UK did such facts apply, as rationing was not given up there in one form or the other until 1957.
The past is a foreign country, as one says.
My purpose here is anything other than to defend a dealer's objects, to be sure.
Somewhere in the internet is the diary account of an SS doctor in the Generalgouvernement and his trials and tribulations with actually getting something from the Kleiderkasse SS, that is, the purchase of these things was not always as straightforward a proposition as one imagines today in a world of cheap and plentiful consumer items.
The above document is incomplete, but the portions that do describe the rationing of textiles is anything other than the consumer chain of supply we have in our world of the present. Textiles were a sore point in Germany even as early as the Four Year Plan of 1936 because the import of textiles required hard currency, which was in short supply.
The evidence of the problems caused by rationing in wartime are legion, actually. Germany began a war footing in its economy well before the war, that is in 1936. This fact is common knowledge, and it is a topic about which I have written two hundred times on this website.
I cannot recall the title or locale of this diary of an SS doctor, but it is famous and often cited source. He makes constant reference to the things he could or could not buy, and the loot from either the Protektorat and the Generalgouvernement that he sent home to his people. There is a whole new historical monograph of German looting of consumer goods from occupied Europe, a process that began with the systematic theft from Jews via Aryanization in the Reich itself.
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