SS items of note: Maker marked visor hat

[jHAM]

From Mollo VI the relevant sections.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

From Mollo VI the relevant sections.

Thanks for the kind aid.

[Robert H]

we also know maker marked W-SS visor caps from the war years (like 40-45) that are sure original even without reading or knowing Mollo's books.

[M18922]

If they were allowed to have their caps made by a private Muetzenmacher from 1941 then why are waffen-SS visor caps with a makers logo so hard to come by? Or am I missing something here?

Cheers, Pat

[BOB COLEMAN]

Pat-
Not all gray caps are Waffen SS just as not all black caps are Allgemeine SS. I have six gray officer caps and all are purchased outside the SS standard supply source. It would make sense that junior officers, who are the majority or any military group's officer component, would not spend the extra funds to privately purchase their caps. While unmarked gray officer caps are more common, maker or distributor marked caps are not that rare.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

If they were allowed to have their caps made by a private Muetzenmacher from 1941 then why are waffen-SS visor caps with a makers logo so hard to come by? Or am I missing something here?

Cheers, Pat

The SS as an organization, especially its officer corps, was hardly as large as that of, say, the army or other uniformed entities in the III. Reich. The pictorial record leaves the impression that the SS was omnipresent, but the actual numbers of officers of this organization was relatively small.
In the second part, these items were hardly a prized object in the years 1945 and thereafter, such that every German I have known (and it is about a dozen or more...) with an SS connection destroyed their uniform, or their families did so.
This fact is often too arcane and hard to comprehend in the present, where there are so many fakes and so much apparent interest in these items.
Bob's point is also germane, as well, as the grey uniform was worn by other branches of the SS.
Any SS officer's cap is rare, be it black or grey. This being said, I found a grey cap several years before I found a black one in the dim decades of the past.
In the U.S. zone, for instance, one of the first measures of military government was to order the mandatory turning in of all uniforms, as well as weapons.
Another aspect is that the grey cap was frequently worn in central and eastern Europe, engulfed by the Red Army in something other than a peaceful process and one which tended to end in the death or flight of SS officers. Either way, it is not as if the whole wardrobe of said SS officer made it intact from garrisons in Minsk or Krakow into peace and order of Baden or Hannover in the final months of the war. Many areas of Nazi Europe and eastern Germany or Bohemia became communist and for which ownership of such items after May 1945 was also especially toxic, hence much of this regalia was also destroyed. Our central and eastern European friends here can attest to this fact.
A further point is that many German cities, themselves, were destroyed in the last eighteen months of the war, whereby the suit of clothes at home likely got pulverized as well, or, later, in a time of cold and hunger was either sold on the black market or burned for fuel......
One does well to look at the films of the ruins made famous by Rosellini and others in the years 1946 and 1947 to have some idea of life in Germany, which is unfathomable to young people.
Look at a picture of present day Aleppo in Syria or Somalia, and you find something like Cologne or Berlin in 1946.....
Ergo, all of this accounts for why such caps are rare.

Apropos the fact that the leading cities were destroyed, I have never seen an Allgemeine SS uniform from the Standarten from greater Berlin......but, by same token, Cologne uniforms are present, even though the city was pulverized.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

The cap illustrated in this thread is of wartime make, not the least because of its very high crown, as well as the cheapo textiles of the lining.

[M18922]

Thanks for the information Gents.

Thanks, Pat

[Robert H]

always highly rated words from FB and Bob.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

always highly rated words from FB and Bob.

Thanks.