SS Officer "flat-wire" collar-tabs - when were they first used?

[N.C. Wyeth]

I always look at period photos to identify the minutae of insignia. It is very important to collectors, but, I am sure, of little importance to the original soldier, wearing same.

It is only to those who study such things any matter of thought.

Bob Hritz

Thanks for the continued insight, Bob - sometimes these thoughts are often forgotten or overlooked . . .

But the answer to my original question still evades me - when were these embroidered Officer tabs first issued?

I'm sure they are genuine, but at the same time, it seems so uncommon to see original photographs of them in use, or to find original documents that hint of there introduction . . . where are they?

[Friedrich-Berthold]

You pose the kind of question I have many times, and there usually comes no echo, because most people have no way of answering such a question based on the highly limited evidence in the hands of most reading these lines.

Photographic evidence of details of insignia is imperfect at best. Sometimes the photos are quite clear, but generally not.

Further, the evidence of the past that would allow a bomb proof answer is no where to be found, if it ever existed at all.

The real evidence are the Proben, as I showed to you, and these usually have a date. But only one-s-ies and two-s-ies of these exist, if at all, so, for instance, there is no existing set of Proben for all the items in the SS price list. That would be something, now, would it not?

Our friend d'Alquen has the best references and maybe he can help us.

Gun show lore and pearls of wisdom won't answer the question.

In real terms of getting to the bottom of your quert, some one who worked in the quartermaster base of the SS (Verwaltungsamt SS) would know, were such a person still alive and in possession of their marbles. You need a time machine back to say 1958, and then you might have found them in Dachau or Munich or wherever.

But as colleague Hritz said, most people who wore these things and even made them gave little thought to the antiquarian passion we manifest here. They would be greatly perplexed by it all.

[N.C. Wyeth]

You pose the kind of question I have many times, and there usually comes no echo, because most people have no way of answering such a question based on the highly limited evidence in the hands of most reading these lines.

Photographic evidence of details of insignia is imperfect at best. Sometimes the photos are quite clear, but generally not.

Further, the evidence of the past that would allow a bomb proof answer is no where to be found, if it ever existed at all.

The real evidence are the Proben, as I showed to you, and these usually have a date. But only one-s-ies and two-s-ies of these exist, if at all, so, for instance, there is no existing set of Proben for all the items in the SS price list. That would be something, now, would it not?

I am with you FB . . . maybe some day this specific Proben will be revealed . . . until such truth becomes revealed, it will be my personal quest to always ask the question!

[Friedrich-Berthold]

I am with you FB . . . maybe some day this specific Proben will be revealed . . . until such truth becomes revealed, it will be my personal quest to always ask the question!

Please ask each question that burns within you.

I have posed dozens of questions here and elsewhere and never received any answers at all.

But, I have also learned many unexpected things and found many more exciting and interesting things, too.

The appendix in the 3d volume of Mollo includes the order for the SSVT uniform, with reference to the alu wire Effekten. This order is from 1934, the time in which the SSVT takes shape as such.

Hence, based on this order and the organizational consolidation of the paramilitary/ domestic mission of these units in the era 1934/5, I imagine the insignia originated in said time.

But I am making a historical hunch, which is not what you seek.

Our Canadian friend has gone through the orders and circulars in depth, that is, he has gone beyond the research Mollo did once upon a time and then some. I would await his answer.

And, there are many things we shall simply never know, and such is our fate. This fact makes me skeptical of those on other websites who would have us believe that they watched all these processes at every spot in the 1000 year Reich and speak with scientific certainty.

I know very little at all.

Postscriptum

This man entered the SSVT only a month or so after Roehm was bumped off. I think the insignia in question may be from then.

It would also be a miracle to find all the Proben for the SS that must have resided in Dachau somewhere, or in Berlin or wherever. In the case of the old armies and even up to the Bw and NVA, these Proben exist and have been preserved.

They are the missing link for much of what we think about and seek.