Theodor Eicke gut ????, am definitivsten ja !!!!

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 01-08-2011, 04:04 AM

by sitges1990

I wish you would share your brilliant insights with us more often F.B. It's facinating to read your cultivated opinions on these subjects, especially when you "let your hair down".

Your photos are to die for Dr No.

Jay

Dear Colleague, my insights are hardly brilliant. But thank you for saying so. These are matters in which I have more than a hobby interest, you might say, and because of the stupid nature of the 21st century, I will keep it at that. I can always give you a list of books to read, if that is your thing.
Many here do read, and read well, which is a useful part of this stuff. I think the knowledge piece is important for the regalia, really.
Without putting too fine a point on it, I have spent most of my adult life around soldiers in something more than a mess kit repair company and at somewhat higher echelons.

**Espenlaub Militaria** · 01-08-2011 04:04 AM

We also buy and trade your items and full collections!

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 01-08-2011, 04:05 AM

Dr No would do himself and the collector bio tope a favor in publishing his SSTV albums via Schiffer or one of the usual suspects. Enough of these albums have come to light to make for an interesting picture book and it would be a commercial success granted the interest in the SSTV and Division "Totenkopf."

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 01-08-2011, 04:18 AM

The whole issue of Soldaten wie andere auch piece as pioneered by Hausser and Steiner and the group in the 1950s also has to be seen specifically in the context of that time, actually. That is, the ex SS people wanted pensions from the FRG and also were part of the veterans movement more generally of the era, some of which were part of the FRG and some of which were politically dissident and drifted to the edge of constitutionality as in the era 1919-1933.
This subject is not as interesting as "crimped prongs" and the particular die marks on the Deschler skull made by the master die maker on 30 January 1937 (and shown to me in the Munich Hauptbahnhof three weeks ago before I got on the train to Leipzig) but all history is contemporary history. This memoir literature was very much a function of said era and it lives on decades later. The Waffen SS apologia literature was also part of the reaction against the way that many German did try to make the SS the alibi of a nation, whereas other professions wholly went along with all the bad things, and were deeply implicated themselves, i.e. professors, diplomats, lawyers, pi pa po. These professional groups in national socialism did not fess up to how brown they had been until decades later, whereas the SS people took it on the chin immediately, not surprisingly. But many of them re cycled themselves with great skill, on both sides of the iron curtain.

all too droll.

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 01-08-2011, 04:25 AM

This is the great grand daddy of the Waffen SS memoir literature.

Theodor Eicke gut ????, am definitivsten ja !!!!

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 01-08-2011, 04:27 AM

For the most up to date and remarkable quantitative research on the comparison of the Waffen SS and the army, with huge chunk of top flight research on Dr. No's beloved SSTV, read this one.

I wish I had written this, but I am not smart enough to have done it or have organized the research, which is totally beyond my limited brief.

A remarkable book in all ways.

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 01-08-2011, 04:30 AM

My next book will be a sequel to this one.

**sitges1990** · 01-08-2011, 04:55 AM

Not drool at all F.B. I'm sure those would be facinating reads if I could read German. There in, lies the rub. I'm a typical language limited American. In your opinion, which memoir of all the SS commanders is the best? Also, I can't wait to see your sequel to the above.

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 01-08-2011, 05:00 AM

by sitges1990

Not drool at all F.B. I'm sure those would be facinating reads if I could read German. There in, lies the rub. I'm a typical language limited American. In your opinion, which memoir of all the SS commanders is the best? Also, I can't wait to see your sequel to the above.

I only know these SS memoirs in German, in fact. My sequel to Struwelpeter is still on the drawing board as it were, shunted aside by my hum drum day job wherein certain of these issues come up from time to time.

All the best and thanks for the kind words, indeed.

**Doktor No** · 01-08-2011, 05:54 AM

What's more interesting to study? The known and accepted truths that are repeated over and over or the objective and hard to find facts. Ask yourself how a Man takes a Cadre of Camp Guards and forms them into the most fearsome fighting Division in the Waffen SS. Why were they not routed at Demjansk? Why did they not surrender? Is it because they were at the Barracks before the War running around the Track, Leaping Hurdles and throwing the Discus?

The Russians gave up on Demjansk and went elsewhere, can you imagine what the Soviets thought? "Forget these Lunatics, they look like Skeletons in Rags and yet.... on they Fight".

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 01-08-2011, 05:58 AM

Thanks for the nice images. I wonder what the young man in the black uniform looked like a few years later.
Read the book I posted by Rohrkamp to find the answers to the questions you pose above. They are all there in spades.

The interesting thing, of course, with these studio portraits of the SSTV men as proud Eickeaner in say 1938 is how the reality of war marked them in the intervening time.