Very nice, Glenn!! I'll admit it: I'm on cloud nine with this one!
Very nice, Glenn!! I'll admit it: I'm on cloud nine with this one!
You must be! I have to say I have never danced in response to an item of militaria!
How I collect SS brassards.
Haha, rub it in, FB! Rub it in...
The arm band was a piece of insignia among several, which, in its time, appeared on an SS man as pictured.
The piece of insignia by itself, in lurid close up pictures, is somehow a break with its historical reality. It is not a picture of the past as people saw it and experienced it at the time.
The arm band was a badge of honor and a symbol of the origins and violent character of Nazism, taken from socialists and communists.
My goal is to recreate the historical reality, as near as possible by showing it as it was really worn to the extent that such is possible today and via these images for the use of all.
Authentic black SS tunics are very scarce in the internet, as they are in the world's leading museums.
I include the only real one I know, which is in Vienna, in a complete state. There is none in the leading museums in Germany.
This book and others created the aesthetic fixation that I do not find especially informative and useful for this site, and its goals.
The regalia of the SS was complex and constituted many elements, many things to designate rank and status.
and, in view of the political miseries of today, all of it constituted mankind's worst impulses to inflict injustice, violence, and brutality on innocent people for insane ideas born of great human suffering.
When this book was published, I went to study at a German university and I lived with a guest family, in which, to my surprise, the master of the house had been an SS officer.
At this point, I already owned three black SS tunics and five black SS peaked caps and daggers, and associated things. I did not take my collection with me to a German university.
I did go to theater costume sales, where I found real army uniforms for ten dollars.
Our experience of each other in this guest family was a major event in my life as a person, and as a professional historian.
What I did take away from this friendship, and it was indeed one over the years from 1974 until 1990s, when this family died, was that the people who wore these things prior, in the worldafter 1945 never wanted to see them again; thought they were junk; and thought that anyone interested in such insignificant and minor junk from the past was only one thing: crazy. They lived in the here and now and dealt with life in prosperity and peace with gratitude.
They recalled the past vividly, and they surely did not tell me the whole truth, and the truth they told me was their truth, which I very much wanted to know from them....even if it contained lies and such.
This experience of Nazi regalia among ex Nazis, who no longer identified with the regime and its goals, is among the most significant insights I might share in this venue.
and, you can be certain that this family did not have a wardrobe full of black SS uniforms enshrined somewhere in moth balls. I have never seen such a thing in Germany under any circumstances. and at any time.
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