Hello Corey,
Thanks for your reply, you may be right, you may be wrong, but no one will ever know for sure if it's original or not...
When i started collecting Heer militaria in the late seventies, one of the dealers who had a table within the flea market where i did go all weekends used to sell fake splinter pattern covers to young and unexperienced collectors. They had been made with original Zeltbahnen, some even had foliage loop. They were not reversible of course, but were extremely well made, by his wife....I bought one for 200 francs, which at the time was not cheap for a 10 yrs old boy. If he used to make and sell these fakes it's only because there was a demand, at least in France....in the nineties, he sold 1st type Heer smocks made of BGS camo cloth...
Corey, do you really think that regulation splinter pattern covers were easy to find and cheap in the seventies ?
This item was even rare in the german army during WWII...there were not many collectors to own an example in the 70s.
I may be wrong of course, but i think that in the seventies/eighties, the biggest owner of regulation covers was a french film company called "Pathé Cinéma". All covers from this source bear an ink stamp in circle with the letters PC in it. When they came out for business, most collectors were not ready to believe in them...and they laughed....
As most dead stocks were found quite recently (in the last 25 years), now a lot of collectors own one...but not back in the seventies...
Postwar in my country there was plenty of german camo cloth of all nature available for anyone interested, for instance in one of the factories that produced cars for a famous french car manufacturer, when workers had to use a rag or simply wash their hands, they used rags and towels made from WSS pea dots cloth cut in square, and they used them for years and years as the stock was huge...kilometers and kilometers of original WSS camo cloth used as rags and towels....i guess that dozens and dozens of them were binned each week.....and what has been done by some people at the time was to recover some nice pieces of leftover uncut cloth to make hunting clothes, like pants, shirt or jacket, which now could be considered as original privately purchased or field made WSS items....made in brand new cloth, with pro sewing machine, brand new thread, worn for years while hunting giving a nice and homogeneus patina...then stored for years in a closet giving this nice and characteristic old smell...I dont even talk about the thousands and thousands of french hunters, fishermen, mushrooms pickers who had a piece of clothes made from M31 Zeltbahnen...or the french soldiers sent to Indochina who in the early years used a field made garment made from german camo cloth...
I have seen so many "field made" covers in my collecting life, i heard so many stories about provenances especially from Normandie or Provence....that's why i wrote, save your money for a regulation one or make one yourself....in my opinion that's the only acceptable way to deal with this kind of item if you want to sleep at night...which is an important thing in life...
Tony : if it's cheap and if you dont care if the cover is original or not, then keep it until you find a regulation one.
Thanks
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