Article about: Based on your images, Notton, I would guess this piece you just posted was put together, if the tunic itself, is authentic. This is what I meant with the various pieces found in the collapse
Based on your images, Notton, I would guess this piece you just posted was put together, if the tunic itself, is authentic. This is what I meant with the various pieces found in the collapse of the socialist order and its film studios. But I cannot really tell from the images. The SD Raute does not bring joy to me, though. A leading US dealer in the No. Virginia realm made a name for himself in being a pioneer in the ex USSR with his discoveries.
But so much of this is a hall of mirrors without the chance to examine the thing at close range.
Since such fools as I have posted so many images of authentic pieces here, the fakers are increasing their efforts and skills, of course.
The authentic issue tunics (that is, with the VA stamp) of make after about 1936 or so have marked buttons and many traits I shall not divulge which are pretty obvious when you actually handle the thing.
Here an authentic and remarkable uniform illustrating the military style shoulder boards of the years 193x until 1942.
The SD Raute with the Paspel means former member of the Gestapa, i.e. the forerunner of the Gestapo in the Prussian State police in the beginning of the III. Reich. The Gestapa predated Himmler's take over of what became the Gestapo in the process of the Gleichschaltung of the police forces in the Laender. You will recall that Heini H. and Reinhard H. got their practical start with all of this after 30 January 1933 first in Bayern. Prussia was another undertaking entirely, in the hands of Hermann Goering.
Last edited by Friedrich-Berthold; 03-29-2010 at 05:09 AM.
Here the famous image of the famous Charlottenburger Schule der Sipo in Berlin.
This tunic here was sold by a famous US dealer some years ago. It is not my property and the photo is courtesy Darryl Pajot, who long departed these climes for elsewhere. I cannot find the image of my uniform I posted somewhere on this site some weeks ago. Tut mir leid....also that I use the word "famous" too often.
Last edited by Friedrich-Berthold; 03-29-2010 at 05:33 AM.
But here are some similar caps, of course....I have posted these images a few times. These are on the heads in the Charlottenburg picture. Maybe they are the very same... The peaked cap on the left is in the Shea Beaver book, which was only revealed to me recently and long after I bought and sold the thing. The cap looks nicer in the book than it did in real life, and I sold it to a friend, of which I am proud. He has not pried off the cap insignia, either.
The cap on the right is from an SSTV officer with a common name, whom the dealer thought was an Allgemeine SS man. The dealer was in error. I still have it, too.
The cuff titles are of the type introduced in the middle of 1937 for all ranks, though they are wrongly depicted by nearly all as being the Standarte staff cuff titles for all echelons of a Standarte, i.e. Standarte, Sturmbann und Sturm in the rank of Fuehrer. The cuff titles with the colored borders were phased out as of then, but were worn further, since the old and new models were worn concurrently as was typical in the SS and as causes many of you to be very unhappy and confused.
The NS Jahrbuch has the original Nazi pencil in it, which I shall sell for a set of real neusilber or cupal cap insignia, known to some as "sculls" or "deadheads." (i.e. see the caps here) You do not see many Nazi pencils in the year 2010. I imagine in the process of running the III. Reich and the New Order in Europe, they got ground down to nothing.
sapere aude.
PS I only mention the fact that the one cap was in the book because it is an amusing irony that reinforces the otherwise neurotic tendency to hoard and hoard this material, which is usually not so practical. It also speaks to the fact that there is less of this stuff around than some of us think.
Last edited by Friedrich-Berthold; 03-29-2010 at 05:16 AM.
Volume 5 of Mollo speaks to this issue in some detail. The issue overall is well treated in Hans Juergen Mueller, Das Heer und Hitler as well as any sensible account of the role of the Einsatzgruppen in the Polish and later in the Russian campaign. Apparently there was also friction with the Waffen SS and the Einsatzgruppen SD/Sipo people.
Military rank insignia were naturally a status symbol and a sign of the monopoly of armed power in the state that was under constant threat in Nazi Germany from competing interests.
I am not sure when the Sipo/SD people in field grey uniform began to use the military style rank insignia, but the issue surely did not begin with the Polish campaign. Mueller describes all of this in detail. The book was first published in 1969. The fate of general Blaskowitz in the Polish campaign, and his protests against the misdeeds of the SS were also a factor in this story. The police style badges came ca. 1942. Most collectors have real trouble understanding the state and party relations in the III. Reich, and such things are but poorly interpreted in the ripping yarns approach as operates on most websites in which the heroic deeds of certain Waffen SS veterans get recycled as if straight from the typewriter of an SS Kriegsberichterkompanie, and then not in very good style or grammar.
The best literature on the Sipo/SD today is overwhelmingly also in German, and there is a huge, complex literature on the real character of the war in the east and the SS/Wehrmacht/other NS agencies relationship.
Happy reading.
PS On the world war website we have had an amusing discussion with much primary source material in the realm of confusion that operated generally at the time with SS insignia. The system was so complicated that the contemporaries could not figure it out and the directives to make policy only added to the confusion. This little fact comes as a huge shock to the gun show crowd who have seen Riefenstahl's marching pictures in Nuremberg too many times and extrapolated all of life from what they think they are seeing....or they interpret the past through the standardized, homogenized lite version of Orwell's 1984 that constitutes the dismal globalized present. The past was richer, more varied, and infinitely more interesting than the present. Where is the exit back to the 20th century?
The Mollo series I have, that's a good launch point, thank you. I am currently reading Hohne's "Order of the Death's Head." It goes quite in depth regarding the factions of the Reich both within and without the SS. As us American's live in a hierarchical technocracy, the epitome of bureaucracy, it is difficult not to extract administrative excellence from the curt drill in Leni's reels.
As I am Germanically challenged, I must wait for more translations of Hohne's works and the Mueller book you mentioned. American researchers took the lead with early research, but now we are far, far behind.
Back to pips and litzen, the genesis of the SS rank devices (kragenspiel correct?) trace to it's SA origins. And the SA rank insignia were designed by the infamous artistically minded one from Austria.
As the SS surrounded Hitler constantly, and as he is the "father" of the rank designs, one wonders if a simple random comment by the dictator himself would lead to a flurry of new uniform regulations.
I see that many answers and more questions lie in the pages of the "Uniformen Markt" disc. But sadly no poor language studies grad student has tackled a translation for those of us in the New World.
The Mollo series I have, that's a good launch point, thank you. I am currently reading Hohne's "Order of the Death's Head." It goes quite in depth regarding the factions of the Reich both within and without the SS. As us American's live in a hierarchical technocracy, the epitome of bureaucracy, it is difficult not to extract administrative excellence from the curt drill in Leni's reels.
As I am Germanically challenged, I must wait for more translations of Hohne's works and the Mueller book you mentioned. American researchers took the lead with early research, but now we are far, far behind.
Back to pips and litzen, the genesis of the SS rank devices (kragenspiel correct?) trace to it's SA origins. And the SA rank insignia were designed by the infamous artistically minded one from Austria.
As the SS surrounded Hitler constantly, and as he is the "father" of the rank designs, one wonders if a simple random comment by the dictator himself would lead to a flurry of new uniform regulations.
I see that many answers and more questions lie in the pages of the "Uniformen Markt" disc. But sadly no poor language studies grad student has tackled a translation for those of us in the New World.
Thanks for this. The Hoehne book is an introduction, but it has long been surpassed by scholarly literature on many, many aspects of the SS, some of which I have included here.
The ins and outs of SS uniforms in reality are well contained in the relevant archival files and even in the SS Befehlsblaetter, some of which I have included here. I rather expect that Hitler was involved in much of the design of the early party regalia, and remained thus, granted his background and career longings which he realized through politics.
There is no way around learning German if you want to gain escalation dominance with this stuff. Otherwise, one is always object and never subject, as it were. I learned German in large part because of my own deep interest in this material, and when I did it about forty years ago, patience and a long apprenticeship were the norm. As concerns languages and culture this is no longer the norm with a computer that poses as a translator. The last 20 years have especially spoiled and deluded my countrymen as concerns the role of language. Also, a language graduate student would have a hell of a time translating Uniformenmarkt, since its language is archaic and laden with the trade jargon of the tailoring and the textile industry of the era, to say nothing of Nazi Deutsch, which is a cosmos in and of itself. Many native speakers of German today would have trouble with it.
But if this were all easy, then you would not be interested in it. Most other people are content to look at pictures of teen-agers covered with Playdoh and to twitter and tweet their consumption of apple sauce or the latest stock trades. Or to read lists of the foods that cause one to forget that one has lost a fortune and is presently to stand in a bread line.
This is the cap that goes with the grey Grenz Polizei uniform. An extraordinary piece. It is not mine, sadly. Ein Prachtstueck! It is the property of an anonymous collector who shared his material here some time ago to a reception in which some failed to recognize the treasures before them.
Last edited by Friedrich-Berthold; 03-29-2010 at 05:52 AM.
Very nice piece, indeed. Thanks. The top image is the rose laden drive way to the SD Hauptamt, an image that is more suited to fine homes and gardens than to totalitarianism. It is courtesy of our fine colleague, Robert H.
Re: Black uniform
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by Friedrich-Berthold
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