New Poster - Looking To Buy An Authentic SS Uniform

[Friedrich-Berthold]

This is how the thing looked when it appeared from a veteran's family in the US southwest. Thank God they took good care of the thing for sixty odd years. Notice the appearance of the cuff title in the well staged image and the impromptu shot. Real SS alu embroidery has a patina from oxidation which is quite tangible in real life and in photos. This piece has little of same, but one can learn to recognize this patina from the examination of real pieces, i.e. the proper appearance of the 70 year woolen and the alu. Effekten. I do not mean to be arch or coy in writing this, but the old fakes and recently made, cunning reproductions do not have the patina either in the woolens or the Effekten--especially in the latter. Or, the old fakes are simply old, and have signs of age, but these are not identical with the phenomenon I have in mind here.
Were I a better Fotograf, I could illustrate my generalizations. But my camera is busted and I have neither the interest nor energy to learn how to zip images into my Mac computer, which constantly flummoxes me...

Happy foetid clothes.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

of some relevance to the theme.

Though foetid, in a good state of preservation.

I am not a good Fotograf, but I can see the patina I have described.

Maybe it is a delusion or an illusion. Maybe both....

A very energetic operator of personnel files and rank lists might figure out to whom these objects belonged.

Happy woolens and may all your dreams of Alu Effekten come true.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

The Rest Militaria Verlag has published a 3 volume history of the field grey army uniform from about 1907 until 1918 in three volumes, and it is by far the best thing I have ever read on German regalia. There is a lot of very subtle knowledge in this work which is no where to be found in the English language works we too frequently cite. Krause is a curator at the Bavarian Army Museum in Ingolstadt and really has a substantial knowledge of regalia, unlike especially the grandees we see on the other site. You might object that this theme is not really germane to ours, but the SS grew out of the experience of the old army in an indirect way, and, to be sure, the people who ran the administrative structure of the latter had experience in the former. I do not collect grey uniforms of the first world war, but in many ways the truths governing this earlier regalia matters to the later epoch in a variety of ways. That is, the imposition of war time economy measures had a precedent in the 1914-1918 period that was then duplicated on a larger scale in the 1936-1945 period.

Such themes that impress me with this work are: the origins of field grey textiles and the difficulties experienced in standardization; the imposition of war time restrictions on certain Werkstoffe used in the manufacture of uniforms and the ersatz materials; variations from regulations in detail, which were decried and then tolerated; and much more done with reference to primary sources and in a readable and sophisticated narrative.

None of the Schiffer coffee table books come remotely close to this standard at all. It is a pity that Mollo won't update his original work with the state of knowledge as it exists four decades later.

Someone reading this should do so, but the internet has made this kind of book nearly obsolete, which is a pity.

This being said, the work I cited is quite costly, being in excess of Euros 158 which is USD 227 or so without the porto.

While the author did an earlier work with photo examples from the Ingolstadt museum, this work I mention here consists only of text, drawings, many from Paul Pietsch (the great uniform illustrator) and much citations of regulations.

There is not the accidental heap of gun show lore pieces put together in a semi random order, and the whole is embedded in the necessary institutional context done by a professional historian/curator.
But the latter is hardly a dry enterprise, but offered in a narrative that holds this reader's interest and which makes good sense.

The SS field should aspire to this standard.

On all my detached service this year, I bought a lot of books.

The Spanish book on Heeresfeldblusen is also of exceptional quality, too.
It has been reprinted in Germany.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Let us see what nuggets are had in the Gesamtausgabe of Uniformen Markt?

Does someone else here own same and have some insights?

The Herstellungsvorschriften der RZM are not as rich a source for us as I had hoped.

But they are surely interesting.

Were the latter republished after 1936?

Happy impossibly obscure details of the 20th century that only interest a handful of people, some of whom should attend to their proper jobs and write more for scholarly journals.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

One little astonishing detail in this Krause compendium is this: officer's caps with silk cap covers were forbidden during the '14-'18 war, and yet were bought with great gusto by those who flaunted regulations. For awhile the SS had a cap with a silk cap cover. Enclosed here is Peter J's example, and an army one of the Muetze alte Probe.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

For those interested, here is the cover of said work described above.

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Peter J sold this uniform a while ago, an Abschnitt staff piece from the Bodensee. It took awhile to sell, but it is a nice piece. In my experience, material of this kind is in really very few hands.

[Frog]

F-B's images are inspiring to be sure.

I suppose if these woolens had survived in greater numbers that we might not be quite so fascinated.

Imagine having your pick of these:

[Friedrich-Berthold]

Or these....

I should think that I would like them even if more were at hand.

They have a hypnotic effect on those who throw a normal life away at the sight of old textiles.

[Frog]

Where the heck were the collectors back then?