Need your advice on this HBT tunic
Waffen SS HBT Tunic
Need your advice on this HBT tunic
Welcome to the forum..Im quite sure those shoulder tabs and sleeve eagle has been recently added..the rest I will leave to the SS gents who walk the hallways of this forum. They look quite new in appearance.
Give a read through the threads here..and you will see that photos are worth thousands of words.
Regards Larry
It is not the size of a Collection in History that matters......Its the size of your Passion for it!!- Larry C
One never knows what tree roots push to the surface of what laid buried before the tree was planted - Larry C
“The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” - Winston Churchill
Even some of us who are not "native Europeans" can well recognize a pretty shabby attempt to deceive. The insignia here, as Larry notes, are
nowhere near an original. Let me say that I stumble through these hall ways, and do so very loudly to the detriment of many.
Also, please note that I take no pleasure at all in the writing of this negative comment.
My wish is to exemplify authentic material, of which, sadly, there is precious little in the hands of collectors.
There are simply few authentic uniforms of this type. If they survived at all, they were stripped of insignia
and recycled in the shortages until the currency reform in 1948. Ownership of SS regalia at war's end was
subject for severe punishment and so forth. We struggle with what little authentic regalia there is, and
there do exist these items, but there is little of it. Most of what one can easily find is a fake, since
the making of fakes has gone on for much, much longer than the handful of years in which this regalia
was made and used, say, from 1939 until 1944. Five short years, and five short, violent and confusing years, to be sure.
Last edited by Friedrich-Berthold; 01-16-2018 at 01:29 AM.
I decided to add a little of background where the tunic came from. In year 2000 I moved to Daytona Beach, FL where I was attending flight school at Embry Riddle University. During my stay I was looking for used furniture in local Pennysaver. During one pickup of a kitchen table I met this elderly gentleman who was selling the entire content of the house, because of my accent he asked me where I was from and conversation started. Anyway, I ended up buying this tunic that apparently he brought with him from Germany; the tunic came with original SS belt and SS cup. He also had a luger pistol in very good condition but I was not able to buy it…
A case of buying the item rather than the story. One of the great adages of militaria collecting. A person can say whatever they want about the item, where it came from, whose it was. But at the end of the day, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Regards, B.B.
Well he brought a tunic with Fake insignia, the LAH slip-ons are terrible.
And any photos the SS-Cup or is that a misprint for SS-Cap which I'd also love to see.
Welcome to the forum NativeEuropean.
While I am sure it is highly disappointing, you have been fortunate to receive quick, timely, honest as well as quality feedback from a gentleman with tremendous experience. He has owned and handled more of these items than most people have even seen and has spent decades researching and analyzing them.
We always say, better to know the truth than to not. As painful as it may be.
And BB has also brought up a good point as well. Stories are great but we must first always look to the item. And if the tabs and cuff titles are fake, then we have to discount the story however hard it may be to disbelieve an old gentleman. We also do not get hung up on items being "text book", (we have many threads on the forum of period photos of non-text book uniforms, caps, etc), but as said above, if part of the items in fake, then the story is wrong or has gotten mixed up over time.
If you have photos of the Cap and Buckle that would be great as well.
"Please", Thank You" and proper manners appreciated
My greatest fear is that one day I will die and my wife will sell my guns for what I told her I paid for them
"Don't tell me these are investments if you never intend to sell anything" (Quote: Wife)
"There are simply few authentic uniforms of this type. If they survived at all, they were stripped of insignia
and recycled in the shortages until the currency reform in 1948. Ownership of SS regalia at war's end was
subject for severe punishment and so forth. We struggle with what little authentic regalia there is, and
there do exist these items, but there is little of it. Most of what one can easily find is a fake,..." F-B.
An excellent point from F-B, one I'm not sure younger and new collectors fully appreciate. Seek out photos of German POW's, or released returning German soldiers and you see them wearing their field tunic and trousers with all insignia and badges removed. At POW camps or collection areas prisoners would line up while Allied soldiers assigned to the job would strip the prisoner's uniform of Third Reich badges. These were tossed into a bin. Those Allied soldiers often stuffed a pocketfull of badges or collar taps to take home as souvenirs. So today, finding a combat tunic, Heer or SS with badges, collar tabs, eagles in 99% of the cases they have been added post war. And many time they are fake items. In constrast the "dress" or parade tunics remained at a home in closet and had a better chance of surviving intact. But even then caution is needed.
This tunic has 6 buttons (Heer) instead of 5 buttons for the Waffen SS. Of course toward end of war , they used what they could get but 6 buttons on the SS tunic was not standard. (the SS had to be different and often seemed to compete with the other branches)
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