ErEl/Wagner
Ladies and Gentlemen: Presently there is a cap for sale on the Weitze site which was produced by ErEl but has a Wagner-stamped sweatband. Is it thinkable that ErEl produced for Wagner? Is it a Frankenstein? What do you think?
Here is the link: https://www.weitze.net/militaria/88/...e__245388.html
I assume someone repaired the sweat band with a Tellermuetze example versus the late war Lubstein type, which is more difficult to find.
Or Lubstein got the spare parts from Wagner. You can see in wartime UM that shops are swapping their stock with one another because
of shortages and supply blockages. But imagine someone restored this cap. It is a fairly 08/15 thing.
I am sure my paranoid, stitch fairy cartel of anxiety denizens will have a more conspiratorial interpretation.
The band looks well situated, though. Who knows?
It is not especially important.
This kind of stamp is seen on army contract enlisted caps, made in huge numbers prior to the outbreak of war.
Dear Sir,by Friedrich-Berthold
I also tend to the swapping theory. It is a late-war ErEl so the idea is not too far-fetched and the stitching of the sweatband seems original to the cap.
and people could take their caps to handicraftsmen or women and get them mended. This fact may irritate the stitch fairy ISIS member, but there you are.
There is the truth as told in the pillars of paranoia of petty digital perfectionists, and then there is what really happened in the past.
I included the UM adverts where one military retailer offers to swap their goods with another plainly because of the break down in supply and the privations of the war.
I am sure there is some Lubstein fundamentalist who will take exception, but so be it. All of these things got reduced in quality even before the war began,
and I cannot date the various sweatbands and so forth. Some bear a stamp and so forth.
I find it immaterial.
The Wagner stamp, though, is typical of the contract caps of pre war make.
The extra caps made by Wagner in wartime for the army looked quite different.
In any case, this cap with Weitze is not the purist.
If I wanted fully to subscribe to the paranoia police, I would ask whether someone had not used a colored marker to render it Pz Grenadier....?
I have a Lubstein wartime Pz cap, in nice preservation and it has a Lubstein sweat band.
The thing looks like a classic wartime Lubstein cap in average condition.
This is mine.
I do not have an image of the interior, but it is not as nicely made as, say, the one from 1938 or so.
ErWeSa--
This hat is a late-late war Erel made for the Kleiderkasse. (I call them the M-45 Erel).
Almost all of them have the Clemens Wagner 1938 stamp on the leather sweatbands.
My hypothesis is that there was a sweatband contractor that had unused/unsold stock intended for CW, who then sold them to Erel (or maybe Erel purchased them from CW).
Most of the M-45 Erels are in unissued condition. My theory is that they were found sitting in an OKK store/warehouse, and discovered by Allied soldiers.
Years ago there was some thought that they were post-war production by Erel, but original boxed examples turned up, along with photos of officers wearing them.
Just another "strange but true" story in the never-ending saga of TR collecting....
“Show me the regulation, and I’ll show you the exception.”
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