As a courtesy to my colleague in Asia the following images.
As a courtesy to my colleague in Asia the following images.
good gracious...silky silky green lining this is a visor i would love to own and a visual which would imprint in me brain for many good years. Thanks FB colleague, your knowledge is greatly needed in forums.
Thanks for the mis placed praise. I think the lining is actually rayon, or deutsche Zellwolle or the like. Whatever, it is the twin to the cap on the cover of the Wilkins book. Wilkins and Shea describe it with the very odd phrase "textbook," an assertion I would dispute, actually. Whatever it is, the buttons are also RZM/SS marked to the year 1942. I think this cap was made by the Saxon or Silesian maker in Glachau, but that is a wild guess.
Hritz also has a hat very similar to this one. I assume these all came from the Kleiderkasse SS in the 1st half of the war, but that is a wild guess, too.
The sweat band is identical to a sweat band found in late made black SS enlisted caps for extra wear, which some Internet lions have derided as fake. This fragile band rips when you just look at it. As ever, collectors in search of the rosetta strone under the sweat band do huge devastation to these things.
Happy collecting. For the record. I disbelieve in the phrase "text book" I rather think that the cap maker lined the caps with the material they had, and as the war dragged on, they had ever less material and used what was at hand. One does well to delve into the Herstellungsvorschriften der RZM to see what was regulation, i.e. nach Vorschrift. But I look in vain for a "text book" of SS caps and encourage others to produce such a document for our enlightenment.
The only one here who remotely aids us in this search is colleague d'Alquen, and one would be surprised by the general nature of some of the directives that governed this material.
Hail headwear.
Happy collecting.
Last edited by Friedrich-Berthold; 10-21-2008 at 03:07 AM.
Postscriptum. One has also to say that this kind of Eskimo or Einheitstuch cap cover in the piece at the start of this thread is frequently found in fakes. This above piece, though, has a more bluish field grey (...????....!!!) which is hard to imitate and the fabric is the appropriate weight for head wear. Generally, of course, the officer grey caps occur in Muetzentrikot. See attached below....the Deschler TK on this piece replaced an Overhoff badge, actually, for reasons I cannot fathom.
i will remember this word deutsche Zellwolle. I have no problem with the sweatband. besides Hritz, i had seen a similar class visor with the same color lining in a major collection. Kleiderklasse might be, judging from certain traits compared to cream version. aarh.. the wilkins twins, if only can trace where the other one went to eh? Best textile collecting.
Apropos Muetzentrikot, here is a Lubstein cap of about the same date as the ones above...I think...this was from Stezelberger's collection.
As to the fate of the cap on the cover of the Wilkins book, I once had the man's email. I believe the thing sold for about USD 6000 in about 2000 or so, a goodly chunk of dough.
I think he was an engineering student at a good university in New Orleans, but my memory is faint. And the computer of that era is long gone and with it the man's email.
Further, I think the grey caps that came from the SS Kleiderkasse tended to have a custard yellow, grey or lime green lining...and maybe other normal colors, too, surely. I can also recall one with a brown cotton ish lining that I owned in 1971 and stupidly sold for far too little money....
Happy collecting....
This cap, too, is in the Wilkins book and is a much nicer piece than the grey one at the top of this file.... but collector tastes run more to items worn in combat---jedem das seine.
Thank you. I ask my colleagues here to correct and/or add to my buccaneering generalizations. But I posted the first cap here because my colleague in Asia wanted to see its interior and I also diverge from some of the generalizations in the widely read 2dary work on caps.
I am a skeptic of lists, rules, text books, generalizations at odds with historical reality, especially when these are conceived out of context and by imposing the present on the past.
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