I can tell you one thing: the internet gurus on other sites would have not gotten said job here so advertised even though they routinely pass themselves off as if they actually had this job or ones similar.
May these ads throw open a window to the past, and thereby show some light on the murky tendency on other websites to pose as an expert, whereas the authentic criteria for same at the time were impossibly different from our imagination of same. Read this ad with special care and compare same to many of the threads on other sites.
Fascinating. Saw an ad for Kornacker, Weissbach, and a Hamburg maker I had never heard of.
Is the CD available in the US?
In fact, the ads are filled with many firms I have never heard of and which are not in the Wilkins book at all. You can buy it through Amazon.de That's how I got it. The CD is German, as you would expect. It costs about USD 200, but the knowledge is worth much more, to be sure.
By the way, my comments here are not directed at you, Mr Chris, but at some others known to us all who reigned over the pixels for awhile and engaged in the charade that they had actually been trained for ten or fifteen years in this craft and trade, while having been born to the sounds of Janis Joplin and Richard Nixon.
More significant than the ads are the articles about how the uniform and cap making trade worked, and the sum of this puts the lie to the normative clap traps that has dominated the other sites.
Apropos the proverbial dog that did not bark symbolized by high end corporate advertising by the head wear industry, here is the omnibus advert of four well know firms from the year 1936.
Recall this: anachronism is the projection backwards into the past of customs, habits, events and whatever from the present. That is, because we live in a world of all horizons advertising, others must have too. This is simply a false assumption, if one considers the reality of commercial life in Germany and generally in continental Europe in the 1st third of the 20th century. Glossy advertising was new, it was directed at the upper middle class, and it was not pervasive. The dominant form of advertising was the poster in the street. What we consider to be normal print advertising was directed to a small fraction of the population, with a very different form of advertising present for the mass of society. Caps for uniforms did not appear to need wide advertising on the US model in say LIFE magazine, as one competed for the captive audience of either Nazis (the prices of whose uniforms were strictly regulated) or military members, in which the same phenomenon operated with the start of the war. That is, there was not a lot of money left around in this system for public relations, even if there was huge effort in Nazi propaganda on other fronts.
Apropos the endless discussions of colored piping on grey SS caps and the more than curious assumption that Nazi Germany was a place where 80 million Germans followed all the rules 110% of the time, please read this article from 1936. And this article or one like it appeared several times a year. Elsewhere I have written about this same phenomenon in the alte Armee as well as the Reichswehr, i.e. that the regulations were often flaunted, and, in fact, certain non regulation customs (Eigenmaechtigkeiten) were then finally officially permitted.
Alack and alas, I cannot read Deutsche, having spent all my school years studying Spanish.
I am always amazed at just how large some of these Muetzenfabriken were. This is from a post-war hat box for the Mayser company (best known during the TR for Robin-hood officer RAD hats). It shows a pic of the company factory before it was "zerstort"--once again, no small "ma 'n pa" haberdashery.
Most of them seemed to use the "courtyard" factory concept:
“Show me the regulation, and I’ll show you the exception.”
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