100,000 ss & sa men at nurnberg 1933

Wuerstenfuchs · 11-09-2008, 02:45 AM

Here is an awesome foto. Maybe I should have posted it in the old SS hat forum!

**Espenlaub Militaria** · 11-09-2008 02:45 AM

We also buy and trade your items and full collections!

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 11-09-2008, 05:43 AM

The images of surviving caps are in the other thread. Where are all these caps today? Does a single one survive? More important, does a single man in this picture survive?

With the passage of time, the chin cord lost its practical aspect and became decorative. In fact, such was the case as these caps became a more formal affair and lost some of the proletarian aspect of the street fights and propaganda marches of the Kampfzeit.

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 11-09-2008, 05:46 AM

You can see that this chin strap was made actually to be worn under the chin. Those on the later caps were not so flexible.

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 11-09-2008, 05:50 AM

Here is a later cap, with the high crown and the decorative chin strap. This cap has non standard badges, but is wholly correct and from the Fa. Lubstein/Berlin. It has the cap spring and saddle shape.

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 11-09-2008, 05:54 AM

When I write proletarian and street fight, I mean this.....these are communists...

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 11-09-2008, 05:57 AM

Here is a cap of the old army in contrast. Notice the rigid structure appropriate for the garrison and Ausgehanzug...

These old things reflect the world in which the people who made them and wore them lived, a world that is both very far away and now getting somehow closer in the 21st century. Denkt daran.

Happy head wear.

I am going to the Danube tomorrow to be closer to this old, new world.

**Australian Guy** · 11-09-2008, 12:10 PM

If you could find just 1% of those hats you could retire!

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 11-09-2008, 04:42 PM

by Australian Guy

If you could find just 1% of those hats you could retire!

How true. But the astonishing thing is that more of these early caps have survived than I ever thought possible. It is not as if the normal Staffelmann ran out and bought a new cap each year. Some of these men, if they remained in service say from 1933 until 1939, kept their early model caps, or they preserved them somehow....and most astonishing....someone has preserved them into the present. See the examples I have posted.

You see these on the Whamond site, as well as Maederer, actually, and sometimes on Shea's site. Though they are less frequent than they were.

But then I have hats I bought in the 1970s and still wear them, so what does that really mean?

Happy headwear.