Dear fellows, please read all the posts I made about the transformation of the cap trade and industry from say 1933/4 until 1938. There was something near a 200% increase, with a shortage of trained labor, as well as cost cutting, price fixing, raw materials shortages (well, well before September 1939) such that an SS cap made in 1934 was of very different quality than a few years later, that is, even before the war began. This is the sum of my reading of the UM as well as my flawed empirical observation of my collection and your collection. Ben knows how deeply disaffected I became from the stitch Nazi cr@p that unfolded on the other site, with the doctrines and dogmas there that cut against the truth.
Please read the Muetzenmacher thread, especially the articles from the UM I posted.
This fact is also why the contemporary publications give a face to this thingy here well beyond the incomplete and by no means comprehensive treatment in the popular secondary reference, in which Lubstein is the only three dimensional person.
Sorry to ride my hobby horse, but there you are.....
Last edited by Friedrich-Berthold; 07-01-2010 at 01:46 PM.
Here is a link to the thread mentioned by the esteemed F-B. If you have ANY interest in collecting Third Reich headgear I cannot recommend it more. You would be hard challenged to find another English language compilation of the information Mr. Stonemint and Mr. F-B have compiled.
https://www.warrelics.eu/forum/cloth...nfabrik-14219/
Thanks, and here is one of example of dozens....why these sources have been so under utilized in all of this remains a real mystery to me....
I note that it is in German, it is in Fraktur, there is no colored picture, and also no "scull" here, though there is mention of the SS service cap and its long period of wear.
Germany had somewhere on the order of 236 cap factories in early 1937.
Last edited by Friedrich-Berthold; 07-01-2010 at 01:49 PM.
I am spending too much time in headgear forums and forget to check back in over here, so I missed the concerns Ben had. Glad to see they were put to rest, and btw, I still think the cap is a good one--a refreshing change from all the junk I have to look at nightly!
“Show me the regulation, and I’ll show you the exception.”
PS:
Regarding bad-stitching, you guys should see some of the late-war civil visors--the stitching goes right through the piping
“Show me the regulation, and I’ll show you the exception.”
The top cap, which is of later make contrasts with a very early cap, with a very early species of RZM tag. My point: the shortage of skilled labor and the need to train "Facharbeiter," i.e. skilled workers who mastered all the steps of cap making, described in the reference book but also included in the UM articles I added to the Muetzenmacherei thread. The other point is the anachronistic attempt by the collector to imagine the past, while the evidence of the past before us conflicts with one's imagination seen from too many propaganda images. Read the SS orders and you will see that screw ups were no uncommon thing, even if the marching columns in Nuremberg in 1934 seem like a human machine.
Finally, these fora and the pictures can often distort the totality of an object in such a way that the presumed faults overwhelm one's capacity for analysis. That is, before the wonders of the key board and the wire, you had to look at the whole thing and analyze the impact of all the senses. The capacity to seize on one aspect, or two aspects and to use electric pictures often obscures the totality of the thing in real life, das Ding an sich as we say in the trade.
This observation represents no criticism of Mr. Ben, whom I esteem very highly as a judicious and thoughtful personage in these spaces. But my criticism is intended for others who have pilloried and otherwise abused some innocent people with stitch drawing and quartering that has, at times, been for less than noble purposes. Mr. Ben has added to the considerable value of the cap under scrutiny here, which, apparently, has already been treated to a skeptical eye from some very senior collectors....
Happy Facharbeiter!
Last edited by Friedrich-Berthold; 07-01-2010 at 03:45 PM.
As per F-B's comments, the shortage of skilled labor became more noticeable as the war dragged on, and is visible in many late-war caps.
Here is just one example--the stitching on this late-war Polizei visor goes thru the piping, something that would never have been tolerated during the early era F-B references, and if it occurred, this hat would never have made it off the production line. (I have other examples worse than this, believe it or not).
“Show me the regulation, and I’ll show you the exception.”
I've practised this on a machine with a normal foot and it's unbelievably difficult to hit the gap between the piping and wool on every stitch.
I tend to think that in most cases, a specially designed foot was used, otherwise the machine just runs away over the piping as Chris has illustrated. Prehaps there is mention of such a thing in the manuals FB is speaking of? Must learn German myself soon!
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