We can try but I don't think that would go down too well on a cruise liner these days!
We can try but I don't think that would go down too well on a cruise liner these days!
Tobacco helped kill my dear father, but the images of people smoking a long time ago do have some poetry to them, really. You have to admit it. I have never smoked, and used to be in Europe where everyone smoked like stacks in the 1960s and 1970s, but such vices are vanishing. I can recall my time in Croatia in the 1990s, when all smoked like a forest fire, and they had great verve and style to it. I assumed they smoked so much having just been in the war of Yugoslav succession. My Germans all smoked, too, in the beginning when I was in college there. I am not sure that bean sprouts with e coli and wasting time trying to squeeze Shakespeare or Goethe into the 140 characters of a "Tweet" compensates for tobacco. I mean, my parents went through the second world war, and drank oceans of booze and smoked tons of cigarettes and had freedom, which I do not have.
Just out of interest, who is this rather stern looking fellow? He's always there in the background during the period...
You have to go to the Axis history forum for said request. That is their bread and butter.
I confine myself to the caps, and have some general sense of place and time, but less so of each senior SS personality.
The second image is that of 21 March 1933, the Day of Potsdam, when the III. Reich was more or less proclaimed with the convening of the new Reichstag in the Garrison Church in Potsdam on the Breite Strasse. I drive this place constantly, and the man with the cap and scar is not there.
I like identifying individual hats more than personalities but this brute does appear very often. Notice the distinct crease on the crown in both photos...
The devotees of Prussian Potsdam will resurrect the Garrison Church, but what is more evident today are these healthy young Germans, heedless of the past and devoted to sports, which is the national passion.
One has trouble realizing how remotely far away in one sense is the scene on 21 March 1933 that unfolded nearby and is memorialized in Ben's post.
Further example of a cap of early make with some more detail of same. This cap has a leather peak and updated badges.
It was the property of some Herr Dr. Professor, likely a racial theorist and person who made hatred a science.
The cap has no RZM marks, but is of extraordinary quality versus the later types from this firm. Maybe it was made to order.
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