"Replacement" PLMs

[stogieman]

The Godet Catalogue...

... I owned (Now in Greg M's collection) was a WW2 era catalogue. Showed miniatures, etc. as well as wearing-styles. Cover illustration showed an orders bar with 3 states represented.
In the past I have owned and sold mounted groups with Godet Metal and/or cloth tags on the back of the medal bar. So obviously, the group was mounted by Godet. One of these groups had a Godet EK2 and a Saxon AOR by Scharffenburg and a BMVO by Lesser.
Numerous other groups have come and gone with Godet tags that obviously encompassed awards used by Godet, but made by the individual states.
Again,
I would submit that the cost involved in making a master die to press out blanks for ANY medal and or order/decoration would be prohibitively high. Multiple discussions regarding dies, manufacturing techniques of the same and the use of dies in creating medals can be found in the Badges forum. They do not need to be rehashed here.
How many PLM's would your maker have to sell to justify the investment of creating their own, unique dies?
How come in NO published references (extensive and another in the works by Steven Previtera) does this maker ever come up as being an authorized maker of this order?
Are we to believe that with the fall of the monarchy, any old Tom, Dick or Harry with money to burn (in 1920/30's Germany????) could tool-up to make an award that less than 100 were awarded 1914-1918??
C'mon, the simple picture in a manufacturer's catalogue tells me they SOLD the piece. It's a SALES catalogue.
It makes no sense whatsoever to me that this previously unknown maker would arbitrarily decide to spend 1000's of RM to create a dye for an award that they might sell how many?? 50?? I submit that even that number would be stretching it.
I'm sorry, but your excitement over the find should be real. It's incredibly intrigueing and a very interesting tidbit.
But I cannot accept that in the face of logic regarding the cost, methods and demand for this award in Germany, in 1939/1940, that this would mean anything other than the fact that they could sell the piece.
What other awards are found in the catalogue? bavarian? Saxon? Baden? Württemburg?

[Luftm40]

Interesting discussion. A theory of mine regarding TR badges and medals is that unassembled parts were subcontracted from larger makers to be assembled and finished by the smaller firm. This makes good business sense. If you want to offer a full line of merchandise, but don't want to expend the capital to make your own tooling, why not just buy the pieces and use your own labor to assemble and finish them? This practice is accepted as fact by dagger collectors

[gregM]

Hi Guys,

Here is a scan from the cover of the Godet catalog that Rick mentioned.
hope it helps

Greg

[Gordon Williamson]

Rick,

The more I think about the structure of this catalogue the more I think you may be right. It is obviously a salesmans pack, consisting of the 1938 and 1940 catalogues bound together with various additional notes and a number of loose leaf addenda sheets. The PLM is on one of the addenda sheets which going by the other wartime awards illustrated, is I am sure 1940. Whilst others of the awards on the addenda sheets are in the main catalogue also, the PLM isn't.

The thing that really got my interest about this particular award being in the catalogue was the fact that clearly even during WW2, there was a good enough market for the sale of PLMs for them to be manufactured (by someone) and included in such catalogues. My main point was the support that this evidence gives to the post WW1 manufacturing of the much maligned "replacements". Did Godet offer the PLM for sale in their wartime catalogue ?

Andy has a good point also. The main reason I bought this catalogue was to get the data on Schickle's U-Boat Badge, which as it turns out is a dead ringer for the Zimmermann type. The almost exact "clone" nature of the U-Boat Badges by Friedrich Orth, Souval, Deumer, Foerster & Barth, Wernstein and others suggests the possibility of buying blanks from a single die maker
and then adding the individual firms own "furniture" and finishing.

Strangely enough, the main thrust of the Imperial awards in the Schickle catalogue is towards Imperial Austrian awards, not the various German states. They did do a rather nice Turkish War Medal and Stickpin miniature of it though.

[Daniel Cole]

why couldn't I send my KO marked EK2, HHOX from Friedlander and Bav MMO4x to Godet for mounting if I was in Berlin?

[stogieman]

Exactly!

Whether the soldat/offizier sent/brought his own awards in to be mounted, or placed the "order" to have the work done and Godet accomplished this via mail/courrier..... The result is the same.
Individual makers made specific awards, which were then passed around amongst everyone for mounting, etc.
It would just be so cost-inefficient for a maker to tool up to make a piece they might sell 2 dozen of in a year... and we KNOW the Germans abhor inefficiency!
<p>

why couldn't I send my KO marked EK2, HHOX from Friedlander and Bav MMO4x to Godet for mounting if I was in Berlin?

[Theodor]

I was curious about all those replacement medals... for example the PLM... Who could get them? I mean, could I just go and give the cash for one, or needed to prove that I am awarded, already bearer of the order??? Was it free for sale or not?

[Brian S]

I believe replacement makers was EXTREMELY limited based on the numbers that would have been required. I ask you, who was ELIGIBLE to even buy these replacements in 1938 and was STILL in active service? You didn't HAVE to be in active service to 'need' one. I've got a group photo of a recipient wearing his full uniform including PLM in the mid 20's, so recipient could still 'need' one.

But supply must be to some extent be based on demand. Who were the still active recipients? Goring, Rommel, Gerdinand Schoner, more yes...

But that doesn't bring in the PRESTIGE factor. If I were a maker of awards, I'd probably at least hope I could carry a PLM and RK for prestige purposes at least.

[J Howland]

I believe replacement makers was EXTREMELY limited based on the numbers that would have been required. I ask you, who was ELIGIBLE to even buy these replacements in 1938 and was STILL in active service? You didn't HAVE to be in active service to 'need' one. I've got a group photo of a recipient wearing his full uniform including PLM in the mid 20's, so recipient could still 'need' one.

But supply must be to some extent be based on demand. Who were the still active recipients? Goring, Rommel, Gerdinand Schoner, more yes...

But that doesn't bring in the PRESTIGE factor. If I were a maker of awards, I'd probably at least hope I could carry a PLM and RK for prestige purposes at least.

I spent a lot of time back in the fifties and sixties collecting European order insignia. A couple of things that I accepted as being true back them from conversations with other collectors:

Pre 1918 order/medal manufacturers in the big cities of Berlin, Vienna, Paris, etc.,had to obtain government warrants to manufacture insgnia. Rother couldn't just decide to start cranking out Anhalt or Prussian insignia. True, a member of a princely house could commission a jeweler to make a one off of a badge he wanted to be bigger or lighter or flashier than what he was "issued." [At the time of the Crimean War, the British government gave actual metal breast stars for the Order of the Garter only to foreign officers - British citizens got tinsel (i.e. embroidered) breast stars. Eventually the discontent of Brit recipients caused the Crown to give metal stars to them, too.]

My understanding has always been that one the various kings & emperors went out of business in 1918 that a large number of order manufacturers sold order insignia directly to collectors from the 1920's on. It was a matter of financial survival - all the pre1914 eropean officers (army, postal, naval, foresters, etc) in the old photos wearing medals looked the same at work, on the street, wherever. After 1918, it was pretty much no longer fashionable to wear all that "stuff" - so a serving officer or a vet didn't need two or three copies of an award for each of his uniforms hanging in his closet...



Jim

[Rick Research]

Certainly Godet or Poellath or Mom And Pop the Watchmakers down on the corner (find that thread in here about mounters' tags! ) made medal bars with existing already awarded decorations the recipient walked in with. Nobody went and bought duplicates of every medal on a medal bar every time they added an award and then threw the entire old one away.

What seems to be getting lost here, again, is that THIS pictured type of PLM-- one, BTW that if I had come across before this catalog I'd have passed on because it is ooogly-- was being SOLD by SCHICKLE in 1940. Who "actually made" it as an "issue" is another round and round and round. Please!!

It now has a documented period source, and THIS is forever after the "Schickle 1940" type Pour le Merite as our reference name, agreed? Out of all the nameless, dateless variants, frauds, and jokes, THIS one has a datable period, a specific source, and "full frontal" detail to match points by points, details by details.

And none of those OTHERS do, OK?

[Brian S]

Maybe I'm not getting the English language here... OK, they SOLD it, we DON'T know who MADE it, then isn't it just a KNOWN pre-May '45 replacement we are calling the Schickle for ease of nomenclature?

[stogieman]

Okay, phase two...

bring on the photographs of all your "wearer's copies" that match this illustration.

[Gordon Williamson]

Maybe I'm not getting the English language here... OK, they SOLD it, we DON'T know who MADE it, then isn't it just a KNOWN pre-May '45 replacement we are calling the Schickle for ease of nomenclature?

We know it was part of their inventory, we don't know for sure they made it, we don't know they didn't.

To get the record straight, Greg has confirmed the Godet catalogue was NOT wartime, but from 1933, a period were there was no regulation on who made what. Being from a "free for all" era as far as regulations were concenrned, inclusion in it can hardly be used as a " benchmarking" for anything - unlike the WW2 period of the Schickle catalogue when manufacture was regulated. By the way, unlike other catalogues I have seen, there are no PRICES in the Schickle catalogue. Strange for a sales catalogue.

[J Howland]

We know it was part of their inventory, we don't know for sure they made it, we don't know they didn't.

To get the record straight, Greg has confirmed the Godet catalogue was NOT wartime, but from 1933, a period were there was no regulation on who made what. Being from a "free for all" era as far as regulations were concenrned, inclusion in it can hardly be used as a " benchmarking" for anything - unlike the WW2 period of the Schickle catalogue when manufacture was regulated. By the way, unlike other catalogues I have seen, there are no PRICES in the Schickle catalogue. Strange for a sales catalogue.

It's probably not all that strange. As a manufacturer/importer/retailer, you print a nice illustrated catalog. You then print a cheaper set of sheets giving prices. One sheet lists retail that the man in the street who walks into your shop will expect to pay. One goes to the tailor in Landshut to whom you will wholesale your goods. He, in turn, prints up his price sheet he passes out to his customers in Bavaria that quotes what his prices will be as his customers browse through your nice albeit priceless master catalog (with his Landshut address overprinted yours).

I was in retail for several years. It's done this way today. Go to a trade show in NYC like the big one held for people who own gift shops and you will walk away with dozens of very slick catalogs and as many zeroxed price lists. It enables suppliers to be always able to keep their prices "current" - say you print a nice catalog with firm prices shown on all your medals made of gold or silver. Suddenly the price for those two metals goes through the roof - you've either got to throw away all of your nice, new catalogs or you've got to go through each one and over-write all the printed prices - a tedious and sloppy procedure...


You know, from a purely theoretical point of view: Godet could simply have bought out the stock of a smaller competitor who had a few PLM's in his stock. Assuming that the quality of the crosses was acceptable to the Godet management, they just could have decided to illustrate the decoration in their catalog for "prestige" purposes. Besides, how many orders were they liable to get? Anyway, they still would have had their own pre-'1914 dies if demand exceeded the supply. (As a sidebar: Rothe in Vienna was still making 19th century orders and decorations from time to time as late as the 1970's - I once owned a silver-gilt & enamel commander's "cross" of the 1860's imperial Order of the Mexican Eagle that they made in the 1960's-70's... these are now selling for big bucks to collectors who assume that Rothe stopped making the insignia as soon as Mexican rebels exceuted Emperor Maximiliian in the 1860's.)

Jim

[Tony & Kaiser]

But that doesn't bring in the PRESTIGE factor. If I were a maker of awards, I'd probably at least hope I could carry a PLM and RK for prestige purposes at least.

Na-ha. And here is a thought from Brian's observation above. We all <u>assume</u> that these awards were bought and worn by some un-known recipient. Some must have been, but what if the vast majority were sitting in storage, at jewelers, or outlets of the lager manufacturers? What decent jeweler would not display a few choice RK and PLM in his shop window to illustrate the quality available there? Enter 1945 and the fall of the Third Reich, insert 10s of thousands of souvenir hungry Allied solders, and these outlets were cleaned out. Result: scores of awards coming back to the UK, Canada, and the USA. Which for us, was a good thing. I have always said, this is where 99.9% of all Pickelhaubes and pre-war Dunkelblau uniforms came from; closets of homes occupied by Allied soldiers.