New Addition - Possible maker connection - Rettenmaier = "Flatback" Maker

[Thomas Durante]

Norm, you can't imagine how many leftovers are out there. Especially needle systems.... we found tons of them. And this more than 60 years after the war

Hi guys,

I think this was true in certain cases, but we know of plenty of other cases where everything was used up relatively quickly, necessitating new hardware systems to be created postwar. Makers like Assmann must have destroyed everything, and that is why their few 57er badges feature cheap sheetmetal catches such as on this LW Observer badge. There must not have been very little, if anything leftover.

Same can be seen with S&L badges, by all accounts they started using these new type of pins in the early 60s, like on this DK. Sure some hardware must have survived but in a few years after the creation of the 57ers all the original pins were used up necessitating these new pins to be used.

Tom

[Thomas Durante]

And ofcourse Souval is another classic case. Very little must have survived in the Souval factory, necessitating them to create a new catch for their reproductions (i.e. the classic Souval Claw catch). By all accounts this catch is a 1950s or early 1960s creation, so quite early enough to show that not much original hardware must have survived in that firm.

I don't doubt that original pins, hinges and catches survived the war, but it may not be as widespread as we think. It certainly wasn't the case for the few firms that were active postwar like S&L and Souval.

Tom

[panzer1432]

catch

Great Thread ! Quite Fascinating !

[BassD]

Makers like Assmann must have destroyed everything,

Same can be seen with S&L badges, by all accounts they started using these new type of pins in the early 60s, like on this DK. Sure some hardware must have survived but in a few years after the creation of the 57ers all the original pins were used up necessitating these new pins to be used.

Tom

Please tell me why Assmann must have destroyed everything? I only know from Mr. Assmann that they must destroy everything with a swastika. But why should they destroy needle systems

According to S&L... they never made needle systems by themselves. And later they changed their supplier. First they ordered their needle systems in Pforzneim, later from a firm that is located near Lüdenscheid. So for me it doen't wonder why we found other needle systems.

Have you informations how you can determine the souval catch in the 1950s or the 1960s? Why not 1970s or in the beginning of 1945?

It is interesting in some discussions that pop ups theories and theories... but hard proove we did not see. You can besure, all i wrote i can proove. If not, i am will write that i was an unprooven theory.

So please where is the fact that Assmann must destroy everthing?

Please show me how you can determine the souval catch?

Please explain me why there is not so many left over?

How would you explain these pictures more than 60 years after the war from a firm tha supplies a lot of companies that produce badges? What you here can see is only a little percent from the left over in 2012/13 could you imagine how much it must in the 1950s???

[BassD]

and more

[Andreas Klein]

Hi Tom,

please look at post #65 and tell me what do you think how many of those catches are stored in one of the bags you can see?

The photos were made a few weeks ago more than 65 years after the war and ages after the firm stopped his business. And we have still thousands of "wartime" setups there. And we have here only ONE firm - during and after the war there were some more working as setup supplier.

[Thomas Durante]

Please tell me why Assmann must have destroyed everything? I only know from Mr. Assmann that they must destroy everything with a swastika. But why should they destroy needle systems

Hi Basti,

We know this is the case by looking at the 57er badges. On the Assmann badges for instance, they are using a catch made of flimsy sheet metal simply bent into a C shape. Why would they do this if they still had wartime hardware leftover? The fact that they had to come up with a new catch is evidence they didn't have any original catches left by 1957. I cannot proove this, it is just an observation based on what we physically see on the badges.

The same goes for Souval. They must have run out of original, wartime hardware in the late 50s or early 60s, necessitating the creation of a new catch (i.e., the one-piece Souval Claw catch). Again, I don't have proof of this and I didn't talk to Heer Umlauf himself, but why would they feel the need to come up with a new catch if they were still sitting on "thousands and thousands of wartime leftover catches"? Doesn't make sense to me.

Same with S&L. The very earliest 57ers have alledgedly wartime-leftover setups. I think that is a pretty well known and non-controversial topic. But by all accounts they must have run out of them relatively quickly because they were forced to use new pins by the early 60s. If they still had leftover pins, why would they feel the need to change?

Going back to the war, I don't doubt that some makers used third-party suppliers for their hardware. But its the way the hardware is put on, its tool marks, its exact combination of hinge, pin and catch that can point to certain makers. For instance, I was looking through Frank Thater's new EK1 book which I picked up at the SOS. Very well done book, and a must have for a collectors like me, who loves looking at dozens of pictures of hinges and catches. As I was flipping through I noticed a round wire catch with a distinct little nose on the top part of it. Immediately I thought to myself "that is a Meybauer catch", and sure enough I was in the Meybauer chapter. That is not just a coincidence, even though it may appear to alot of people as "just another round wire catch". For me, there are definite signatures of each maker to be found on their reverse hardware.

And keep in mind that the hardware is only 1 piece of evidence to look at. It is only a single clue, and you must take it in combination with all the other pieces of evidence when looking at "possible" maker connections.

Tom

[Thomas Durante]

Hi Tom,

please look at post #65 and tell me what do you think how many of those catches are stored in one of the bags you can see?

Hallo Andreas,

No doubt about it, there are thousands of setups in those bags! I can imagine stuff like this still exists, but going back to the original point, I don't think this is the case with most makers. Especially those like Souval, S&L, Deumer, etc. that were active postwar. I base this on the evidence we see on the 57er badges. If there were leftover wartime hardware, it must have been used up relatively quickly (i.e. by the 1960s IMO).

Tom

p.s., I love these pics Andreas. At which firm did you find these?

Tom

[Andreas Klein]

Tom,

i don't see the point in the statement with Assmann. As allready said by Basti certain producers changed the setup supplier so that it is no big surprise that we see different hardware on certain 57 badges.

But this is no answer to the question in general. Perhaps a changed production process was the reason to use a new setup.

Coming back to the import part of Basti's posting which you have forgotten in your post:

The photos from us don't show leftover stocks who rested somewhere untouched until we found it. The same catches which were used on the wartime badges of several makers were still in production and were sold until 1981 ...

As evidence for my words i attach the orders from two well known third reich producers (please look at the date of the postal stamp).

Our firm was running in 1981 the same business as in 1940, 1950 1960, 1970 ... and many many former awards makers bought the setups from them. And you can believe me it looked 1980 like 1940.

[Andreas Klein]

Going back to the war, I don't doubt that some makers used third-party suppliers for their hardware. But its the way the hardware is put on, its tool marks, its exact combination of hinge, pin and catch that can point to certain makers.

If it would be that easy ....

Ok let's play a little game. If a setup is such an easy unique thing it should be no problem to tell me the third reich maker who used the attached catch.

Please understand that the source of the photos is a secret because they don't want to have a gold rush to their firm and we don't want to have wartime setups on postwar stuff.

[Norm F]

We know this is the case by looking at the 57er badges....

The same goes for Souval. They must have run out of original, wartime hardware in the late 50s or early 60s, necessitating the creation of a new catch (i.e., the one-piece Souval Claw catch). Again, I don't have proof of this and I didn't talk to Heer Umlauf himself, but why would they feel the need to come up with a new catch if they were still sitting on "thousands and thousands of wartime leftover catches"? Doesn't make sense to me.

Same with S&L. The very earliest 57ers have allegedly wartime-leftover setups. I think that is a pretty well known and non-controversial topic. But by all accounts they must have run out of them relatively quickly because they were forced to use new pins by the early 60s. If they still had leftover pins, why would they feel the need to change?

Tom

Hi Guys,

Great discussion. It's fascinating to try to correlate the physical evidence in the badge construction with the research of Andreas and Basti on the companies and their leftover stock.

We can't know for certainty exactly when Souval and S&L ran out of their usual wartime setups, but it's clear from the previously posted letter and badge from Umlauf that complete leftovers still persisted at least into the mid-1960s and the same journal in the 1960's also published the claw-like Souval catch, so there was definitely an overlap time with both setups and variable quality. Likewise post-war S&L overlapped the use of setups on different lines since we see zinc Auxiliary Cruisers with "wartime setups" and hollow rivets yet bearing the same type of globe that was used on later production '57s with modern setups.

I have no doubt that a lot of what we currently collect as "wartime" awards are in fact a combination of leftover wartime-assembled awards and post-war assembly from leftover parts. The difficulty (and sometimes impossibility) is in knowing when these ran out, transitioning first to "hybrids" of wartime and post-war parts and finally out-right reproductions. No doubt Souval, and S&L (and possibly Deumer and Rettenmaier) are just the tip of the iceberg in this story. Souval was obvious because his business practise was open and his products often marked, but even his timelines are murky in the details. And it's clear the same practise was going on in Germany and no reason for it to be confined to S&L.

No doubt, various setups existed in different amounts and were consumed at different rates so that some ran out earlier, others later and some not yet depleted.

I think we can still be relatively confident when it comes to worn early Tombak awards, and indeed it's mostly such awards that we see in verifiable German vet groupings and occasionally recognizable in period photos. But as a generalization, zinc awards and Iron Crosses will always be a grey area, with a much higher probability of being leftover wartime stock or post-war assembly.

Best regards,
---Norm

[Norm F]

If it would be that easy ....

Ok let's play a little game. If a setup is such an easy unique thing it should be no problem to tell me the third reich maker who used the attached catch.

This could be a fun game!

Speaking purely from a Minesweeper badge perspective, that catch doesn't appear on any known wartime Minesweeper badge that I can think of. It's similar to the Souval rounded flat-ware catch but different in the lower cut. To be honest, I'd be rather concerned if I saw that catch on a Minesweeper. Not too different from the catch on some Rettenmaier EK1s come to think of it...

(Although I like this game, I'll also re-iterate Tom's point that when making attributions, it's never based on one isolated factor like just the catch. Instead the catch is considered in the greater context of all the other production features.)

Best regards,
---Norm

[Thomas Durante]

Ok let's play a little game. If a setup is such an easy unique thing it should be no problem to tell me the third reich maker who used the attached catch.

Please understand that the source of the photos is a secret because they don't want to have a gold rush to their firm and we don't want to have wartime setups on postwar stuff.

Hi Andreas,

This could be a very fun game, but one question. If I guess it right, it sounds like you wouldn't be able to say the maker so how can we know if I am correct or not?

Regarding the big bags of hinges and catches, how do we know these are leftover stocks from the war?

Thanks

Tom

[Norm F]

...tell me the third reich maker who used the attached catch.

Carl Poellath? (Hard to find good images but apparently they were still selling catches in 1981...)

[Andreas Klein]

Hi Andreas,
This could be a very fun game, but one question. If I guess it right, it sounds like you wouldn't be able to say the maker so how can we know if I am correct or not?

I know it ....

Regarding the big bags of hinges and catches, how do we know these are leftover stocks from the war?

If they wouldn't be leftover stocks from war a wide area of third reich badges would be unmasked as postwar product.