dachau cloth

[Sal Williams]

Hi Guys,
It came to my mind that one of the big reasons for not believing in the stuff is that war shortages would eclude masses of cloth being "wasted" like that late in the war. This should be a proveable fact or not. I have a 1936 Statistisches Jahrbuch fuer Das Deutsches reich , and it has every statistic for every damned thing you could imagine. Does anyone have the 1944 and 1945 books? One could look up textile production numbers and other related stuff and see if the shortages really effected that industry so badly or not. If in fact there was not a horrible cloth shortage then the best arguement for them being fake vanishes.

Best, Sal

[keifer kahn]

The issue was raw material shortage required to make the cloth not actual cloth shortage.This is why the quality of uniform cloth decreased as the war continued. It was continually being bulked out by wood pulp/fibres and rayon as the supplly of natural materials like wool and cotton were depleted.

As for insignia,a lot was rayon based .Rayon requires no wool nor cotton.
Rayon was not an effected fibre due to its non reliance on cotton or wool.
This why a remarkable lot of insignia was found to be souveniered.The production wasnt really affected like items that were wool or cotton based.

[Sal Williams]

AHHH, so why the big stink over there was not material to waste on these stocks of insignia?

Best, Sal

[keifer kahn]

Insignia was produced on a projected estimate of usage and supply.
Not on soldiers in uniform waiting to have insignia put on their uniforms.
Contractors in late 44 would of been filling orders for estimated insignia needed in 45.
Problem is,who was in german uniform after may 1945 to put insignia on his tunic.
They didnt say we have this amount of men in this type of uniform and then say,we now have to produce the insignia now the guys are dressed.
If they estimated they would need the insignia for a projected number of men and the war ended before the men got into those uniforms.They would have all those stocks left over.
Insignia makers were still making insignia right up to the end of hostilities.it wansnt like they knew the war would end in 2 years time and ceased production in 43 hoping there was enough stocks left to last til 45.

Insignia quality suffered just the same as uniform fibres .Early panzer tabs for example were wool piped.Mid/late war ones are nearly always seen in rayon.
Earlier style shoulder boards are wool piped with the later types rayon piped.

[nutmeg]

From veterans I've tallked to there was tons of uniforms and insignia sitting in warehouses at the end of the war, available for the taking. What I gather is many times this stuff sat in the depots because in a number of cases there was no way to get it to the specific units. This sort of material was not a priority for front line rail traffic. Also from what I've read over the years, as late as 1945 the Germans were projecting needed material into 1947.


I have never bought any of these collar patches personally from veterans(and I've bought a lot from Vets) . I also have not met any who were at Dachau either. However, one of my best buddies has made at least two veteran hits over the years with a good number of these patches in each .

[Sal Williams]

Thank you for the info Kiefer!
I guess you guys are a few steps ahead of me on this . I should have figured that, i just had the idea pop into my head.

So then (and I don't want to start any tangents here so please everybody just the question at hand) what is the basis of Robin L's theory that these are bogus? Just the fact that a lot started showing up in the 60's?

Best, Sal

[Peter R.]

Well, you could argue that a great way to prove a point in favour of Dachau tabs would be if any of the typical 'Dachau' style items can be proven to have been sold/bought from 1945 onwards.

If indeed they only appeared since e.g. 1960 and had not been sighted before that by any of the older collectors - not even one - then that ought to be something to try and explain at the least, even if it's not proof of being fake.

That's of course assuming that trading in Dachau tabs would have been the same as any other 3rd Reich souvenirs in the US, and assuming that trading souvenirs indeed started almost immediately upon return home of the GIs.

I guess the trouble is that for this one there's no real hard period evidence other than veteran's accounts (correct?) and while that's understandably absolute proof for those who spoke to the vets personally, especially if they spoke to more than one, to anybody else it's all hearsay.

[hochiminhtrail]

we do not have to forget that in Germany after 1945 there was a huge black market, Nazi insignias were sold our exachanged for coffee, butter and cigaretes.

i know for fact that germans did produce after 1945 some crosses and daggers and insignias to sell them to GI` s.

Alex

[Ian Hulley]

Some of the vast quantity of volunteer insignia found can be attributed to Himmlers self-dilusional projected figures for recruits and the orders may have been placed pre 6th June '44 when things didn't look quite as grim.

As a slight aside,since the birth of the net I've been amazed at the number of US servicemen who acquired these items when compared to the average British soldier,I guess that until Normandy and Arnhem and before the final surrender and POW camps in Italy they hadn't come up against the Waffen SS in any numbers.
Is it a case of strict regulations as to what the Brits could bring home or just that they didn't collect the stuff in the first place ?

Cheers,Ian.

[Raym']

I too have heard that some awards and daggers ect were made after the end of the war for exchange for food ect, but this cant have gone on for too long, and original materials and dies, which were lying around in empty factories were being used. so I consider them as originals- its impossible to tell the difference anyways. But I am aware that some collectors get very 'wound up' about this and hate the thought that thier pieces might be post war - by a week or two anyway!

[Basil]

My assumption is that a lot of the stuff found at Dachau must have been ordered around mid-1944 when the Waffen-SS were in the process of taking over the majority of foreign volunteer formations and attempting to raise new ones. It's interesting that some of the commonest Dachau insignias are for the 'Kaminski/RONA' division which spent a brief period as a W-SS formation around August and September 1944 before being disbanded and absorbed by the Vlassov 'army' (thus not requiring the large quantities of insignia which had been made) and for the Italian division which had been around in various guises for some time and was thus presumably already well equipped with insignia.

As for Brits not acquiring foreign volunteer stuff - my experience has been that ROA insignia are reasonably common in the UK (presumably captured in Normandy etc) but that the W-SS foreign volunteer insignia is generally easier to find in the US, simply because a lot of it was found at Dachau and brought back by US vets. IIRC, very few of the 'European' foreign volunteer formations fought in the west so it wasn't captured in combat by Brits or Americans. On the other hand, as an example most of the very few genuine RONA armshields which I have seen were originally acquired by British soldiers guarding POW camps in East Anglia where some of the volunteers ended up.

But there are various parallels to the US vets' Dachau finds. The first Third Reich pieces I acquired as a child came from my primary school headmaster who, as a Royal Artillery captain, had liberated a regalia factory somewhere in north west Germany in 1945. I visited his house once with my parents and the place was full of swords, daggers, medals, banners and so on which he had found there and brought home. He gave me a War Merit Cross 2nd class and an EK2 which he had in a big tin biscuit box full of similar medals. Alas, he died about 20 years ago, before I started collecting seriously, and I have no idea what happened to his hoard, but it is my experience of this which leads me to be comfortable with the Dachau find.

Cheers,

Baz

Some of the vast quantity of volunteer insignia found can be attributed to Himmlers self-dilusional projected figures for recruits and the orders may have been placed pre 6th June '44 when things didn't look quite as grim.

As a slight aside,since the birth of the net I've been amazed at the number of US servicemen who acquired these items when compared to the average British soldier,I guess that until Normandy and Arnhem and before the final surrender and POW camps in Italy they hadn't come up against the Waffen SS in any numbers.
Is it a case of strict regulations as to what the Brits could bring home or just that they didn't collect the stuff in the first place ?

Cheers,Ian.

[Gary Wood]

So then (and I don't want to start any tangents here so please everybody just the question at hand) what is the basis of Robin L's theory that these are bogus? Just the fact that a lot started showing up in the 60's?

Best, Sal

Sal,

Robins basis for dislike of the dachau tabs were just his personnel opinion not based on any facts what so ever and he could not support his theory with any evidence at all, on the whole 2 things he disliked were,
1) There are a lot of them around.
2) The lines on the back.

point one has no bearing on if an item is original or not
Point 2 you would only need to provide one non dachau item with a line to dismiss that theory.

And i am certainly not going to get into it again, in his last attempt he said the fakes were made on wool even after in that thread I had mentioned that all the tabs had moleskin base material i think you call it velveteen in the US, moleskin is rayon based, not all the dachau type tabs are on this fabric, some are on badge cloth which is felt based, some are on a doeskin which is a woven wool with a nap.

I will post a couple of pictures below that is all if you want to believe they are fake then believe away.
cheers,
Gary

[Gary Wood]

back of the runic,incidentally when i posted this runic in the dachau thread and asked robin if he thought it was original he said he like it, i had at that time not posted a picture for obvious reasons

[Gary Wood]

And finally quite obviously not a dachau tab, this is a patch owned by fellow moderator M.V.

[Gary Wood]

the back , both the examples above are on badge cloth.

And that is all i am going to say on the subject
cheers,

Gary