Thank you. There are many, and indeed too many collectors (and I do not mean you, Mr. Ostermann) who have a blind faith in glamor dealers. They fail to enligthen themselves. They buy no books; they engage in no effort themselves, but flock to the temple of a few glamor dealers to sit at their feet to garner snipets of wisdom. One sees this syndrome in these fora constantly, and Roger Bender complained to me about this recently as a cause for the shifting fortunes of his publishing undertaking. It was to this phenomenon that I was referring, in fact, and which I find very curious.
Also,I am sure that I shall be pilloried for this, but I do think that Bill Shea knows exotic SS caps. I am aware that others are jealous and resentful on this score, and I do not mean to suggest, Mr. Ostermann, that you are making this statement. However, I have noted a tendency hereabouts of this general direction. I have seen many of his rather more over to the top SS caps, and in 99% of cases they are authentic.
If the issue is this that the illustrated examples of grey SS caps in the Schiffer books or Wilkins contain no such images of a cap with runes, stamps, &c, then I must cordially suggest that these books have certain understandable limitations. The violin cap is an example of a very rare kind of grey SS cap from the era of the Verfuegungstruppe/Totenkopfverband, you name it, in which the officer corps of the SS increased from a small size to much larger, but still actually a very small # of officers, I think less than ten thousand or so. When the Eberhard cap was made in 1937 in Munich (of this I am fairly sure....) the officer corps of the SSTV was at most between a thousand and two thousand men, if that. The strength of the whole SSTV at the end of 1937 was less than 10,000 men. The SSTV doubled in 1938, by the way. Thus, the Eberhard cap is very rare. But the officer corps of the SSVT was also quite small.
Thus, the early species of this cap is the kind of regalia, in fact, that is very unlikely to have survived the march of time. The image of a grey SS cap in many minds is that of a species made for the SS Kleiderkasse in the era 1941-943 or so, and examples are legion in the books and in the collector sphere. The cap in the hands of colleague Violin and the piece that came from Weitze and was in Swabia reflect an earlier variety, the existence of which I have known about since the beginning of the 1970s, but had not seen until recently.
You, Mr Ostermann, have seen the cap and have a leg up on the rest of us. In any case, the thing seems off to a new home and surely that figure might regret they were (wherever that may be...) not in Stuttgart to buy it for 1500 dollars. I, for one, am often seized by regret that I am not somewhere between the Rhine, Black Forest and Danube. I do intend to correct this matter at some point.
