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Luftwaffe Great Coat Collar tabs - Fakes


Gildwiller1918

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Well I thought the area of Luftwaffe Greatcoat collar tabs was a relative safe area on collecting, I saw today that these are now being faked, below is an example. 

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The wings have been neatly set, but are blatently obvious, the braid looks a little too wide and should not be wrapped around the edges, and the material does not look quite right. Would be interesting to see the reverse. The blue cloth is too coarse, and you can see the criscross weave! Here is an original set in comparison.
There are apparently two different types of wings, the standard aluminium or zink version, and the hollow pressed version with triangular pins on the edges, which I first encountered about 10 years ago.
Have seen many nice original examples of these greatcoat patches in my time, now much harder to find.

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Flak-Kanonier, alternative wings: Hollow backed wings with triangular splints on the edges, utility production in one piece?
N.B.: Wings similar to those of the Luftwaffe were also part of the uniform of the "Luftstreitkräfte" der Nationalen Volksarmee der DDR.
These were of course, somewhat simplified (the DDR did not have a "Luftwaffe" as such, were part of the army). There was basicly only one "Waffenfarbe" and that was a deep aquarmarine colour (more a traditional Russian colour than German). All patches had only one metal wing.
The officers patches had a metal wing over a metal oakwreath, the edge of the patch had a thin silver cord edging.

Another word of caution - former NVA uniforms are now being "converted" into Wehrmacht originals, there were two different kinds of grey cloth in the DDR, the type below, known as "Kammgarn" for officers and Berufssoldaten, and the normal "Strichtuch" for ncos and other ranks.
Also, the buttons with the rim were not in the Wehrmacht.

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Luftstreitkräfte der NVA der DDR:  Collar patch type from Unterleutnant to Hauptmann. Fähnrich and Oberfähnrich also wore this. Here, rank of Hauptmann. A Hauptmann in previous times (pre 1945) had only two stars. A shoulder piece for officers always had a maximum of 2 stars, apart from the Generals series, and the Unteroffizier series till 1945

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Example of insignia for staff officers. Here, Oberstleutnant Siegfried Jähn (13.2.1937-21.9.2019), Cosmonaut and the first German and DDR-Bürger(!)  in space. He is wearing the double-breasted so-called Gesellschaftsanzug.
Note the number of stars set, the shoulder pieces in DDR times had one star more than previously, the lowest rank started with already one star for an Unterleutnant.

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You are correct Fritz, it was blatantly obvious it was a fake, it is just amazing that everything seems to be faked today. The one thing I have not seen yet is a well made tresse for these, the narrow type used on originals seems to be the last hurdle. 

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Well, scratch that, I found a site last night that sells the narrow tresse for the collar patches. I will order a small piece so we can compare with the originals. 

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  • 1 month later...

Here is some of the fake collar tab tresse that is coming out now, I have it on a original tab just for show. The overall quality is not impressive. It does not have the metal feel as originals did. It also is very thin and flimsy, versus the original material which thicker and heavier. I suspect we will see a influx of fake NCO collar tabs soon. Not quite the pattern the LW used, but just showing what it looks like.

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What is the grey material supposed to represent?

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Do you mean the collar tab? It is black, the flash on the camera made it look lighter. It looks much darker in person.

 

 

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