Comment by hermitcrab

3 days ago

Germans pioneers wore white uniforms? That sounds like the worst possible colour for digging ditches, recovering tanks or camouflage (if it isn't snowing). Why would they do that? Did Hugo Boss do the design?

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hermitcrab

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icegreentea2  3 days ago

From the link, the white pants are part of the "Drillich" work uniform. From searching around, these were intended as work uniforms / overalls. You were intended to wear these (there were both pants and jackets) over your actual uniform, and these would take the abuse.

It seems like the early war patterns were simply undyed. Mid-war versions were apparently dyed darker.

Here's a forum with a bunch of pictures of examples: https://www.militariacollectors.network/forums/topic/4042-th...

  • thetisxviii  3 days ago

    Post WW II the Panzer IV's were offloaded to the Middle East. But it competed well with its Soviet T-34.

    At first it looked like Czech military fatigue but the confluence of two rivers points to Germany.

    > The man is an unnamed German pioneer likely at the time of recovery.

Retric  3 days ago

Edit: ops, that joke wasn’t clear.

A prisoner’s uniform needs to be cheap, distinctive, and easy to spot it doesn’t need to be clean.

1-more  3 days ago

> Did Hugo Boss do the design?

I'm not saying that you're saying that, but there is a persistent meme that Hugo Boss designed the Nazi officer uniforms, or maybe is was the SS, or it was the whole Wehrmacht. This lends a certain mystique to the Nazis and cements the notion that they were somehow extra sharp. Aesthetic forbidden fruit. I don't like that, not in the least because it's not correct. The uniforms for all the Nazi arms of the state were designed by party insiders. Boss didn't even start designing men's tailored suits until after the war.

This is not to exculpate Hugo Boss, but to knock the shine of fancy suits off of the nazis. Hugo Boss had been selling ready made menswear since 1923, joined the nazi party in 1931, and won contracts to produce the uniforms much the way FEDS Apparel makes the USDA branded polo shirts [1]. In fact, he produced the uniforms using slave labor. He's guilty as sin.

someone with better citations saying the same thing with more details seven years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/78ho4c/comme...

[1] think of these dorky (no offense to the dorks who keep our milk free of pathogens) polos or windbreakers when you think of the nazi uniforms https://www.fedsapparel.com/collections/us-department-of-agr...