Item

An original Second World War German Heer (Army) officer's cuff lace tab (Ärmelpatte) from an infantry officer's Waffenrock — the German Army's dress and walking-out tunic. It is built on a dark bottle-green (dunkelgrün) wool base, the facing color of the Waffenrock's collar and cuffs, and centered with a hand-embroidered bar of silver/aluminium bullion lace (Litze) in the corded officer style, the whole tab bordered with a white piping (Vorstoß). The tab measures approximately 3.0 cm long by 1.8 cm wide; as the piece rests against the Lobo Forensics scale in the photograph, this is a close-approximate reading. The reverse shows the dark green wool and the folded piping with securing threads and light mounting traces, honest and fully consistent with a genuine period, uniform-mounted piece. No maker's stamp is visible.

Design & Branch

The device is the German officer's collar-and-cuff lace (Litze) rendered in bright bullion on the bottle-green field, the pattern that ran along the cuffs (Ärmelaufschläge) of the Waffenrock. Branch is read from the piping: the white Vorstoß is the Waffenfarbe of the Infanterie (infantry), the German Army's largest arm of service. The hand-wired bullion construction, rather than a flat machine-woven lace, marks the piece as an officer's (Offizier) quality item as opposed to an enlisted man's. On the tunic a pair of these Litzen sat on each dark-green cuff, framed by the branch-color piping, mirroring the Litzen worn at the collar.

History

The Waffenrock was reintroduced in 1935 for the rebuilt German Army as its formal dress and walking-out tunic, distinguished by a dark bottle-green collar and cuffs set off with branch-color piping and silver Litzen. It was the uniform of parades, ceremonies, and off-duty wear in garrison — the tunic in which an officer presented himself in his best appearance rather than in the field. As the war went on and the army shifted almost entirely to field-service uniforms, the Waffenrock passed out of general use, which makes its dress insignia a distinctly peacetime-and-early-war survivor. An infantry officer's bullion cuff Litze in dark green with white piping is a refined and characterful example of German dress tailoring — a small but genuine piece of the German officer's ceremonial wardrobe, representing the infantry branch that formed the backbone of the army.

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