Leather
 

Something which comes up occasionally is the determining if a holster is genuine. There are many factors which are beyond my capacity to fathom to determmine originality. I'll throw this out in general reference leather items in the Wehrmacht in WWII: Leather was a major logistics high demand item. It would for the time have had the same importance as perhaps plastic would have in a modern army. My point is that production would have been extremely important and new items would have been produced up to the end of the war. This is my short list of essential items for the German WWII military:

rifle slings
canteen cap connectors
bayonet frogs
Y harnesses
back packs
holsters
individual soldier belts
harness for horses/wagons (50% of transport was horse drawn)
helmet liners
boots
shoes
cartridge pouches
equipment tie down straps


anything else?

rk

yeah, clean that up for me Ed. I screwed that up. Too much coffee.

rk

You can add dress hat brims to the list... and small equipment transport cases. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Eek!]" src="eek.gif" />

Dress hat brims were sometimes made of "vulcanized fibre". By 1945 equipment belts and bayo frogs were often made of heavy canvas. These last items are often identified as Afrikakorps, this was not really the case.