Kritten (hat)
The kitten is the popular and unofficial name for a historical military headgear in the German Empire with the official name "field cap for teams". It was a visorless cap for Prussian and German soldiers and was usually worn by crews and NCOs without portepee .
description
The scabbard usually had a hat in the same color as the tunic. The total height should be 8.3 cm; above the 2.7 cm wide trim strip that left a 3 mm wide strip of the basic cloth visible at the bottom. The cylindrical trim strip widened conically into the 5 cm high side pieces and finally ended in the round cap. The individual parts of the hat are separated from one another at the edges with colored piping. As with the trim strip, the color of the piping was adopted from the gun color . Two cockades were attached in the middle of the forehead . The upper one was the imperial cockade in the colors: black, white, red. Including the country cockade; in Prussia z. B. black, white, black. The hat material was originally stretched with a steel ring, as was the case with the peaked cap, and that is how the scribble was issued. However, it was customary to remove it immediately, which made the scabbard bulge like a beret and was worn like that. The advantage of this was that you could simply roll up the crab and put it in your pocket.
Surname
The name comes from the language of the soldiers and is a joking diminutive of scabies in the meaning of a basket , which is derived from Middle High German : kretze or from Old High German : krezzo . The name of the headgear is compared to a cup. The fact that the name of the headgear is derived from the scabies or that the hat is a refuge for parasites is probably a bon mot or a later explanation of the no longer understood term. The scabbard was officially called a field cap without a peak .
history
The scratching was initially only introduced by the Prussian Army in 1808 when they were re-uniformed, initially for some groups. The model was the Russian flat cap, which was also worn by army soldiers. After the war of liberation in the first half of the 19th century, more and more Prussian troops adopted this practical headgear. During the German War it was taken over by some of Prussia's allies. After the war, the height of the itch was drastically reduced; from a hood it became more of a flat cap. After the founding of the empire in 1871, most contingents of the imperial army carried the Krätze. On April 19, 1907, the field gray crab was initially only given to infantry and pioneers. In 1910, field gray was introduced with the M1910 model . In a memorandum from 1913, the Prussian War Ministry states that the team hats absolutely must have umbrellas in order to give the eyes better protection. In addition, the hat fabric must be protected from excessive wear, as the men have to touch the fabric with sweaty hands. Nevertheless, with the AKO of September 21, 1915, the scrape was made binding. The reason could be seen in the war-related shortage of leather supplies.
Finally, on July 24, 1917, the Prussian War Ministry forbade the soldiers from procuring and attaching leather umbrellas to the kittens. From then on, umbrellas were only allowed to be made from vulcanized fiber , cardboard or similar substitutes. As early as the second year of the war, the colored trim strips were camouflaged with specially introduced cap straps. Because of further shortages of cotton , the Prussian War Ministry finally introduced the scraper in plain field gray on July 20, 1917, without trimming strips and advances. This could now be worn in the field without additional camouflage. The first samples of this new dross were issued for Prussia on August 31, 1917, in Saxony on August 8, 1917 and in Württemberg on July 31, 1917. Only in Bavaria did the king with AE of August 3, 1917 refuse the issue. There, on August 15, 1917, a scrap with a field-gray cover protrusion and field-gray trim was released. With the establishment of the Reichswehr, the beret-like imperial headgear disappeared for the troops. Instead, in 1919 the peaked cap , which had been typical for officers until then, was also introduced to the men. It was last issued in 1938 and 1939 during exercises from stockpiles.
Until 1945, the scraper was part of the blue and white striped prisoner clothing for prison inmates and gained worldwide fame through its use in concentration camps .
The beret in its current form developed from the field cap in the British Army .
meaning
In the beginning, the kitten was worn by all soldiers regardless of rank, including officers and non-commissioned officers. In an ordinance of 1873, the visor cap was only issued to sergeants and sergeants. NCOs and men regularly wore the scabbard. Unlike the colored peace uniform, the field gray field uniform did not initially have a visor cap for NCOs. If they wanted to get a field gray peaked cap during the war, they had to buy it at their own expense. Since they were satisfied with the headgear, the kitten became the identification mark for the common soldier . After the First World War, this practical headgear, which was only worn by the lower ranks, became synonymous with an unconditional spirit of submission. In Werner Herzog Woyzeck's film, for example, the protagonist Klaus Kinski was only shown with kittens, which was hardly widespread in the time the film was set.
literature
- Klaus Ulrich Keubke: 1000 Uniforms: Military Uniforms in the World from the Beginning to Today . Naumann & Göbel Verlag, Cologne 2008, ISBN 3-625-11629-4 .
- Jürgen Kraus: The field-gray uniform of the German army 1907–1918 . Biblio Verlag, Osnabrück 1999, ISBN 3-7648-2533-2 .
Web links
- Jörg Dehn: Krätze in the execution of the imperial troops. Retrieved December 17, 2019 .
- Illustration of a Kritten from 1906, Garde-Korps Berlin. Retrieved December 17, 2019 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Knötel, Pietsch and Collas: Das Deutsche Heer, peace uniforms at the outbreak of the world war . Spemann Verlag, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-440-81053-4 .
- ^ A b c Jürgen Kraus: The field-gray uniform of the German army 1907-1918 . Biblio Verlag, Osnabrück 1999, ISBN 3-7648-2533-2 , p. 109 .
- ↑ Origin of the term 'scabies'. In: Duden online. Retrieved December 16, 2019 .