German Leibermuster M45 Jacket

Awesome! I imagine that even the unexposed fabric will have faded slightly from age and chemical reactions, so I'm picturing the green as slightly darker back in the day.

Not a good one

OK, Thom... this was good enough to get me out of my semi-retirement for a comment or two.  Congratulations

You got this from the Polish guy on eBay, yes?  I took a look at it and was impressed with the original looking condition, but I couldn't find anything that matched it.  Granted, I don't have a lot of source material to look at and I'm sure there were quick-and-dirty variations during the end of war chaos.

gnashernz seems to think this isn't a legit piece.  I'm curious to know more.  Have you posted this to WAF?  Those guys will have educated opinions for sure.

Steve

P.S. obviously I'm not dead Just insanely busy for the last year+

Well for starters its not HBT which is what the only examples are made of, this must be the only one in existence of this smooth cotton, the construction is different - yet you think this good?
The RB stamping looks to have been pieced together by individual stamps rather than it being one actual stamp, the M45 does not look right either, I'm thinking its been given a collector terminology rather than it being a depot stamp.
Put it on WAF, love to hear the comments.

Hi, new forum member here, this is a really interesting piece, i have a particular fondness for Leibermuster. What feedback have you received on the originality of this? Its a very nice piece, but respectfully i have a few concerns

There was a twill Leibertarn jacket with WSS insignia posted on WAF in 2016, which was judged likely authentic, as its insignia was confirmed real, and the printed pattern matched that of known originals. On the other hand, the example that started this thread is printed in a pattern that matches exactly a present-day commercial pattern, which was once available on Spoonflower (copyrighted by Richard Montgomery). It is still being used to make fashion garments right now, for instance this:

 https://camohq.com/products/german-world-war-2-wwii-leibermuster-camo-unisex-hoodie-hq

Either this jacket is the grand daddy of the commercial pattern, or, more likely than not, given the other issues that had already been pointed out, it is a relatively recent creation.

It's worth remembering that the original Leibertarn, as well as some of the early Swiss derivatives, were printed using different sized rollers for different colors, causing the latter to overlap at different intervals, virtually eliminating repetitions in their alignment (the exact repeats happen over dozens of yards rather than dozens of inches). Indeed, that was one of the main claims in Leiber's original patent! The modern commercial tribute pattern doesn't have this feature. The fact that the pattern on this jacket matches the Montgomery drawing exactly in terms of color alignment is pretty good evidence that it IS the Montgomery drawing.

Thanks for the detailed analysis! Seems like that answers any questions about it

Just to close the loop, here is a side by side comparison of how two blocks of Montgomery drawing would have looked next to two continuous blocks of the original pattern (extracted and "flattened" from a very large tarp someone had posted on WAF some years ago), scaled to match one another using the large black features as reference:




Montgomery did a pretty good job, obviously, but the differences are pretty obvious as well. Other than the asynchronous repeats between the black, green, red, and faint black features that made the original look so "organic", which Montgomery could not reproduce using his consolidated block pattern, he also did some weird stuff on the far right 1/6th - 1/5th of the block that is not present on the original; which might be an artifact of his working with incomplete samples.

Regarding the RBNr, there is an online reference now, where we can verify whether the number makes sense (if a jacket has an RBNr from a shoe maker, we would know to stay away). The list may not be 100% complete, and future fakers will probably be a lot more careful stamping their products, but it's infinitely better than nothing. https://reichsbetriebsnummer.com/en/database.php The number inside this particular jacket is not in the database. It alone may not mean anything, but notice how the person stamping it used an "O" instead of an "0", something that is quite improbable if the stamp had been professionally made as a single unit?

And this is why I don't mess around with WW2 German items. There are people willing to put more effort into creating believable fakes then I have time/energy to put into detecting them. I'll stick with postwar stuff

Steve

This was an excellent read.. you guys know your stuff.