Very strange reversible parka

Hi all,

I came upon this on eBay today:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/276184286868

It is Strichtarn on one side and Bundeswehr Schneetarn on the other side.

The snow side appears to be from a 1960s snow cape, based on the texture of the cloth and the particular printing of the needles (they got denser/darker later on). It also provides more than enough cloth without seams to make onto pretty much anything. The cloth on the Strichtarn side could be from a shelter half or surplus as at one time there was a lot of it available.

I've looked at the construction details and compared it against both DDR and BRD garments and I'm nearly positive that this is not a put-together of existing items. The closest match would be a DDR female winter parka and a BRD 1st Model Schneetarn top. However, for sure neither were used as there are major construction differences that would preclude this.

Whatever this is, someone with a LOT of skill put in a LOT of time making this.

Any thoughts?

Steve

looks very strange. espacially the pockets!?

Maybe it's a miltec /Sturm production from the early 90s?

How much? Seen these for a lot lot less
Kevin.

milly66 wrote:How much? Seen these for a lot lot less
Kevin.

You've seen this type of reversible parka before?

The seller says there's no tags, no marks of any kind.  STURM is a suspect here because it isn't shy about creating things from inexpensive stuff it acquired after the wall came down.  They certainly have the skills to put something like this together and also the history.

The BRD snow capes were sold in huge quantities for almost nothing many years ago.  IIRC Sportsmans Guide was selling them in 4 packs for something like $10 each.  I bought a bunch of them  STURM also likely bought up most of the existing stocks of unused Strichtarn cloth and I suspect has done new runs of it since.

STURM (Mil-Tec) does produce a copy of the 1st Model Schneetarn uniform, which this hybrid thing is clearly based on. It's not identical, but modifying the sewing patterns would be pretty easy.

So yeah, STURM is an excellent guess.  But I haven't seen this thing before, which is surprising to me.  I am on German eBay all the time and I haven't seen a single one of these.

Steve

Isn’t the snow camo Bundeswehr and not NVA? In which case it’s an east west combo, so highly unlikely to be genuine issue. Looks very well made though, I wonder if it’s possible that Ralph Lauren produced this. I’m not joking, I don’t know how widely available their ex surplus Frankensteins are, but I’ve seen genuine Belgian camo fabrics and recuts of uniforms by Ralph in Australian upper end fashion stores.

Rafski wrote:Isn’t the snow camo Bundeswehr and not NVA?

Indeed it is Bundeswehr snow camo. See first line after the link of my initial post

The more and more I think about it, this is probably a STURM product. They have everything needed to produce this, including the pattern for the 1st Model Schneetarn top which this clearly is based on.

In my mind the question is if this was produced in quantity or if they only made a few prototypes. Maybe it was too expensive to make?

Steve