In the world of militaria collecting, items associated with Nazi Germany still command the highest prices, and the most valuable of all are those linked to the Nazi leadership. Serious collectors will pay enormous sums for uniforms that once belonged to the men at the top of the regime. Over the years I have examined many priceless pieces in museum collections: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz’s baton, Hermann Göring’s powder blue Reichsmarschall uniform, one of Göring’s summer tunics, and the summer uniform of Dr. Hans Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery.
Any one of those items would fetch a king’s ransom at auction. But until now, I had never come across a uniform belonging to one of the most prominent and feared Nazi leaders of all. The most valuable Nazi leader’s uniform ever sold was discovered in an abandoned home in May 1945, as American forces overran Bavaria. That home belonged to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany.
Himmler had two palatial houses in Bavaria. South of Munich, on the shores of the Tegernsee, he owned a fine villa in the village of Gmund, purchased in 1934 and expensively redecorated, with a guard house and an air raid shelter added. Before the war he lived there with his wife and daughter, close to Munich, the spiritual heart of the Nazi Party, where Hitler also kept an apartment. When Hitler was in Berlin, Himmler stayed at a house he owned in the city.
But when Hitler was at the Berghof, his home above Berchtesgaden in southern Bavaria, Himmler found himself inconvenienced. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s powerful secretary, deliberately kept Himmler from having a house among the other leaders on the mountain, alongside himself, Göring, and Albert Speer. Himmler was forced to use plush Nazi guesthouses in Obersalzberg when visiting Hitler. Later, after Himmler separated from his wife early in the war and set up with his mistress Hedwig Potthast, he moved into a fine villa at Schönau am Königssee, close to Berchtesgaden.
There she lived with Himmler’s two illegitimate children. He continued to visit Gmund throughout the war to see his daughter Gudrun. When he visited Hitler at the Berghof, he used the Schönau house as his residence, and it too was remodeled to include staff and guard wings and an air raid shelter. By the end of the war Himmler was nowhere near Bavaria.
He had left Berlin and moved north into Schleswig-Holstein to be near Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz’s government, which succeeded Hitler on 30 April 1945. He remained in northern Germany until his strange capture by British forces on 21 May 1945, and he died under even stranger circumstances two days later at a house in Lüneburg. Meanwhile, both of his Bavarian properties had fallen to American troops. On 4 May 1945, a small eight-man patrol from the 1st Battalion of the 141st Infantry Regiment, part of the 36th Texas Infantry Division, captured the villa at Gmund along with the holiday homes of several other senior Nazi leaders nearby.
Himmler’s wife Margareta and their daughter were not home. They had fled days earlier by car, along with several female relatives, heading for northern Italy, which was still in German hands, and abandoning the property entirely. The house was a treasure trove of Himmler-related artifacts, and it was thoroughly looted for souvenirs. Many such items have since appeared at auctions, particularly in the United States in recent years.
That same day, the US 7th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division captured Berchtesgaden, the exclusive Nazi Alpine town, and discovered Himmler’s second villa. It too had been abandoned by its human occupants, but it was stuffed full of his uniforms and personal effects. Among the discoveries was a special armored limousine, now on permanent display in a German museum, which Himmler had used to travel from the house up to Hitler’s Berghof or to and from the airport used by Nazi leaders when he flew in aboard his private Focke-Wulf 200 Condor. Again, the house was thoroughly looted by American troops seeking souvenirs.
The unit most closely associated with the looting of Himmler’s Gmund home was the 22nd Infantry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, which arrived shortly after the patrol from the 141st Infantry on the same day. One of those soldiers walked away with a host of items, one of which would become the most valuable SS relic ever found. First Sergeant Paul E. Davis of Company E, 22nd Infantry, later wrote a receipt for the sale of these items to a famous collector in June 1982, though he got the date of his discovery wrong by two days.
The receipt was written on Himmler’s personal headed notepaper and listed the items Davis had taken from the house: stationery, photographs, a sash of the Order of Saint Maurice and Saint Lazarus, and the grand prize, Himmler’s summer dress tunic. That tunic still exists today and is the only authenticated Himmler uniform to have survived from the war. In the photographs from that period, we can see First Sergeant Davis wearing the tunic and the sash of the Italian order, standing outside Himmler’s house at Gmund. In his left hand he holds an item familiar to followers of this channel: an SS pre-war parade helmet, which I believe to be the very same one recorded as having been recovered from the Gmund house by Corporal Raymond W.
Dyckar of the same unit. Dyckar brought Himmler’s personal parade helmet home to New York City, and the item now resides in the Museum of Jewish History there, donated by his son after his father’s death. It was extraordinary to discover, among the papers supplied by the auction house that handled the sale of Himmler’s uniform, this photograph of First Sergeant Davis carrying that very helmet. It seems the material at the Gmund house had been placed in long-term storage on Himmler’s orders, since he was now living at the Schönau am Königssee house rather than at Gmund.
This is reflected in the type of uniform items found there, including a pre-war parade helmet no longer used during World War II, and this summer tunic of a type the Reichsführer had not worn after 1940. It is also telling that the decorations normally fastened to Himmler’s uniform were missing when Davis wore the tunic shortly after finding it. The metal insignia had been stripped and transferred to Himmler’s other daily use uniforms, the field gray ones he kept at Schönau, at his Berlin residences, and elsewhere. Everything indicates this white tunic had been retired to storage.
What kind of tunic is this? Lightweight versions of the black and field gray SS tunics were tailored for officers to wear between April and September. They were introduced in 1937 and discontinued in 1940 due to wartime economies, designed to be easy to wash. This example was finely tailored in white doll skin wool with a four-button front, an open collar, French cuffs, scalloped and pleated breast pockets, scalloped flap slash hip pockets, silver pebbled buttons, and two more buttons at the back to hold up the belt.
The Nazi Party armband is of red wool with black ribbed rayon borders, hand applied. The very rare cuff title is of silver aluminum thread with black borders, again hand applied. The Reichsführer rank badges, unique to Himmler, consist of collar tabs of black velvet backing with silver aluminum twist cord piping and silver aluminum embroidered clusters of three oak leaves surrounded by an oak leaf wreath. The tunic has a single shoulder board of three interwoven twist silver aluminum cords, the middle twist running in the opposite direction from the outer cords.
The rank is shown by a gray metal cipher of a three oak leaf spray on black wool backing, retained by a silver pebbled button attached to a screw post. On the right sleeve is the honor chevron issued to all SS personnel who were members of the SS or the Nazi Party before January 1933. This silver version is again of silver thread with two inner black stripes, hand applied. Himmler wore an aiguillette of silver aluminum interwoven braided cord.
The tunic is lined in cream-colored silk, including the sleeves, and in the right breast pocket is a maker’s label reading Steckbart, along with the handwritten name: Reichsführer SS Himmler, 22 April 1938. The white summer tunic contains stitched loops on the left breast to hold a ribbon bar and various decorations. Himmler’s medals were modest and pedestrian compared to the ironware hauled around by Nazis like Hermann Göring, because Himmler’s World War I service had been very limited. He had not been awarded any high Nazi decorations except the Blood Order, the ribbon of which is permanently stitched to the tunic’s right pocket buttonhole.
That award indicates Himmler took part in the famous Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, when Hitler attempted to seize power by force. Photographs taken in the 1960s show the actual medals captured at his home, though he would have had more sets kept at other houses and offices for ceremonial occasions. From left to right we see the SS Long Service Award, an extremely gaudy piece, the NSDAP Long Service Crosses in silver and bronze, and four campaign medals: the 1938 Anschluss Medal for the takeover of Austria, the Sudetenland Medal of 1938 with the 1939 Prague Bar, the Memel Medal of 1939, and the West Wall Medal. On the left breast pocket are loops to hold the Golden Party Badge, plus two further sets of loops, one for the Reich Sports Badge in silver that Himmler strove extremely hard to earn despite not being the most physical specimen of SS man.
The other award that once hung there is difficult to identify, as photographs of Himmler before 1940 show only two badges on his uniform. Later, Göring awarded Himmler the gaudy combined Pilots and Observers Badge in gold with diamonds, even though Himmler had never taken the controls of a plane. Himmler had also received a few exotic foreign orders. One of the interesting items noted on First Sergeant Davis’s receipt was a boxed set of insignia for the grade of Grand Officer of the Order of St.
Maurice and St. Lazarus, which Himmler was awarded by the Italian government in the 1930s. It was commonly given to high-ranking Nazi officials and police leaders by the Kingdom of Italy and included a green sash. We have photographs of Himmler wearing the insignia, and later of Davis wearing the sash.
Himmler received two other such awards: the Grand Cross of the White Rose of Finland, and the Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Pribina, a Slovakian order he received in March 1943. He wore each of these gifts only once, when they were bestowed. Davis brought the items back to the United States in 1945 and was honorably discharged from the US Army on 3 February 1946 at Fort McPherson, Georgia. He kept everything until 1 June 1982, when he sold the lot to collector Dr.
Robert Lee, before the items were sold on to the foremost collector of Third Reich material in the United States, Dave Delich. The Himmler tunic is very famous in collecting circles, having appeared in several reference books, and was considered the crown jewel of Delich’s collection. After Delich’s death, his collection was auctioned by Hermann Historica in 2023 and 2024. So how much did the Himmler tunic make?
With the buyer’s premium added, this unique antique sold for an astounding $2. 2 million, making it by far the most valuable SS relic in existence today. Sadly, unlike Himmler’s parade helmet, which now sits in a museum in New York where anyone can see it as part of an educational exhibit, the tunic has disappeared into another private collection. Quite a number of Himmler’s tunics were undoubtedly hanging in closets at both of his houses when they were captured by the US Army.
Yet not one of his field gray SS World War II uniforms has ever surfaced. According to my research, some of the Reichsführer’s clothing was removed from the Königssee house in April 1945, along with documents, by one of his secretaries, Erika Lorenz, and later burned at the property before American forces arrived. Other material was crated up and trucked out, and later destroyed or eventually looted by American troops. The word on the grapevine, however, is that several of Himmler’s uniforms were indeed taken as souvenirs by GIs, but they have never surfaced.
Either that is a myth, or a tunic or two may still be sitting with veterans’ families, perhaps not realizing who it belonged to or its immense value, since the veteran has most likely passed away by now. It might be worth checking those basements and attics and granddad’s old trunk. Somebody out there is undoubtedly sitting on a literal goldmine.