I notice that Peddinghaus makes a big variety of 1/35 German cuff titles. The bad news is that many of them I cannot read even with a magnifying glass. Is there some listing of which set has what cuff titles and what they say>

Peddinghaus is a German company, due to anti NAZI laws the are ot allowed to replicate insignia and symbols from WW2.

If I recall, on this forum it was mentioned there was some ambiguity over that. It's akin to the publishing of the book "Mein Kampf", with the idea of "know your enemy".

Hi. I've had this discussion before with a German model retailer. He clarified that certain BANNED nazi insignia is prohibited. This amounts to any swastikas as well as SS insignia and runes.

Wehrmacht unit insignia and cuff titles are not per se banned.

I've had a few nasty surprises upon receiving a model that I've ordered from Germany only to find all the SS decal options either cut out off the sheet or colored over with marker pen.

As for other manufacturers of cuff titles (Verlinden, Tamiya and Alliance Modelworks), you'll find mostly LAH,Afrika, Das Reich and Wiking division if I recall.Not a very wide variety of cuff titles out there. Oh and the ones that come as part of the Academy Tiger 1 Late are of very poor readability.

Hope this sheds some light.

To be fair, the cuff title, if it is correctly in scale, is going to be pretty much unreadable in 1/35th, except under magnification. Of course in larger scales it is a different matter.

Mein Kampf was published last year in Germany because the government recognised that it was better to have a critically annotated version out there than black market copies. Personally I can't see the problem with a few 1?35 scale collar and cuff markings. I've always thought that if we try to pretend that these things never happened we risk forgetting them altogether.

I agree with you Stephen. No harm whatsoever is going to come from a scale military modeler applying historically accurate SS insignia to a model. Its a very far cry from a crazed neo-nazi brandishing a swastika flag and yelling obscenities on the street!

Without wanting to turn this into a political debate, I believe the German government does take a very authoritarian approach to many issues, from how the past is percieved to how current opinions on matters such as the refugee problem are thought of...it all seems very tightly controlled with very little freedom to express anything other than the official line.

In model making there is a very clear need to depict the subject with the greatest realism possible, and I don't see how making historically accurate decals available is going to incite any desires in anyone to become a nazi.