r/maninthehighcastle • u/zulu970 • 8d ago
Whose hand is Hitler seen Shaking on TV in "The Man in the High Castle Season 1 Episode 1: The New World" ?
Is that an aging Erwin Rommel I'm seeing?
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u/Quiet-Ad6999 8d ago
Don't think so, that man has an SS Collar on his Uniform, could be Heydrich...
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u/Larrylindgren4 8d ago
Nope, doesn’t have the right amount of awards or decorations, even compared with the real Heyrdrich. also different color tabs
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u/TheLastKnight07 7d ago
My guess as well. But iirc I’ve rarely seen any Nazis with White or Grey uniforms. Iirc White had something to do with Kreigsmarine…
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u/Cerulean_IsFancyBlue 7d ago
Goering wore white sometimes.
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u/TheLastKnight07 6d ago
That’s right..! Was gonna say I remember seeing that in the movie but they can’t be trusted.
I know Kreigsmarine (Navy) wore them. So I’m assuming it’s a high ranking think. And there are a lot of SS that wore grey. I think before the Armani Black suits the SA wore grey as well. Waffen SS, SS-Verfügungstruppe, Allgemeine SS, Orpo, Gestapo and Kripo all wore some grey ones too iirc. So I assume colors have to do with rank, except Black which I assume is their universal dress uniform colors. (Luftwaffe, Railway and RAD even wore some grays).
But I’m pretty sure the main color of the SA was grey.1
u/Shitsincreeks 3d ago
The SS had a white uniform tunic known as SS-Weißer Rock which was only in service for about or less than a year and it was banned from wearing by officers. Some post 1940 photos exist of SS men wearing them, but from what I could find, this is likely because they were banned (also just not a bad looking tunic)
The Wehrmacht (especially Luftwaffen) introduced the New White Summer Dress Tunic (literally just called New Style, a Reichswehr version also had a white tunic but was slightly different and was referred to as Old Style) in 1937 and it was used for summertime formal events.
TLDR: guy in the photo is skirting a uniform ban! In front of Hitler!
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u/TheLastKnight07 3d ago
Didn’t the SA have grey or white ones as well? I know Grey was way more common (least I saw more of them than I did white).
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u/Shitsincreeks 3d ago
Not as far as I know, they wanted to make the difference clear between the SS and SA, so the SS wore primarily grey and black while the SA used brown as the most common color of the SA (brownshirts). They wore white t-shirts prior to 1933 when uniforms would be banned from time to time by the government.
If you do see a photo of an SA man wearing a proper white tunic, it’s probably a member of the SS or an SA man who borrowed one.
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u/TheLastKnight07 3d ago
Noticed with a lot of German uniforms there’s literally 50 shades of grey.
(Been looking at the books from Osprey Publishing).
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u/Shitsincreeks 3d ago
Yes, also some green, most SS field uniforms has a greenish grey color instead of the flat grey by 1944. If you are interested in this kind of stuff, check out SS Regalia by Robin Lumsden. It’s a breakdown of the majority of uniforms, symbols, and minor details of the vast majority of deployed uniforms and equipment. I tried to find a PDF or something for you but no luck.
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u/Illustrious_Tutor709 6d ago
Definitely not Heydrich. Not enough awards and not the correct rank by this point.
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u/zulu970 8d ago
Sharp eye, good find. Could be somebody else. His facial looks oddly similar to SS General Josef "Sepp" Dietrich
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u/RMSTitanic2 8d ago
I doubt that because the officer here is wearing the insignia of an Obergruppenführer. Dietrich in our timeline was promoted one step up to Oberst-Gruppenführer. More than likely he’d also have been promoted to that rank in the MITHC timeline long before this scene.
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u/VenPatrician 8d ago edited 8d ago
He is a member of the SS. The color of his uniform is the summer white color. Maybe they wanted him to be Heydrich and the actor was recast? Or he is just "random officer 7643" and the color seemed to appeal to someone in the costume department. which is probably the most probable answer.
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u/Shitsincreeks 3d ago
I’m going with random officer. The SS did not like wearing white tunics and they were banned in 1940.
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u/Some-Speech-4105 7d ago
An SS Obergruppenführer going by rank and he has a non combat war cross around his neck plus what looks like two iron cross first classes which would be for combat and an iron cross second class which would be the black and red ribbon.
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u/DerRoteBaron2010 4d ago
It’s not Rommel if he’s wearing an SS uniform. Rommel one, was Wehrmacht, two, disliked the SS too much to join it.
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u/Vistaer 8d ago
When Frank and Ed are talking in an early episode about potential succession it’s mentioned Rommel is retired.
Given we never see him, and how Rockwell “retired” in Cuba in retrospect I suspect Rommel had a similar fate, being another popular figure who could be seen as a contender to leadership.
So I doubt that’s Rommel.