According to the Miami Herald, I am now a World War II buff. It’s a label I strongly reject. How does one even become a World War II buff? I don’t watch the History Channel. Something I believe World War II buffs do all the time. They certainly don’t just flip past it to get to other channels. I don’t want to be a buff. Not about World War II or anything else for that matter. Really.
I was never contacted by anyone at the Miami Herald before they wrote this article. I certainly never told anyone that I was a World War II buff. To the best of my knowledge, nobody else ever referred to me as a buff.
Here is the article from the Miami Herald:
Skull emblems are huge sellers these days, so Scott Deutsch had no problem placing 50,000 T-shirts emblazoned with a distinctive version of the gory symbol in Wal-Mart.
Trouble is, this particular skull and crossbones was the insignia used by a division of the Nazi Waffen SS — the Death’s Head or Totenkopf. Wal-Mart yanked the shirts off the shelves last week.
”We would never have done that shirt if we had known,” said Deutsch, president of Miami-based Orange Clothing Company, a manufacturer of young men’s apparel. “Furthermore, I’m Jewish.”
The T-shirts are now flooding back into Deutsch’s warehouse, leaving him with a loss of more than $200,000.
Wal-Mart started pulling the tops after a Maryland blogger — and World War II buff — noticed them in local stores and took a photo of the squashed-looking skull with his cellphone.
After Rick Rottman checked the emblem and saw it matched the Nazi insignia, he posted an item on his blog, bentcorner.com, on Nov. 9 along with comparison photos.
Wal-Mart, which had placed the T-shirts in stores a couple weeks ago, reacted quickly. ”We would never have placed the T-shirts on our shelves had we known the origin or significance of the emblem,” the retailer said in a statement.
The Death’s Head was used by the Third Division of the Waffen SS, which was notorious for war crimes. Many of its men were concentration camp guards.
Deutsch said his designers found the skull in a European ”trend book.” Apparel makers use trend books to decide which motifs and styles to manufacture for the upcoming season.
The T-shirt was made for Wal-Mart’s private label, No Boundaries.
Skulls, Deutsch said, have been popular emblems for the past five years.
”It’s a cool, bad-ass image in the young men’s market,” he said. “We do skulls all the time.”
A Miami native, Deutsch started Orange Clothing in 1999. The company manufactures in China, where it has an office in Shanghai, and Latin America. It sells $10 million worth of clothing a year to retailers such as Macy’s, Dollar General and JCPenney.
Deutsch said he doesn’t know what he’ll do with all the extra T-shirts, which have also started cropping up on eBay. But he’s sure about one thing.
”We’re checking the origins of the skulls now,” he said.
So the totenkopf shirts sold at Wal-Mart stores was done so by a company owned by a Jewish man? You couldn’t make this stuff up.
What’s a trend book? Are clothing designers allowed to just copy things and then pass it off as their own? If so, it makes me wonder just what they are actually designing. Maybe they didn’t know they were copying a Nazi SS totenkopf, but they had to know they were copying something. Something not designed by them. Something that might have been trademarked by another artist or designer. The company or person that actually created the image. It’s an exact copy of the Nazi SS totenkopf. They didn’t even reverse the image. They didn’t change the shape or add anything.
Maybe next time they are paid to design something, they should design it instead of lifting it from a book.
It’s strange that a clothing maker that provides clothes for Macy’s also makes clothes for Dollar General. Talk about a wide range of products. No matter which way the economy goes, they are covered.
Nazi shirt was an accident, Miami designer says [Miami Herald]
I honestly cannot see why somebody would purposely choose to go out and spend money on a Zune mp3 player. Microsoft’s lame attempt at producing something to compete with Apple’s popular iPod mp3 player. I understand that Microsoft felt the need to once again go out and copy something another company first came up with. Once they realize consumers like whatever another company was able to come up with on their own. It’s what Microsoft does.
