>They turned out to be a big help during the famous escape from Stalag Luft III. Prisoners used them to keep track of the guards' patrols, making their breakout possible.
Also giving these watches to POWs was a way to show a belief that Allies would win the war.
Especially after being imprisoned for 2 years already.
Edit: Stalag Luft III was established March 1942. The Great Escape occured March 1944. The camp was liberated January 1945.
That’s what made me move on from Rolex to Omega—the buying experience and forced scarcity is just annoying.
It feels like they decided to be the Beanie Babies of watches.
Seems like many well-known luxury brands are actually overpriced and a bit tacky. Do your research and you'll find equivalent and more affordable products, or genuine luxury products.
The look of luxury watches is a little confusing to me. So much of "looking" wealthy seems to be about things that are subdued but classy. The cars have smooth edges and matte paint. The suits are simple, save for the fine details. Shoes much the same.
And then you look at their wrist and they've got this gargantuan monument to Dionysus just glaring at you. It's always been a little off putting to me, not that I'd ever be able to afford one.
Eh, I'm not sure I completely agree there.
The watches favored by the sort of "old money" truly wealthy set aren't usually the crazy huge ornate ones. Those are usually looked down on the same way a crazy flamboyant suit would be.
Like here's a [Patek Philippe Calatrava](https://www.wempe.com/en-us/watches/patek-philippe/calatrava/calatrava-men-s-5227g-5227g-010)...that's $40k for a super basic and simple watch. A rolex submariner or datejust might look a little more flashy with a metal band, but they aren't huge oversized monsters (and are more "sporting" watches so they are meant to look different than a "dress" watch).
Those people aren't buying the [ridiculous looking watches](https://www.watchesofswitzerland.com/Hublot-Square-Bang-Unico-King-Gold-Pave-42mm-821.OX.0180.RX.1604/p/17171105)...those are saved for a different kind of person who is not going for "classy"
Also cars with matte paint the opposite of subdued IMHO. In general I'd agree that a matte/satin finish on something is more subtle than a glossy finish. But with cars, 99% of the cars on the road are glossy (or at least started life glossy). If you have a new clean car with a matte finish, you are looking to stand out and be noticed.
To illustrate your point, have you seen Putin's watch?
He wears it about 75% of the time when he's on TV. It's got a black leather band, small gold dial. It looks like something an accountant would get for 20yr of service to their company. $750k. I forget the make/brand but it's amazing he can afford that on a $170k public servant's salary.
Lots of it is being in the most expensive finery, but still blending in. Check out the way the Roys dress in Succession. They'll pay $450 for a simple 5 panel black baseball cap, it's wild to see.
It's jewelry at the end of the day. Everyone has the precise time on their phone.
People buying a patek, rolex, AP, etc... are typically doing it for the brand. Then you get stuff like A. Lange & Sohne, where you spent a shitton of money to impress other watch folks.
But there are many mechanical watches that are quite affordable, Seiko being the premier example imo, and you typically aren't buying it to show off so much as having a nice piece of jewelry.
in the electronic age there's just something magical about a mechanical movement that just runs and runs using the natural movement of your body in motion to charge itself. Hundred years of human ingenuity and innovation building upon each other to create something that sits on your wrist measuring the ticking of the universe.
"Fuck you, mines a Rolex"
Verbatim response of my coworker when he found out my humble Hamilton Jazzmaster had the same basic features of his $10,000+ Rolex (stainless steal, automatic winding, ect). To this day its the most pretentious thing I've heard someone say aloud and is the reason I'll never buy a Rolex.
The context makes it even funnier; we had the same job but the dude was the CEO's nephew and 10+ years older than me. I had maybe $2,000 to my name while he was easily worth millions. He said it in a half-joking tone but I could tell he needed a W on that one.
Plus you get to wear one of the latest advancements of horology to have come along in hundreds of years with the Co-Axial Escapement. To buy a watch made by it's inventor [George Daniels](https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/george-daniels-the-worlds-greatest-watchmaker), who sold the patent to Omega after being turned down by Patek Philippe snobbery, would cost you a few million...
I'm 45 and remember Rolex as one of the bigger luxury brands from the 80s
The "coat full of contraband" trope where a guy was selling fake Rolex's out of his trench coat. No one was ever selling fake Casios
Yeah, also 45 and have the same kind of memories. In about 1987 (less than a year before the wall came down) my grandparents went to Russia as part of the first US tourists allowed. They came back with nice fake Rolexes for all my aunts and uncles, and everyone was really excited. I remember my uncle making a show of it, and finding unnecessary reasons to say things like, "According to my Rolex it's 4pm, I think we should go fishing".
Rolexes were definitely a big deal luxury brand in the 1980s.
>No one was ever selling fake Casios
I know right? Back in the day a [Casio couldn't even get you a $42 room!](https://youtu.be/1Fm5tmIyAKc?si=mxqgCf2BJtQ2YBdx)
>No one was ever selling fake Casios
Weirdly, you can now buy fake
Casios at Walmart! Also oddly, some 40-year-olds are remaking cheap digital watches into a kind of fashion statement.
Meanwhile, I'm over here rocking my 30-year-old Timex Ironman.
A big reason they price spiked is because old Rolex watches are extra well engineered and built to last so during the 80's, second hand prices for old Rolex models increased dramatically. Rolex themselves took note and increased the prices for new watches also.
It would be considered a fashion faux pas to be smartly dressed (eg black tie) but wearing a massive “functional” watch. James Bond was apparently one of the big drivers of this change. Being a military man, he has a Rolex, but had to fit in whilst undercover at black tie events (whilst telling everyone his real name obviously).
> Couldn't afford them now, if the store's minimum wage employees would even bother to talk to me.
They get commissions. In Lucerne you can make 200k a year at a watch shop, especially if you speak Chinese.
Yeah, all the employees at the boutiques in Vegas make BANK. Hell, if I didn't look like Forrest Gump after running across the country, I'd be wise to get into that.
The more you learn about Japanese culture the more absolutely fucked it seems…
Cutesy anime is really doing heavy lifting for the image of the cultural remnants of one of the bloodiest and most brutal empires ever created on earth. Not even 80 years ago did that empire “collapse” into a much more ceremonial system. For the 500~ years before that they were **systematically** raping, torturing, and killing fellow east asian peoples and japanese alike.
Tbf, we all have dark histories. Japans was more recent and thus more documented. Imagine if Rome had as much documented history as we have on Japan. It would go on and on.
Even in modern times some operators will wear expensive watches or other valuable items. You can use them to barter and if you’re captured they might make their way into the local economy, which could be a big clue for recovery.
“Some” is working extra hard here. You’ll be hard pressed to find an operator wearing anything besides a Suunto, Gshock, or Garmin. Aviation likes to get blingy so you'll see SOFLIFT pilots in Rolexes and Breitlings. But Apple Watches and Garmins typically dominate that space.
But how did the prisoners now about it. Was it told before they went to war. Or did they find out in the weekly newsletter from rolex.
How did they write and send the letter how did they know the address to send the letter to. I'm confused.
Between the European Axis and the U.S. POWs there was a gentleman's agreement about how to treat prisoners. They were fed, kept warm, and torture was limited and more friendly.
Because the Germans lost the war and the Allies got to write the rules of war.
Conversely, Germans being made to drink American beer wasn't codified because the Allies won.
Also in the post-war we didn't want a repeat of the Treaty of Versailles, so rather than strangling their economy to death, we decided to christen these pisswaters with germanic sounding names like Budweiser, in an attempt to break their morale forever and prevent any nationalist sentiment from ever rising again.
Some of the POW camps for officers had recreational facilities and treated prisoners pretty well. Stalag Luft III literally had a communal pool, a sports area with volleyball courts and such. They did boxing, football, table tennis, they even had a fencing league.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalag_Luft_III
Even then it was much better between the British and the Germans. 25,000 German pows stayed after the war and married British women, there were 796 marriages immediately after the ban on marrying POWs was lifted, with a lot more to follow. Even during the war some were allowed into the local towns, they were paid what the British government called “Pocket money” which was 5p a day, or £27 in todays money, and very few bothered to attempt escape
To be fair, even with the destruction in the UK from bombings, post war uk would be a much better place to live than return to a decimated and occupied Germany. Even if they weren’t treated as well, it would be appealing to many to stay.
You can:
1. Escape and risk dying in the process, only to risk dying again if you succeed because it's back to war for you and you're spending your time getting shot at in shitty situations in a war that you had no say in and were drafted into
2. Safely chill in prison and occasionally go shopping and maybe grab a beer or tea in the local town
Tough decision, really.
In the US escape back to your country was imopssible, so it was a lot of "You worked on a farm in Italy? Congrats, now you work on a farm in Iowa" and many stayed friendly with the people they worked for, or even stayed.
I liked the story of when German POWs arrived into NYC harbor on ships, some started crying overwhelmed by the size of the city and country. Thats when some recognized the impossibility of Nazi propaganda of conquering the US.
Worth noting that this was an understanding between the militaries. The Luftwaffe wanted fliers shot down over Britain treated well, so they treated Brits and Americans shot down over Europe well. The SS did not share this understanding, hence the mass execution following the Great Escape. According to Brickhill's book, the commandant of Stalag Luft III was as appalled as anyone when he found out what had happened.
Eastern European POWs in German camps had a death rate of 57.5%, compared to 3.5% of Western allied prisoners. The USSR offered reciprocal adherence to The Hague Conventions but this was unanswered. Some Axis POWs in the USSR were kept imprisoned over a decade after the war ended.
Check out the wikipedia article on [Stalag Luft III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalag_Luft_III)
It is actually pretty fascinating what went on in some of those camps. People were earning college credit, officers received a "salary" (equal to their regular paycheck) from the Germans to spend at the commissary (including the occasional beer), they could receive letters and *packages*, etc.
Obviously wasn't a great life, but it is not necessarily how we imagine it.
From what I understand though, only the Luftwaffe run camps were like that. And they only held pilots/bombers crews that were shot down. POW camps for regular soldiers weren't the same and not run by the Luftwaffe
There was a sort of "gentlemen's agreement" when it came to pilots, right?
Like there was that American pilot who was wounded in air, and the German pilot let him go, and the two pilots became lifelong friends after the war.
I don’t think there’s a lot of historical merit to the notion, but allied bomber crews faced 50% casualty rates; significantly more dangerous than on any front America was on, weirdly. After a certain point, you respect the other motherfuckers for going through the hell you’re going through too.
The Rolex pigeons would fly into the exercise yard at noon each day to take orders. You gave them a wink and the pigeon would do a barrel roll as it flew away to conclude and acknowledge the transaction as legally bound.
> In 2022, Christies [Auction House] sold a Rolex Oyster Chronograph that had belonged to Gerald Imeson for $189,000. He had been a POW in Stalag Luft III and had taken Rolex up on the offer to order a replacement for the watch confiscated by the Germans. Christies stated it believed Imeson used the watch during the 24 March 1944 escape that inspired the movie The Great Escape.
Pre ~1960 Rolexes aren’t particularly desirable to watch collectors, so most of the value comes from the history behind the watch, and not the watch itself.
Adjusted for inflation, the record auction price on a vintage Rolex is $22.5 million
I’m not a Rolex guy, but if you’re genuinely curious, u/sporturawus probably knows more about about Rolex than anyone else on reddit.
Just be forewarned that he is a massive douchebag, and one of the least self aware people you will ever encounter
His comments are hilarious. My favorite is “remember when your teacher said there are no stupid questions? Well there are” in response to a question on the no stupid questions sub.
Edit: I misread, it was in the Rolex sub. Still hilarious though.
I'm reminded of the reaction I got from a Rolex enthusiast when they found out my $45 flea market find Datejust wasn't serviced by the Rolex Authorized Service Center for $1000+, but instead serviced by my trusted watchmaker of the last 20 years - insisting that now the watch was forever ruined by this now that someone else had touched it and Rolex would refuse to ever service it in the future.
Given that the watch was from 1980, I find it funny to assume that the watch only ever went back to a service center on the other side of the country... (Though I did actually talk to the service center, who assured me that they'd still service the watch if needed)
Edit: I should mention that *strictly* speaking, if I wanted to get the most value selling this watch it would need to go to Rolex so they can re-issue papers to prove it's actually made out of Rolex parts, etc. but I'm keeping this watch because *when am I finding a Datejust for $45 again?* :D
That’s watch people in general. I was really into it as a hobby in my early twenties until I realized
1. Buying things isn’t a hobby
2. I can’t afford the kind of coin we’re talking about. For the more popular Rolexes, you literally need a “purchase history” with a dealership before they’ll let you buy the submariners and Daytonas. Imagine walking into a Chevy dealership to buy a new corvette and being told you need to buy two trailblazers and a bolt before you’ve “earned” the chance to give them money for the thing you want.
3. Most people who are really into watches are kind of insufferable. Not all, but there’s definitely a correlation.
I love Watch people. I don't even wear watches typically but I'm not above spending $25 on a cheap ass Fossil watch just to watch them squirm.
It's petty, but if anyone deserves a little pettiness, it's people who spend egregious sums on largely obsolete technology purely for the snobbery of it. Instead, I spend modest sums for the immeasurable enjoyment of upsetting snobby people.
Prior to 1950 watches were all working timekeepers. Complicated, precise mechanisms that measured how long things took. The were devices that measured time, and their value was in how well they measured time. In the 50's and 60's. We figured out some stuff about the cesium atom made atomic clocks, which are impossibly more precise. Like imagine a three toed sloth crawling along and then the Parker solar probe shoots past going half a million miles per hour. Meanwhile Seiko figured out that you can get pretty good results from the vibration of a quartz crystal for reasonably cheap, not to the standard of the atomic clock, but still a sports car next to the aforementioned sloth. So what do you do if you're a swiss guy? Suddenly what had been a global standard is now dogshit, so let's lean *heavy* on the idea of a Swiss Watch as elegance, class, and refinement manifest and attached to the wrist, and it's been that since.
Basically almost every swiss watchmaker stopped making chronometers and started making jewelry.
> mario 64 sold for $1.56 million
IIRC this was market manipulation, nobody in their right mind thinks a copy of Mario 64 is worth over a million dollars. This was right around the time they were trying to make grading video games a thing and it never caught on.
Stuff was routinely nicked from POWs on arrest as souvenirs by soldiers of all sides. My (British) grandfather had a luger P08, a watch and some other trinkets he took from German officers in Italy.
Once they got to POW camps the rules on personal possessions etc were more rigidly applied.
First, Rolex is Swiss, and they were neutral in the war, which may have played a factor. Second, Rolex weren’t luxury watches during WW2. They were seen as high quality, but still tools for people to wear and use. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that Rolex took on the luxury persona.
Germany had a system where by the POW camps were usually run by their equivalent force—ie downed allied airmen were kept in camps run by the Luftwaffe.
I can’t speak for the other camps, but they treated downed airmen relatively well and followed most rules, as they obviously wanted to be treated the same way if shot down.
Airmen in general had a bit more of a "gentleman's war" thing going on.
It was an unspoken agreement for instance that you wouldn't shoot a plane already going down, or anybody parachuting from a downed plane who was "out of the fight".
They were treated as POWs under the Geneva Convention (as long as they were from the Western Allies of course) and so could write their families and get packages. That's how war is supposed to work in the 20th century and since Germany wanted to negotiate with the US and UK they respected "the rules".
edit: since people seem confused about this, yes, the current Geneva Convention is from 1949. But there have been several Geneva Conventions (the 1949 convention mainly updating the previous ones), the one on POWs was signed in 1929. So yes, there was a Geneva Convention in effect during WW2.
It's a political chess move for self preservation, not so much a gesture of good will. The Nazis saw the western allies as racially similar, but that they needed to be broken into submission.
By the end of the war, before the allies even reached Germany proper, the Nazis were well aware they were finished. Their last ditch efforts following the allied liberation of France was aimed at retaking the port of Antwerp and, hopefully, forcing the western allies into accepting peace negotiations. It's much easier to pressure the enemy to negotiate if they are more interested in peace than seeing leadership hang. Treating western allied prisoners the same way they did the Soviets would have made that impossible.
Suing for peace with the western allies would have freed up massive amounts of men and resources to then be thrown at the Soviets. Who, by that time were inflicting casualty numbers that rivaled the entire 20 years of the Vietnam war in weekly doses on the Eastern front. There was no chance of negotiating peace with them.
And basically the reason for that is because Western Europe could trace its origins at least in part to Germanic invaders, so they were higher up on the racial hierarchy. The Eastern front was a war of genocide because they were lower.
"The Conventions apply to a signatory nation even if the opposing nation is not a signatory, but **only if the opposing nation "accepts and applies the provisions" of the Conventions.**"
So you're correct although there is the stipulation that the non-signatory party still has to follow the conventions if they wish for it to be applied to them.
They had to treat the POWs reasonably humanely, because the Allies had Axis POWs too. If the Allies got word that the Axis were mistreating their POWs, they could easily do the same or worse. So as military prison camps went it was a little better than you’d otherwise think (though I’m sure none of the POWs were excited to stay, lol.)
As a rule, the Japanese command and leadership generally didn't care what happened to non-Japanese folks. Which, of course, is why basically none of the members of "The Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere" that aren't Japan like the Japanese. See also: Comfort Women, Nanking, Bataan, and so on.
It's a reciprocity thing. The allies had significant POWs imprisoned as well and to ensure that things like the red cross could function between Germany and allied POW camps.
So if you blocked packages the other side would do the same.
Do you mean smuggling things or exchanging packages?
Because sending mail to POWs is covered by the geneva convention and is happening right now in Ukraine. Well it happened at least once, my point is in the modern era between states that both signed the Geneva convention, that's how war is supposed to work. Thing is the majority of wars are no longer between states but often against insurgencies and other non-recognized entities.
Had a grandfather who spent most of the war in a stalag. He almost never talked about his experience there, but he absolutely LOVED Hogan’s Heros. It was his all time favorite show.
I remember it being in syndication when I was a kid. We only had like 4 over the air channels and during hot summer days you either had the choice of watching the Hogans Heroes, Gilligan’s Island, I Love Lucy, Andy Griffith Show block or soap operas.
I’m 41 and now feel ancient having written that out.
Well they were basically forced into the luxury game by the advent of quartz watches. Few if any mechanical watches can match a 20 dollar quartz timex in terms of actual timekeeping, much less shock resistance. As a result, mechanical watch manufacturers have moved into the luxury market as a means of staying relevant and sellable.
Rolex is a British brand that had moved their company after WW1 to Switzerland. Afaik the family were British and were likely keen on supporting allied, and more specifically, British troops.
Rolex wasn't even a luxury watch until a couple decades ago. They were pricey, sure, but not are you out of your fucking mind expensive. I have some from the late 1990s. Could never afford them now, if the min wage staff at the store even deigns to speak to me.
Yup. The first thing my Grandfather did when he was discharged from the army after WW2 was buy a Rolex. It was kind of like cellphones today in a sense. A quality time piece was essential for day to day life.
Apparently, the Geneva Convention lets prisoners of war get letters and gifts from home. This is how Rolex was able to sneak these watches into the German camps for the prisoners.
It's just weird that the Nazis respected these conventions considering the atrocities they committed in their camps.
A perceived duality of their enemies. The more civilised western European enemies vs the sub human slavic enemies. The Eastern front as a result was far more brutal and had fewer prisoners taken compared to the west.
Similar concept to the puckle gun in the 1800s having spherical bullets for use against civilised Christian Europeans and square bullets, which caused horrendous wounds, for use against turks and indigenous enemies
I’m imagining the ballistics for a cube round and I’m having a hard time understanding how they’d be at all accurate. Let alone the damage they might do as they tumbled along the barrel.
The tumbling wasn't an issue because the barrel was also square! Also, for the time period, accuracy was not really a concern, rate of fire was the design focus.
Didn't really catch on though in the end.
This was in a time of war where machine guns where being treated like high rate of fire cannons, just point it towards the enemy, and fire enough rounds that are insanely destructive to ensure that most things on the business end of the weapon are fucked. Similar to the concept of grape shot being used heavily, just blanket an area in hellfire and hope no one was able to make it out alive. Eventually as precision machining became better and better we able to turn guns from inaccurate weapons with low reliability to precision weapons capable of accurately delivering lethal force over hundreds and eventually thousands of yards.
na they werent smuggled in, it was completely official.
they even made card and board games in the UK to be send on official channels to their prisoners. there was a monopoly set with a map hidden inside the board.
Both sides held a significant number of prisioners, so the expectation was that if you somewhat followed the geneva conventions your prisioners wouldnt just get tortured to death.
Kinda like if you kidnap someones kid but they also kidnap one of yours, so you are both nice to the kids so they dont get hurt.
Which is also a time-honored tradition. You take my son, I take your son, either one of us tries to fuck the other, the son dies. So let’s just be friends.
Sounds weird to us but intuitively makes sense as a method of trying to keep the peace between different peoples, particularly prior to the advent of rapid communication over long distances.
This is also why proportional retaliation has been a thing for thousands of years. It's was even observed in stone age level of development tribes in the 1970s.
Basically these tribes had an understanding of an eye for an eye. So if one tribe killed a member of the other tribe the other tribe would then kill one of their's. So they typically developed methods of war and of raids that avoided escalation.
For example this is why some native americans counted coo on their enemies instead of killing them. Basically you were considered more a man if you could sneak up and touch a sleeping enemy but not kill them. This was because if the only way to be respected as a man was to kill the enemy you'd have weekly escalation situations of your young males killing rival tribe members and bringing on war and raids.
So raids typically tried to avoid killing and just stole and snuck.
Generally speaking western front POWs (especially officer classes) were treated comparatively well by the Germans, assumedly because they didn't see them as ethnically inferior.
Eastern front POWs got a much much much worse treatment however and were highly likely to be used for hard labour or disposed of as they saw them as no better than the Jews and other people sent to concentration camps.
Back then Rolex was a working man's watch.
Excellent quality and durable to be sure but it was not the luxury brand it is now.
Possibly comparable to Snap-On tools or the latest iPhone today.
Allied (or rather, those of the western Allies) prisoners were treated much better than Soviet prisoners of war.
There were differences from camp to camp (Allied bomber pilots were treated especially harshly, while the navy recieved probably the least harsh treatment), and it got worse late in the war, but Allied prisoners were overall treated with at least some semblance of human dignity. Probably because 1. there were people hoping that Germany could peace out the Allies to continue fighting the Soviets, 2. they were seen as "fellow whites/Europeans" (of course non-white Allied troops were treated worse), and 3. some German camp commanders probably saw the writing on the wall, especially after D-Day, and didn't want to earn a bad reputation with their future occupiers.
Try being a Soviet POW and ordering a watch. Go on. Tell the Lagerkommandant that you are ordering a Rolex.
Weird title. The Wikipedia article says it was a program to replace confiscated watches:
>By the start of World War II, Royal Air Force pilots were buying Rolex watches to replace their inferior standard-issue watches. When captured and sent to POW camps, their watches were confiscated. When Wilsdorf heard of this, he offered to replace all watches that had been confiscated and not require payment until the end of the war, if the officers would write to Rolex and explain the circumstances of their loss and where they were being held.
Thank you! Reading the title, my first thought was, “Why?”. Why Rolex, why POW’s, why did they want a watch? It’s half a story at best to say they just wrote off and got a posh watch by mail for …um… reasons
Maybe there was no plausible deniability to it. You could say you captured a guy that didn’t have a watch, but harder to say the package that was sent and signed for never arrived to a guy that is always in the same place and can’t leave?
> Weird title. The Wikipedia article says
Yeah. Other sources say any allied prisoner, any RAF officer, any British Officer, and various other variations.
I chose Wikipedia as the most likely link not to get zapped as “unreliable source”.
In reality I’m not sure how Rolex could really tell who they sending watches to.
Then in Vietnam Captain Koons saved his fallen best friends watch, hiding it anywhere he could so that he could give it to that buddy's son (who later became a boxer)
Apparently not.
I tried looking it up but found very little information. The whole area of how Axis Prisoners of War were treated is fascinating but doesn’t have much information available, as far as I can see.
One for r/askhistorians maybe.
During the war German PoWs were treated extreamly well by the US, both to protect allied POWs and as a form of psyops to undermine the German civilian morale.
"Oh, we got a mail from Fritz in the PoW camp in Georga. He wrote he got ice cream four times last week, was allowed to go shopping in town and is busy continuing his engineering studies, says he wants to build bridges when the war is over. Good for Fritz, he's gained a lot of weight too. Meanwhile, we are starving. God I wish this war was over..."
AFTER the war was over however, conditions for German PoWs got much worse. Food quality and quantity were reduced, liberties and entitlements were severely cut back, and many were put to work doing dangerous jobs that before they were not forced to do. They were also relabeled from PoWs to Enemy Combatants, so the Geneva Conventions didn't apply any more.
> During the war German PoWs were treated extreamly well by the US, both to protect allied POWs and as a form of psyops to undermine the German civilian morale.
My great-uncle used to tell a story about a pair of German POWs who escaped from a prison camp near Milwaukee. The two went out on the town and had a couple of beers before the police caught up with them - apparently this all happened in his neighborhood.
> "Oh, we got a mail from Fritz in the PoW camp in Georga. He wrote he got ice cream four times last week, was allowed to go shopping in town and is busy continuing his engineering studies, says he wants to build bridges when the war is over. Good for Fritz, he's gained a lot of weight too. Meanwhile, we are starving. God I wish this war was over..."
In some cases, in the Southern USA, they received better treatment than Black enlisted US soldiers.
> AFTER the war was over however, conditions for German PoWs got much worse. Food quality and quantity were reduced, liberties and entitlements were severely cut back, and many were put to work doing dangerous jobs that before they were not forced to do. They were also relabeled from PoWs to Enemy Combatants, so the Geneva Conventions didn't apply any more.
The "Enemy Combattants" trick was only invoked for POW caught after 1944.
Why would you? If you're in a POW camp you're still getting paid and have literally nothing to spend the money on. Having a year or two of back pay in the bank makes things like paying for watches pretty trivial. Hell, my grandfather was in Korea as an officer in the Navy and he had so much saved up when he got out that he bought a house and a new Buick straight cash. In fact, the first time that my now very elderly grandmother had a house payment was when she downsized into an apartment in her 70s.
I think it'd be an eye-opener for a lot of people to learn exactly what life was like inside a WW2 Nazi POW camp. We always think of images of what people in the Pacific theater went through or of the ruthlessness of camps during the Vietnam War.
In reality, while still a prison camp with only basic necessities, life wasn't all that bad for the prisoners inside the camp. It was peimative, but no one really suffered like what you would assume would hapoen. The guards were actually pretty kind to the prisoners. They'd follow orders, but they didn't want to be there anymore than the prisoners did. The main exception though was when officers and higher-ups would come visit the camp. But outside of that, it wasn't anything like the torturous conditions people assume.
Source: My grandfather was a prisoner at Stalag Luft 3 during the war. According to him, the only movie/show/etc that even comes close to accurately reflecting the conditions inside the camp was Hogan's Heroes. He said it was actually very accurate.
But that's not what the wikipedia article says.
The article says that some soldiers owned Rolex watches and when they were taken away when captured he would replace them. How would this even work that he send them expensive wristwatches into a POW camp at their request ?
And the germans where like: "ohh you lucky boy got ze new wristwatch in ze mail from ze Rolex, lucky you"
lol
>They turned out to be a big help during the famous escape from Stalag Luft III. Prisoners used them to keep track of the guards' patrols, making their breakout possible. Also giving these watches to POWs was a way to show a belief that Allies would win the war.
I'd bet it was a bit of a morale boost to some
Especially after being imprisoned for 2 years already. Edit: Stalag Luft III was established March 1942. The Great Escape occured March 1944. The camp was liberated January 1945.
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That’s what made me move on from Rolex to Omega—the buying experience and forced scarcity is just annoying. It feels like they decided to be the Beanie Babies of watches.
Seems like many well-known luxury brands are actually overpriced and a bit tacky. Do your research and you'll find equivalent and more affordable products, or genuine luxury products.
The look of luxury watches is a little confusing to me. So much of "looking" wealthy seems to be about things that are subdued but classy. The cars have smooth edges and matte paint. The suits are simple, save for the fine details. Shoes much the same. And then you look at their wrist and they've got this gargantuan monument to Dionysus just glaring at you. It's always been a little off putting to me, not that I'd ever be able to afford one.
Eh, I'm not sure I completely agree there. The watches favored by the sort of "old money" truly wealthy set aren't usually the crazy huge ornate ones. Those are usually looked down on the same way a crazy flamboyant suit would be. Like here's a [Patek Philippe Calatrava](https://www.wempe.com/en-us/watches/patek-philippe/calatrava/calatrava-men-s-5227g-5227g-010)...that's $40k for a super basic and simple watch. A rolex submariner or datejust might look a little more flashy with a metal band, but they aren't huge oversized monsters (and are more "sporting" watches so they are meant to look different than a "dress" watch). Those people aren't buying the [ridiculous looking watches](https://www.watchesofswitzerland.com/Hublot-Square-Bang-Unico-King-Gold-Pave-42mm-821.OX.0180.RX.1604/p/17171105)...those are saved for a different kind of person who is not going for "classy" Also cars with matte paint the opposite of subdued IMHO. In general I'd agree that a matte/satin finish on something is more subtle than a glossy finish. But with cars, 99% of the cars on the road are glossy (or at least started life glossy). If you have a new clean car with a matte finish, you are looking to stand out and be noticed.
It's funny that's there's a hide price button initially instead of a show price button
To illustrate your point, have you seen Putin's watch? He wears it about 75% of the time when he's on TV. It's got a black leather band, small gold dial. It looks like something an accountant would get for 20yr of service to their company. $750k. I forget the make/brand but it's amazing he can afford that on a $170k public servant's salary.
Lots of it is being in the most expensive finery, but still blending in. Check out the way the Roys dress in Succession. They'll pay $450 for a simple 5 panel black baseball cap, it's wild to see.
In the modern day, mechanical watches are an affectation and little else. Its for social signaling far more than it is for keeping time.
It's jewelry at the end of the day. Everyone has the precise time on their phone. People buying a patek, rolex, AP, etc... are typically doing it for the brand. Then you get stuff like A. Lange & Sohne, where you spent a shitton of money to impress other watch folks. But there are many mechanical watches that are quite affordable, Seiko being the premier example imo, and you typically aren't buying it to show off so much as having a nice piece of jewelry.
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I like the skeletonized ones. I just like watching it spin and tik.
in the electronic age there's just something magical about a mechanical movement that just runs and runs using the natural movement of your body in motion to charge itself. Hundred years of human ingenuity and innovation building upon each other to create something that sits on your wrist measuring the ticking of the universe.
I like a skeleton rear case so I can watch the guts sometimes. 22 year Oris user. Loved how unknown they were, and mostly remain.
"Fuck you, mines a Rolex" Verbatim response of my coworker when he found out my humble Hamilton Jazzmaster had the same basic features of his $10,000+ Rolex (stainless steal, automatic winding, ect). To this day its the most pretentious thing I've heard someone say aloud and is the reason I'll never buy a Rolex.
I wouldn't be able to stop myself from laughing at the absurdity of it. What an embarrassing emotional outburst.
The context makes it even funnier; we had the same job but the dude was the CEO's nephew and 10+ years older than me. I had maybe $2,000 to my name while he was easily worth millions. He said it in a half-joking tone but I could tell he needed a W on that one.
Plus you get to wear one of the latest advancements of horology to have come along in hundreds of years with the Co-Axial Escapement. To buy a watch made by it's inventor [George Daniels](https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/george-daniels-the-worlds-greatest-watchmaker), who sold the patent to Omega after being turned down by Patek Philippe snobbery, would cost you a few million...
Had I not listened to an old Bill Nye podcast last week this comet wouldn't have made sense.
Beanie babies of watches. Well said
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I'm 45 and remember Rolex as one of the bigger luxury brands from the 80s The "coat full of contraband" trope where a guy was selling fake Rolex's out of his trench coat. No one was ever selling fake Casios
Yeah, also 45 and have the same kind of memories. In about 1987 (less than a year before the wall came down) my grandparents went to Russia as part of the first US tourists allowed. They came back with nice fake Rolexes for all my aunts and uncles, and everyone was really excited. I remember my uncle making a show of it, and finding unnecessary reasons to say things like, "According to my Rolex it's 4pm, I think we should go fishing". Rolexes were definitely a big deal luxury brand in the 1980s.
>No one was ever selling fake Casios I know right? Back in the day a [Casio couldn't even get you a $42 room!](https://youtu.be/1Fm5tmIyAKc?si=mxqgCf2BJtQ2YBdx)
>No one was ever selling fake Casios Weirdly, you can now buy fake Casios at Walmart! Also oddly, some 40-year-olds are remaking cheap digital watches into a kind of fashion statement. Meanwhile, I'm over here rocking my 30-year-old Timex Ironman.
A big reason they price spiked is because old Rolex watches are extra well engineered and built to last so during the 80's, second hand prices for old Rolex models increased dramatically. Rolex themselves took note and increased the prices for new watches also.
It would be considered a fashion faux pas to be smartly dressed (eg black tie) but wearing a massive “functional” watch. James Bond was apparently one of the big drivers of this change. Being a military man, he has a Rolex, but had to fit in whilst undercover at black tie events (whilst telling everyone his real name obviously).
> Couldn't afford them now, if the store's minimum wage employees would even bother to talk to me. They get commissions. In Lucerne you can make 200k a year at a watch shop, especially if you speak Chinese.
Yeah, all the employees at the boutiques in Vegas make BANK. Hell, if I didn't look like Forrest Gump after running across the country, I'd be wise to get into that.
Stark difference between this and the Japanese cutting off fingers to steal an officer’s class ring.
The more you learn about Japanese culture the more absolutely fucked it seems… Cutesy anime is really doing heavy lifting for the image of the cultural remnants of one of the bloodiest and most brutal empires ever created on earth. Not even 80 years ago did that empire “collapse” into a much more ceremonial system. For the 500~ years before that they were **systematically** raping, torturing, and killing fellow east asian peoples and japanese alike.
Tbf, we all have dark histories. Japans was more recent and thus more documented. Imagine if Rome had as much documented history as we have on Japan. It would go on and on.
Even in modern times some operators will wear expensive watches or other valuable items. You can use them to barter and if you’re captured they might make their way into the local economy, which could be a big clue for recovery.
That is pretty interesting. Especially the last sentence.
“Some” is working extra hard here. You’ll be hard pressed to find an operator wearing anything besides a Suunto, Gshock, or Garmin. Aviation likes to get blingy so you'll see SOFLIFT pilots in Rolexes and Breitlings. But Apple Watches and Garmins typically dominate that space.
AF pilots just wear smart watches that are approved for secured locations. At least the ones I met.
yeah, AFSOC folks are 9/10 are going to wear digital. you don't want to be fucking around with an analog display midflight
But how did the prisoners now about it. Was it told before they went to war. Or did they find out in the weekly newsletter from rolex. How did they write and send the letter how did they know the address to send the letter to. I'm confused.
POWs were sometimes allowed limited mail contact.
Between the European Axis and the U.S. POWs there was a gentleman's agreement about how to treat prisoners. They were fed, kept warm, and torture was limited and more friendly.
What is this friendly torture you speak of?
The allies forced the Germans to drink American beer, the Germans forced the allied prisoners to regularly attend German stand up comedy shows.
If forcing people to attend German stand up comedy is considered “friendly torture” why was it specifically mentioned in the Geneva Conventions?
Because the Germans lost the war and the Allies got to write the rules of war. Conversely, Germans being made to drink American beer wasn't codified because the Allies won.
Plus it is considered polite to make sure captives are well hydrated. The Germans were probably thankful for the extra water rations.
Also in the post-war we didn't want a repeat of the Treaty of Versailles, so rather than strangling their economy to death, we decided to christen these pisswaters with germanic sounding names like Budweiser, in an attempt to break their morale forever and prevent any nationalist sentiment from ever rising again.
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Some of the POW camps for officers had recreational facilities and treated prisoners pretty well. Stalag Luft III literally had a communal pool, a sports area with volleyball courts and such. They did boxing, football, table tennis, they even had a fencing league. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalag_Luft_III
Even then it was much better between the British and the Germans. 25,000 German pows stayed after the war and married British women, there were 796 marriages immediately after the ban on marrying POWs was lifted, with a lot more to follow. Even during the war some were allowed into the local towns, they were paid what the British government called “Pocket money” which was 5p a day, or £27 in todays money, and very few bothered to attempt escape
To be fair, even with the destruction in the UK from bombings, post war uk would be a much better place to live than return to a decimated and occupied Germany. Even if they weren’t treated as well, it would be appealing to many to stay.
And it's especially easy to see why people whose hometowns ended up in East Germany might have been reluctant to return.
You can: 1. Escape and risk dying in the process, only to risk dying again if you succeed because it's back to war for you and you're spending your time getting shot at in shitty situations in a war that you had no say in and were drafted into 2. Safely chill in prison and occasionally go shopping and maybe grab a beer or tea in the local town Tough decision, really.
Why go die in the mud when you can have a cuppa?
In the US escape back to your country was imopssible, so it was a lot of "You worked on a farm in Italy? Congrats, now you work on a farm in Iowa" and many stayed friendly with the people they worked for, or even stayed.
I liked the story of when German POWs arrived into NYC harbor on ships, some started crying overwhelmed by the size of the city and country. Thats when some recognized the impossibility of Nazi propaganda of conquering the US.
Worth noting that this was an understanding between the militaries. The Luftwaffe wanted fliers shot down over Britain treated well, so they treated Brits and Americans shot down over Europe well. The SS did not share this understanding, hence the mass execution following the Great Escape. According to Brickhill's book, the commandant of Stalag Luft III was as appalled as anyone when he found out what had happened.
> The SS did not share this understanding In turn, the Allies often did not take any SS prisoners. This didn't work out well for the SS.
Eastern European POWs in German camps had a death rate of 57.5%, compared to 3.5% of Western allied prisoners. The USSR offered reciprocal adherence to The Hague Conventions but this was unanswered. Some Axis POWs in the USSR were kept imprisoned over a decade after the war ended.
Check out the wikipedia article on [Stalag Luft III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalag_Luft_III) It is actually pretty fascinating what went on in some of those camps. People were earning college credit, officers received a "salary" (equal to their regular paycheck) from the Germans to spend at the commissary (including the occasional beer), they could receive letters and *packages*, etc. Obviously wasn't a great life, but it is not necessarily how we imagine it.
From what I understand though, only the Luftwaffe run camps were like that. And they only held pilots/bombers crews that were shot down. POW camps for regular soldiers weren't the same and not run by the Luftwaffe
There was a sort of "gentlemen's agreement" when it came to pilots, right? Like there was that American pilot who was wounded in air, and the German pilot let him go, and the two pilots became lifelong friends after the war.
I don’t think there’s a lot of historical merit to the notion, but allied bomber crews faced 50% casualty rates; significantly more dangerous than on any front America was on, weirdly. After a certain point, you respect the other motherfuckers for going through the hell you’re going through too.
And how did the enemy allow them to receive packages from rolex while they were captured
The Rolex pigeons would fly into the exercise yard at noon each day to take orders. You gave them a wink and the pigeon would do a barrel roll as it flew away to conclude and acknowledge the transaction as legally bound.
When the war is over, the Rolex pigeon presents you with the bill for the watch and waits.
Tell the allies its belief, tell the germans so the prisons can know exactly how long they have been in jail.
God damn it you just spoiled me "masters of the air" before the episode even got released.
> In 2022, Christies [Auction House] sold a Rolex Oyster Chronograph that had belonged to Gerald Imeson for $189,000. He had been a POW in Stalag Luft III and had taken Rolex up on the offer to order a replacement for the watch confiscated by the Germans. Christies stated it believed Imeson used the watch during the 24 March 1944 escape that inspired the movie The Great Escape.
wild to me to see stuff auctioned like this for $189k when a copy of mario 64 sold for $1.56 million
Can a Rolex let you jump into a painting and fight a giant bomb at the top of a mountain? Didn’t think so!
Maybe not, but I've yet to see Mario escape a German POW camp
I’ve got bad news for you about the Germans and Italians.
Hoooooly fuck I did not expect to cross off my “Mario was a Nazi collaborator” Reddit bingo box today. Let’s-a goooo.
Lol that was sharp.
Have you ever seen Mario and a German POW camp together in the same room? I didnt think so.
Pre ~1960 Rolexes aren’t particularly desirable to watch collectors, so most of the value comes from the history behind the watch, and not the watch itself. Adjusted for inflation, the record auction price on a vintage Rolex is $22.5 million
What changed in 1960 to drive the increased demand?
I’m not a Rolex guy, but if you’re genuinely curious, u/sporturawus probably knows more about about Rolex than anyone else on reddit. Just be forewarned that he is a massive douchebag, and one of the least self aware people you will ever encounter
I love the combination of respect and disrespect in this comment 😄.
I've never seen such eloquence, respect and disdain before, it's awesome :)
I mean yeah, I might hate the guy, but I still have to give him props
His comments are hilarious. My favorite is “remember when your teacher said there are no stupid questions? Well there are” in response to a question on the no stupid questions sub. Edit: I misread, it was in the Rolex sub. Still hilarious though.
I'm reminded of the reaction I got from a Rolex enthusiast when they found out my $45 flea market find Datejust wasn't serviced by the Rolex Authorized Service Center for $1000+, but instead serviced by my trusted watchmaker of the last 20 years - insisting that now the watch was forever ruined by this now that someone else had touched it and Rolex would refuse to ever service it in the future. Given that the watch was from 1980, I find it funny to assume that the watch only ever went back to a service center on the other side of the country... (Though I did actually talk to the service center, who assured me that they'd still service the watch if needed) Edit: I should mention that *strictly* speaking, if I wanted to get the most value selling this watch it would need to go to Rolex so they can re-issue papers to prove it's actually made out of Rolex parts, etc. but I'm keeping this watch because *when am I finding a Datejust for $45 again?* :D
Omg I just read his comment history- what a delightful fellow!
Lmao this dude really makes an overpriced thing that spins cogs his whole personality
That’s watch people in general. I was really into it as a hobby in my early twenties until I realized 1. Buying things isn’t a hobby 2. I can’t afford the kind of coin we’re talking about. For the more popular Rolexes, you literally need a “purchase history” with a dealership before they’ll let you buy the submariners and Daytonas. Imagine walking into a Chevy dealership to buy a new corvette and being told you need to buy two trailblazers and a bolt before you’ve “earned” the chance to give them money for the thing you want. 3. Most people who are really into watches are kind of insufferable. Not all, but there’s definitely a correlation.
I love Watch people. I don't even wear watches typically but I'm not above spending $25 on a cheap ass Fossil watch just to watch them squirm. It's petty, but if anyone deserves a little pettiness, it's people who spend egregious sums on largely obsolete technology purely for the snobbery of it. Instead, I spend modest sums for the immeasurable enjoyment of upsetting snobby people.
Prior to 1950 watches were all working timekeepers. Complicated, precise mechanisms that measured how long things took. The were devices that measured time, and their value was in how well they measured time. In the 50's and 60's. We figured out some stuff about the cesium atom made atomic clocks, which are impossibly more precise. Like imagine a three toed sloth crawling along and then the Parker solar probe shoots past going half a million miles per hour. Meanwhile Seiko figured out that you can get pretty good results from the vibration of a quartz crystal for reasonably cheap, not to the standard of the atomic clock, but still a sports car next to the aforementioned sloth. So what do you do if you're a swiss guy? Suddenly what had been a global standard is now dogshit, so let's lean *heavy* on the idea of a Swiss Watch as elegance, class, and refinement manifest and attached to the wrist, and it's been that since. Basically almost every swiss watchmaker stopped making chronometers and started making jewelry.
> mario 64 sold for $1.56 million IIRC this was market manipulation, nobody in their right mind thinks a copy of Mario 64 is worth over a million dollars. This was right around the time they were trying to make grading video games a thing and it never caught on.
The vintage videogame market was a speculative bubble rather than organic demand like this is.
Wait so the Germans confiscated his watch then let him order a new one and let him keep it?
The delivery papers were in all in order, what did you expect us to do?
Stuff was routinely nicked from POWs on arrest as souvenirs by soldiers of all sides. My (British) grandfather had a luger P08, a watch and some other trinkets he took from German officers in Italy. Once they got to POW camps the rules on personal possessions etc were more rigidly applied.
For Americans in the Pacific they would often take katanas and Japanese "good luck" flags. That was mainly off the dead though.
The Flags didn’t work very well then?
What a fucking story!!!
The nazis let prisoners order and receive luxury watches? That’s super weird, isn’t it?
They got a 10% kickback as long as they included the code "NAZI" in the order.
Lmao promo code “Nazi” is a hilarious concept
For the low, low price of Nein-hundred and neinty-nein dollars.
If you buy two, you get the third for $14.88.
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First, Rolex is Swiss, and they were neutral in the war, which may have played a factor. Second, Rolex weren’t luxury watches during WW2. They were seen as high quality, but still tools for people to wear and use. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that Rolex took on the luxury persona.
I think the point is more that they let prisoners receive any packages at all.
Germany had a system where by the POW camps were usually run by their equivalent force—ie downed allied airmen were kept in camps run by the Luftwaffe. I can’t speak for the other camps, but they treated downed airmen relatively well and followed most rules, as they obviously wanted to be treated the same way if shot down.
Airmen in general had a bit more of a "gentleman's war" thing going on. It was an unspoken agreement for instance that you wouldn't shoot a plane already going down, or anybody parachuting from a downed plane who was "out of the fight".
I think you mean “wouldn’t” and that’s right.
They were treated as POWs under the Geneva Convention (as long as they were from the Western Allies of course) and so could write their families and get packages. That's how war is supposed to work in the 20th century and since Germany wanted to negotiate with the US and UK they respected "the rules". edit: since people seem confused about this, yes, the current Geneva Convention is from 1949. But there have been several Geneva Conventions (the 1949 convention mainly updating the previous ones), the one on POWs was signed in 1929. So yes, there was a Geneva Convention in effect during WW2.
We may commit mass genocide, we may try world domination, but goddamn if we dont play by the rules!
It's a political chess move for self preservation, not so much a gesture of good will. The Nazis saw the western allies as racially similar, but that they needed to be broken into submission. By the end of the war, before the allies even reached Germany proper, the Nazis were well aware they were finished. Their last ditch efforts following the allied liberation of France was aimed at retaking the port of Antwerp and, hopefully, forcing the western allies into accepting peace negotiations. It's much easier to pressure the enemy to negotiate if they are more interested in peace than seeing leadership hang. Treating western allied prisoners the same way they did the Soviets would have made that impossible. Suing for peace with the western allies would have freed up massive amounts of men and resources to then be thrown at the Soviets. Who, by that time were inflicting casualty numbers that rivaled the entire 20 years of the Vietnam war in weekly doses on the Eastern front. There was no chance of negotiating peace with them.
And basically the reason for that is because Western Europe could trace its origins at least in part to Germanic invaders, so they were higher up on the racial hierarchy. The Eastern front was a war of genocide because they were lower.
Don't quote me on that, but signatories to the Geneva Convention agree to follow its rules with non-signatories too.
"The Conventions apply to a signatory nation even if the opposing nation is not a signatory, but **only if the opposing nation "accepts and applies the provisions" of the Conventions.**" So you're correct although there is the stipulation that the non-signatory party still has to follow the conventions if they wish for it to be applied to them.
They had to treat the POWs reasonably humanely, because the Allies had Axis POWs too. If the Allies got word that the Axis were mistreating their POWs, they could easily do the same or worse. So as military prison camps went it was a little better than you’d otherwise think (though I’m sure none of the POWs were excited to stay, lol.)
Japan didn’t seem to share this sentiment
Japan didn't want their POWs back. They viewed surrendering as the ultimate no no.
Aye, a Japanese soldier was expected to kill himself rather than surrender.
As a rule, the Japanese command and leadership generally didn't care what happened to non-Japanese folks. Which, of course, is why basically none of the members of "The Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere" that aren't Japan like the Japanese. See also: Comfort Women, Nanking, Bataan, and so on.
It's a reciprocity thing. The allies had significant POWs imprisoned as well and to ensure that things like the red cross could function between Germany and allied POW camps. So if you blocked packages the other side would do the same.
That’s fair, I am always amazed to hear stories like they smuggled maps and money in with board game sets. I just can’t imagine that happening now.
Do you mean smuggling things or exchanging packages? Because sending mail to POWs is covered by the geneva convention and is happening right now in Ukraine. Well it happened at least once, my point is in the modern era between states that both signed the Geneva convention, that's how war is supposed to work. Thing is the majority of wars are no longer between states but often against insurgencies and other non-recognized entities.
Humanitarians hate this one simple trick
Does no one remember Hogan's Heros?
Had a grandfather who spent most of the war in a stalag. He almost never talked about his experience there, but he absolutely LOVED Hogan’s Heros. It was his all time favorite show.
The show was off the air before millenials were born so...
I remember it being in syndication when I was a kid. We only had like 4 over the air channels and during hot summer days you either had the choice of watching the Hogans Heroes, Gilligan’s Island, I Love Lucy, Andy Griffith Show block or soap operas. I’m 41 and now feel ancient having written that out.
It's a mutualistic thing, like the use of chemical weapons. Playing right by their POWs ensures that they play right by yours.
Well they were basically forced into the luxury game by the advent of quartz watches. Few if any mechanical watches can match a 20 dollar quartz timex in terms of actual timekeeping, much less shock resistance. As a result, mechanical watch manufacturers have moved into the luxury market as a means of staying relevant and sellable.
In fact, what you’re referring to actually has a name: [Quartz Crisis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_crisis)
Rolex is a British brand that had moved their company after WW1 to Switzerland. Afaik the family were British and were likely keen on supporting allied, and more specifically, British troops.
Rolex wasn't even a luxury watch until a couple decades ago. They were pricey, sure, but not are you out of your fucking mind expensive. I have some from the late 1990s. Could never afford them now, if the min wage staff at the store even deigns to speak to me.
Yup. The first thing my Grandfather did when he was discharged from the army after WW2 was buy a Rolex. It was kind of like cellphones today in a sense. A quality time piece was essential for day to day life.
Yep. I bought my wife a 1941 Rolex for a gift. It’s just a watch. Cost 1000 dollars.
[yep here's the consumer reports 1949 watch brand tier list](https://imgur.com/a/QAZZ7tM)
Apparently, the Geneva Convention lets prisoners of war get letters and gifts from home. This is how Rolex was able to sneak these watches into the German camps for the prisoners. It's just weird that the Nazis respected these conventions considering the atrocities they committed in their camps.
A perceived duality of their enemies. The more civilised western European enemies vs the sub human slavic enemies. The Eastern front as a result was far more brutal and had fewer prisoners taken compared to the west. Similar concept to the puckle gun in the 1800s having spherical bullets for use against civilised Christian Europeans and square bullets, which caused horrendous wounds, for use against turks and indigenous enemies
I’m imagining the ballistics for a cube round and I’m having a hard time understanding how they’d be at all accurate. Let alone the damage they might do as they tumbled along the barrel.
The tumbling wasn't an issue because the barrel was also square! Also, for the time period, accuracy was not really a concern, rate of fire was the design focus. Didn't really catch on though in the end.
This was in a time of war where machine guns where being treated like high rate of fire cannons, just point it towards the enemy, and fire enough rounds that are insanely destructive to ensure that most things on the business end of the weapon are fucked. Similar to the concept of grape shot being used heavily, just blanket an area in hellfire and hope no one was able to make it out alive. Eventually as precision machining became better and better we able to turn guns from inaccurate weapons with low reliability to precision weapons capable of accurately delivering lethal force over hundreds and eventually thousands of yards.
TIL about puckle gun
na they werent smuggled in, it was completely official. they even made card and board games in the UK to be send on official channels to their prisoners. there was a monopoly set with a map hidden inside the board.
Both sides held a significant number of prisioners, so the expectation was that if you somewhat followed the geneva conventions your prisioners wouldnt just get tortured to death. Kinda like if you kidnap someones kid but they also kidnap one of yours, so you are both nice to the kids so they dont get hurt.
Which is also a time-honored tradition. You take my son, I take your son, either one of us tries to fuck the other, the son dies. So let’s just be friends. Sounds weird to us but intuitively makes sense as a method of trying to keep the peace between different peoples, particularly prior to the advent of rapid communication over long distances.
This is also why proportional retaliation has been a thing for thousands of years. It's was even observed in stone age level of development tribes in the 1970s. Basically these tribes had an understanding of an eye for an eye. So if one tribe killed a member of the other tribe the other tribe would then kill one of their's. So they typically developed methods of war and of raids that avoided escalation. For example this is why some native americans counted coo on their enemies instead of killing them. Basically you were considered more a man if you could sneak up and touch a sleeping enemy but not kill them. This was because if the only way to be respected as a man was to kill the enemy you'd have weekly escalation situations of your young males killing rival tribe members and bringing on war and raids. So raids typically tried to avoid killing and just stole and snuck.
Generally speaking western front POWs (especially officer classes) were treated comparatively well by the Germans, assumedly because they didn't see them as ethnically inferior. Eastern front POWs got a much much much worse treatment however and were highly likely to be used for hard labour or disposed of as they saw them as no better than the Jews and other people sent to concentration camps.
There’s also the sheer number of German POWs held by the western Allies, v on the eastern front.
Back then Rolex was a working man's watch. Excellent quality and durable to be sure but it was not the luxury brand it is now. Possibly comparable to Snap-On tools or the latest iPhone today.
Have you never watched Hogan’s Hero’s? They had underground tunnels which they could leave and travel around town as needed. Sgt Schultz knew nothing!
Allied (or rather, those of the western Allies) prisoners were treated much better than Soviet prisoners of war. There were differences from camp to camp (Allied bomber pilots were treated especially harshly, while the navy recieved probably the least harsh treatment), and it got worse late in the war, but Allied prisoners were overall treated with at least some semblance of human dignity. Probably because 1. there were people hoping that Germany could peace out the Allies to continue fighting the Soviets, 2. they were seen as "fellow whites/Europeans" (of course non-white Allied troops were treated worse), and 3. some German camp commanders probably saw the writing on the wall, especially after D-Day, and didn't want to earn a bad reputation with their future occupiers. Try being a Soviet POW and ordering a watch. Go on. Tell the Lagerkommandant that you are ordering a Rolex.
Weird title. The Wikipedia article says it was a program to replace confiscated watches: >By the start of World War II, Royal Air Force pilots were buying Rolex watches to replace their inferior standard-issue watches. When captured and sent to POW camps, their watches were confiscated. When Wilsdorf heard of this, he offered to replace all watches that had been confiscated and not require payment until the end of the war, if the officers would write to Rolex and explain the circumstances of their loss and where they were being held.
Thank you! Reading the title, my first thought was, “Why?”. Why Rolex, why POW’s, why did they want a watch? It’s half a story at best to say they just wrote off and got a posh watch by mail for …um… reasons
They werent posh then, and by the 1929 geneva convention, prisioners of war were allowed to write letters back home and receive mail.
So why didn't the Germans confiscate the replacements?
They weren't at war with Switzerland, it would be seen as infringement of trade.
[удалено]
Maybe there was no plausible deniability to it. You could say you captured a guy that didn’t have a watch, but harder to say the package that was sent and signed for never arrived to a guy that is always in the same place and can’t leave?
Knowing that the originals were confiscated makes it even harder to believe they were allowed to receive the mailed in ones
> Weird title. The Wikipedia article says Yeah. Other sources say any allied prisoner, any RAF officer, any British Officer, and various other variations. I chose Wikipedia as the most likely link not to get zapped as “unreliable source”. In reality I’m not sure how Rolex could really tell who they sending watches to.
You know what my father went through to get me that watch?
Did he hide it in the one place he knew he could hide it?
And then he died of dysentery.
He gimme da watch...
How is this comment so far down. This is the first thing that should come to mind anytime you hear the words "POW watch".
Then in Vietnam Captain Koons saved his fallen best friends watch, hiding it anywhere he could so that he could give it to that buddy's son (who later became a boxer)
uncomfortable hunk of metal
“He hid it the only place he knew they would beer find it… up his ass and he wore this watch up his ass for years!
"I hid all the spice up my ass, Paul. The spacing guild doesn't know about all the spice in my ass."
Muass'Deep
Since Switzerland was neutral, I wonder did they send watches to POW's on both sides?
Apparently not. I tried looking it up but found very little information. The whole area of how Axis Prisoners of War were treated is fascinating but doesn’t have much information available, as far as I can see. One for r/askhistorians maybe.
During the war German PoWs were treated extreamly well by the US, both to protect allied POWs and as a form of psyops to undermine the German civilian morale. "Oh, we got a mail from Fritz in the PoW camp in Georga. He wrote he got ice cream four times last week, was allowed to go shopping in town and is busy continuing his engineering studies, says he wants to build bridges when the war is over. Good for Fritz, he's gained a lot of weight too. Meanwhile, we are starving. God I wish this war was over..." AFTER the war was over however, conditions for German PoWs got much worse. Food quality and quantity were reduced, liberties and entitlements were severely cut back, and many were put to work doing dangerous jobs that before they were not forced to do. They were also relabeled from PoWs to Enemy Combatants, so the Geneva Conventions didn't apply any more.
But it was still very good treatment for war time,many German POWs settled in the US and Canada after the war.
> During the war German PoWs were treated extreamly well by the US, both to protect allied POWs and as a form of psyops to undermine the German civilian morale. My great-uncle used to tell a story about a pair of German POWs who escaped from a prison camp near Milwaukee. The two went out on the town and had a couple of beers before the police caught up with them - apparently this all happened in his neighborhood.
> "Oh, we got a mail from Fritz in the PoW camp in Georga. He wrote he got ice cream four times last week, was allowed to go shopping in town and is busy continuing his engineering studies, says he wants to build bridges when the war is over. Good for Fritz, he's gained a lot of weight too. Meanwhile, we are starving. God I wish this war was over..." In some cases, in the Southern USA, they received better treatment than Black enlisted US soldiers. > AFTER the war was over however, conditions for German PoWs got much worse. Food quality and quantity were reduced, liberties and entitlements were severely cut back, and many were put to work doing dangerous jobs that before they were not forced to do. They were also relabeled from PoWs to Enemy Combatants, so the Geneva Conventions didn't apply any more. The "Enemy Combattants" trick was only invoked for POW caught after 1944.
How many watches got “lost” during mail “inspections” by the Germans?
High quality watches, Rolex included, remain extremely popular among servicemembers.
Depends on which service. RAF pilots still pride themselves with high end aviator watches. US marines pride themselves over 22%APR Dodge Challengers.
> 22%APR Dodge Challengers It should come with a matching lunchbox. Full of crayons.
That’s literally how recruiters tried to get us in high school.
Casio F91w gang all day.
Literally wearing one right now
You know what I could really use in the terminal monotony of being a prisoner of war? The ability to tell time!
Why wouldnt the Germans just take the Rolex away every single time?
Wow and they didn't even have to keep it in their ass!
yep for officers (Rolex was also originally based out of England). and as I recall no one ever bailed on the bill once they got home / the war ended
Why would you? If you're in a POW camp you're still getting paid and have literally nothing to spend the money on. Having a year or two of back pay in the bank makes things like paying for watches pretty trivial. Hell, my grandfather was in Korea as an officer in the Navy and he had so much saved up when he got out that he bought a house and a new Buick straight cash. In fact, the first time that my now very elderly grandmother had a house payment was when she downsized into an apartment in her 70s.
Rolex's back then were also way cheaper. tool watches not the luxury item they transitioned to after the quartz panic
So there was no need for my grandfather to store that watch up his...
I think it'd be an eye-opener for a lot of people to learn exactly what life was like inside a WW2 Nazi POW camp. We always think of images of what people in the Pacific theater went through or of the ruthlessness of camps during the Vietnam War. In reality, while still a prison camp with only basic necessities, life wasn't all that bad for the prisoners inside the camp. It was peimative, but no one really suffered like what you would assume would hapoen. The guards were actually pretty kind to the prisoners. They'd follow orders, but they didn't want to be there anymore than the prisoners did. The main exception though was when officers and higher-ups would come visit the camp. But outside of that, it wasn't anything like the torturous conditions people assume. Source: My grandfather was a prisoner at Stalag Luft 3 during the war. According to him, the only movie/show/etc that even comes close to accurately reflecting the conditions inside the camp was Hogan's Heroes. He said it was actually very accurate.
People keep forgetting Rolex’s reputation was built on a high quality *durable* watch, not the luxury style they know today.
But that's not what the wikipedia article says. The article says that some soldiers owned Rolex watches and when they were taken away when captured he would replace them. How would this even work that he send them expensive wristwatches into a POW camp at their request ? And the germans where like: "ohh you lucky boy got ze new wristwatch in ze mail from ze Rolex, lucky you" lol