SS Fez
The red fez shown in many photographs and surviving militaria examples is most closely associated with the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS “Handschar” (1st Croatian), a Waffen-SS mountain infantry division raised in 1943 mainly from Bosnian Muslims, with a smaller number of Catholic Croats and a German or Volksdeutsche officer and NCO cadre. The division’s name came from the “handschar” or khanjar, a curved Ottoman-style knife or short sabre, chosen because German SS leaders wanted to wrap the unit in Balkan-Islamic and Ottoman military imagery while still binding it firmly to Nazi command and ideology.
The fez was not a normal German army item. It was deliberately chosen for its symbolic value. Heinrich Himmler and other SS organisers wanted the Bosnian Muslim volunteers to look distinct, and they also wanted to evoke the older Austro-Hungarian Bosnian-Herzegovinian infantry regiments, which had worn fez-style headgear before 1918. For the SS, the fez therefore served two purposes: it appealed to a remembered local military tradition, and it visually marked the division as an “Islamic” formation within the Waffen-SS. This was propaganda as much as uniform design.
There were two main wartime versions of the Handschar fez. The field-grey fez was intended for duty and combat wear, while the red, burgundy, or maroon fez was used for parade, marching, off-duty, and ceremonial wear. Both had a black tassel. Surviving museum examples show the front fitted with two SS cloth badges: the SS eagle and swastika above, and the Totenkopf, or death’s head skull, below. The skull is sometimes misdescribed as a “token” badge, but the correct German term is Totenkopf. These were not unique Muslim symbols. They were standard SS symbols placed onto a non-German style of headgear, creating the striking and disturbing mixture that makes these fezzes so recognisable today.
The upper badge was the SS cap eagle. It showed an eagle with outstretched wings clutching a swastika, the general emblem of Nazi state and SS authority. On the fez it sat above the skull badge, just as SS cap insignia often did on other forms of SS headgear. The lower badge was the Totenkopf. The skull had long associations in German military symbolism before the Nazi period, but in the SS it became a central emblem of ideological loyalty, terror, and death. On the Handschar fez, the skull did not mean that the wearer belonged to the SS-Totenkopfverbände concentration-camp guard units specifically; rather, it was the standard Waffen-SS cap death’s head used as part of SS uniform identity.
The badges on original Handschar fezzes were usually machine-woven cloth insignia rather than metal badges. Many surviving examples are described as having black, grey, or silver-grey woven SS eagle-and-swastika and death’s-head badges sewn to the front. Collectors often call this type “BeVo” insignia. BeVo refers to the Wuppertal textile firm Bandfabrik Ewald Vorsteher, famous for machine-woven German military and political insignia. However, caution is needed: “BeVo” is also used by collectors as a broad shorthand for a style of machine-woven insignia, and not every surviving fez can be proved to have badges made by that specific company. Museum descriptions often identify the badges as woven or machine-woven, but do not always name a manufacturer.
The maker of the fez body itself is even harder to identify with certainty. Many original fezzes are unmarked or have only size markings, and wartime SS supply involved central procurement, clothing depots, and contracted textile production rather than a single easily named maker. Some surviving examples and auction descriptions refer to typical Dachau depot construction, meaning that they were assembled or issued through SS clothing-depot channels associated with Dachau. That does not necessarily mean the whole fez was manufactured inside the concentration camp complex; it is a collector term often used for the construction and supply pattern of SS clothing and insignia. The safest statement is that the insignia was of machine-woven SS type, commonly described as BeVo-style, while the exact manufacturer of many individual fez caps is usually unconfirmed unless the object has a reliable maker mark or provenance.
The main unit associated with this headgear was the 13th Waffen-Gebirgs-Division der SS “Handschar” (kroatische Nr. 1). It was authorised in 1943 and became the first non-Germanic division of the Waffen-SS. Its rank and file were mainly Bosnian Muslims from the Independent State of Croatia, a fascist Axis puppet state that included Bosnia-Herzegovina. The division also included Catholic Croats, while many officers and senior NCOs were Germans or ethnic Germans from southeastern Europe. At its peak the division reached about 17,000 men, though its strength fluctuated heavily because of desertion, casualties, transfers, unreliable recruitment, and the deteriorating German military situation.
German planners wanted far more Muslim manpower than they could reliably obtain. The 13th Division was followed by attempts to raise other Muslim or partly Muslim Waffen-SS formations in the Balkans. The 23rd Waffen Mountain Division of the SS “Kama” (2nd Croatian) was intended as a second Bosnian Muslim SS mountain division, but it never reached real divisional strength. In September 1944 it had only a few thousand men, including German officers and Bosnian Muslim soldiers, and the project was cancelled before it became an effective combat division. Many of its personnel were intended to be folded back into the Handschar structure or into other late-war formations.
Another related formation was the 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS “Skanderbeg” (1st Albanian), raised mainly from Kosovo Albanians in 1944. Many of its recruits were Muslim Albanians, though there were also Catholic Albanians and German or Volksdeutsche cadre personnel. It never reached proper divisional strength and was closer to a brigade-sized force, usually estimated at about 6,000 to 6,500 men at most. Its headgear was not identical to the Handschar fez tradition: many Albanian members wore grey skullcaps or traditional Albanian qeleshe-style caps fitted with SS eagle and death’s-head insignia. This shows that the SS repeatedly used local Muslim or Balkan headgear styles as propaganda objects while keeping the same SS symbols on the front.
The Handschar Division also had imams attached to it. This was unusual in the Waffen-SS, but it was part of the recruitment strategy. German propaganda promised respect for Islamic practice, including religious observance, special food arrangements where possible, and clerical support. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was then in Axis Europe, was used by the Germans to support recruitment among Bosnian Muslims. He visited and encouraged the formation, and German propaganda presented the unit as a defence of Islam and local Muslim communities against communism, Serb Chetniks, and other enemies. In reality, the division remained under Nazi German command and served German strategic aims.
The division’s history was troubled from the beginning. It was trained partly outside Bosnia, including in France and later at Neuhammer in Silesia. In September 1943, while in France, members of the division mutinied at Villefranche-de-Rouergue. The revolt was suppressed, and the Germans executed or punished a number of men. The mutiny became one of the most unusual episodes in Waffen-SS history because it involved non-German Muslim SS recruits rebelling against their German cadre before the division had even fully entered combat.
When deployed in 1944, Handschar was mainly used in anti-partisan warfare in Bosnia and northeastern parts of the Independent State of Croatia. Its operations included fighting against Tito’s communist-led Yugoslav Partisans, but the division was also involved in brutal occupation warfare, reprisals, village clearances, and crimes against civilians. The wider Waffen-SS was declared a criminal organisation after the war because of its role in war crimes and crimes against humanity. Handschar’s record must be understood inside that framework: it was not merely an exotic uniformed formation, but part of the Nazi military and police system in occupied Europe.
The fez itself has become one of the most visually memorable objects connected with these units because it combines three layers of meaning. The red or grey fez pointed to Bosnian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian military memory. The black tassel gave it the traditional fez appearance. The SS eagle and Totenkopf transformed it into Nazi military headgear. For collectors and historians, this makes the object important, but also sensitive. It is evidence of how the SS tried to recruit beyond Germany by adapting local symbols, religious language, and regional identities for its own violent purposes.
Original Handschar fezzes are now scarce, especially complete examples retaining both original cloth badges. Many were stripped of their SS insignia after the war, either as souvenirs, to “denazify” the object, or to make the item less incriminating. Surviving examples with intact machine-woven eagle and Totenkopf badges are found in museums and private collections. Reproductions are common, so careful authentication depends on cloth, stitching, weave, construction, age, wear, provenance, and comparison with known originals. The two badges should normally be cloth, not metal, on a standard Handschar fez. Metal badges on such a fez are generally a warning sign unless there is exceptional provenance explaining them.
