Behind the Waffen-SS camouflage was an actual designer. In the late 1930s an artist named Johann Georg Otto Schick studied how sunlight scatters through a forest canopy — the way leaves break light into rounded dots and soft-edged shapes — and translated it into printed cloth. His plane-tree pattern, Platanenmuster, was one of the first results: leaf-like blotches in autumn tones on one face and summer greens on the other, reversible with the seasons on a linen-rayon weave. It was strikingly modern for its day, genuinely effective when a soldier held still, and it helped launch the whole science of disruptive military camouflage.

The officer wears the plane-tree smock and reversible helmet cover over a field greatcoat, binoculars ready and map case at his hip — every inch the SS commander in the field. He sits at the top of the SS command group: link him to his senior NCO the Hauptscharführer, to the range's most notorious SS officer Joachim Peiper, and to the later evolution of Schick's camouflage, the pea-dot smock of the SS Advancing with MP 40. A command group anchors any SS diorama.

W. Britain model 25268. 1/30 scale, matte-painted metal. Single figure — a Waffen-SS officer in a plane-tree camouflage smock over a greatcoat. Boxed.