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As Pete Doherty has found out, one has to be very careful in Germany with regard to 1930s/40s history and its legacy. Back in 1994/95 or thereabouts, I took a green version of this jacket with me on a visit to my girlfriend’s family who were living near Sinsheim at the time. Having swanned around in it for a few days I was eventually asked by a friend of the family why I was wearing a “neo-Nazi jacket”. I was quite shocked and embarrassed. In the UK in the 1980s, the collarless green MA-1 combat jackets had been associated with skinheads and neo-Nazis, but that was then. Besides, this had a collar, faux flight patches, pocket flaps (instead of zips) and everything, and was quite trendy in London at the time. But not surprisingly, few people in Sinsheim knew or cared about how a tiny subset of Londoners had come to regard the jacket. Of course, it went straight into my suitcase and didn’t see the light of day until I was safely back in Blighty.