In the last several months of playing with safety razors, I’ve learned a lot of unexpected tidbits. I didn’t realize that the modern safety razor with flexible, disposable blade AND the cartridge razor were both Gillette’s inventions. I didn’t realize that shaving as we know it today was the result of what’s essentially (for me) a local company. Gillette has its roots in south Boston, and from there its designs and products spread around the world.
In the early 20th century, Gillette was already of a global mindset. Competitors around the world were capitalizing on the new technology and Gillette took the opportunity to rapidly expand worldwide–buying out competition and having an instant foothold with established infrastructure and distribution.
Over in Germany, the bigger manufacturer of Gillette’s patents was Rotbart (Redbeard auf Englisch). Founded in 1913, Rotbart was making excellent products that were extremely popular. At just 13 years old, Rotbart was purchased by Gillete, with the acquisition being announced in January of 1926. And, since Gillette’s blade was a universal design, nothing about their razors had to be changed in order for them to have the Gillette name behind them. I have no idea if it was intention or luck, but that Gillette’s blades became the standard–with no appreciable variation in design–must have made their rapid expansion very easy.
From issue 117 of Iron Age, January 07, 1926. “Gillette has acquired a substantial interest in the companies of Rotbart and Mond Extra, Berlin, Germany, recently merged…”
Rotbart’s signature razor at the time was the Mond, or “Moon.” These razors are highly collectible today, and if you find a razor with the steel box it came in, you’re likelylooking at north of $100 unless you luck out and someone doesn’t realize what they have. There are a few reasons for this.
The first is that they’re German, and the majority of safety razor enthusiasts seem to be in the United States. Generally speaking, we on this side of the pond are perfectly happy paying a premium to buy a sought-after antique from overseas. I’ve encountered the same thing in the cast iron hobby, with pieces offered from German sellers going for hundreds of dollars to buyers in the USA. In Germany, I would routinely see those same pieces for under 50€–about $50. It was difficult not to buy them all but it’s a good thing I showed some restraint seeing how things wound up going a few months later.
In addition to buying antiques from overseas, these are fabulous razors. The mechanism to lock the blade in place is ingenious. Gillette razors of the time had a handle that was essentially a cylinder with two press-fit ends. One was a rounded cap at the butt or “tip” of the handle. The other end was a threaded bit. The head, consisting of the cap, which has a threaded rod and two posts that extend through the blade, and the plate, which has three openings for the rod and posts. The threaded rod mates with the threaded bit on the handle.
It’s great, but has its drawbacks. Over time, the ever-so-slight pressure creates play in the press fit wears the two pieces and slightly distorts the cylinder. This commonly results in the cylinder cracking or a somewhat looser press fit. The looser fit means the threaded rod may spin the piece it threads into before it’s actually tight. Rotbart solved this entirely.
Rather than a short threaded rod, Rotbart extended both the rod and the tip to essentially the full length of the handle. No press fit ends, the threaded rod extends into and mates with the tip. There’s nothing to wear out and loosen over time, and the blade is always perfectly secure. The Treet Platinum gives me an exceptional shave. It’s my #1 by far after having gotten through all 20 blades and then some.
Right away you can see the differences in quality here. While Gillette’s razors lasted a very long time, replacement was built into their business model. German consumers want quality products and if you’ve spent any time there, you have likely experienced the German lack of patience when it comes to shoddy quality or inefficiency–especially if you’ve been present when a bus or train has been more than 6 seconds late.
In performance it’s also a completely different experience. Rotbart razors have a lot more blade exposed than their US-made counterparts. Even comparing to Gillette’s open comb razors, the Rotbart is far more aggressive–at first. I say at first because when using one, you’ll hopefully notice sooner rather than later that the blade angle is completely different. In Anthrospin Shaves the World Part 4: Would ‘Gillette Me Explain?, I covered how to find that perfect blade angle by basically putting the head of the razor flat against your skin, slightly tilting it, and dragging–repeating until you just feel the blade start cutting.
The several Gillette razors I’ve used all have pretty close to the same blade angle. Going at the Rotbart with a similar angle is a mistake. You’ll get a lot of tugging and more audible feedback than you’d want. Muscle through it and you’re skin will be pretty angry with you. The angle for this thing is almost 90°, no joke. If you place it with the top of the cap right on your arm and tilt ever so slightly, it’ll be shaving. It’s probably 82-87° for the sweet spot. I may be exaggerating slightly and I haven’t protracted the angle, but it’s far, far different than the 30-45° I was used to with Gillette.
I have in my notes from the first couple of shaves that once the proper angle was found, it was second to the Tech in comfort and quality of shave, and that with practice it would probably exceed it. Months later and having returned to it, I still agree. It’s a wonderful razor and one I plan to use frequently.
So we have overseas fancy antiques, fantastic construction, and an almost completely different experience. We also have the bit of prestige if you’re in forums and can brag about your Rotbart Mond with case.
My beloved Rotbart, with steel case. I bought these two separately, as they tend to fetch much cheaper prices when not sold as a set. My case is a bit rough, but I preferred to spend $20 instead of $80. It cleaned up better than expected. Big Ben is my #2 blade, but at times I wonder if it’s tied with the Treet Platinum. It stays at 2 though because I’ve had less than stellar experiences with them a couple times in ways that lead me to believe there may be slight inconsistencies in manufacture.
A 1930s advertisement for Rotbart, listed as Berlin and Newark. You can see their razors, blades, shears, and stropping gizmos. At the bottom it says manufacturers of razors, razor blades, stropping machines, and hair clipping machines.
The final reason for these things fetching a premium, and one that I think taps into the morbid curiosity of a lot of collectors has to do with the time period in which the bulk of these things were produced. Popping up shortly before WWI, they rode out a good chunk of Weimar Germany before being acquired by Gillette in 1926 (the Weimar Republic lasted from November 9, 1918- March 23, 1933 with the onset of the Third Reich).
One of Gillette’s big ideas during WWI was to issue Gillette shaving kits as part of United States Army field kits. This decision really brought about the popularity of home shaving with Gillette razors because soldiers were allowed to keep their kit at the end of their tours. Under Gillette’s guidance, this was applied to German soldiers as well. Enter the morbid curiosity.
“Good shave — Good mood.” Good slogan, but this particular advertisement was posted in the publication listed below.
In 1933, Germany began rapid re-militarization under the new Chancellor and pretty much immediate dictator Adolf Hitler. As part of the field kit of the Wehrmacht, soldiers were issued Rotbart shaving kits. With an immense push to restart Germany as an industrial and military power, the government under Hitler did not skimp on the production of these things–these things being both soldiers and products.
The 1934 National Socialist’s Monthly Notebook, Volume 5 ran the ad listed above. We may not all be German-speaking razor enthusiasts, but there’s no ambiguity here.
If you scour the interwebs pretty carefully for these razors, you’ll find some that are listed as battlefield or bunker relics from the German occupation of Kurland, Latvia. In short, this was the German occupation of a Latvian peninsula from 1941 until 1944. As the Soviet forces began marching to retake the peninsula, Hitler’s military advisors suggested he evacuate the 200,000 some-odd troops from Kurland and re-station them in central Europe, where the fiercest fighting was going on and where they could make a difference.
Hitler was pretty well out of his mind by that point, having combined propped up by over a decade of yes men telling him whatever he wanted to hear for fear of what would happen if they went against him with prescription cocaine and opiate abuse. By the late stages of the war, Hitler was convinced of his infallibility and would routinely dismiss more level-headed council–what of it he still had attempting to council him. Had he moved these troops from Kurland, the War would likely have ended similarly, but there’s no way 200,000 more troops in central Europe wouldn’t have made an enormous difference.
Anyway, these razors were sent to Wehrmacht troops all over Europe, and those in Kurland were pretty much sitting there until they were cut off by the Soviets and eventually taken prisoner. Those razors, if the seller is to be believed (he’s got some believable details, anyway) were “dug out” and recovered from the bunkers and battlements where the Nazi soldiers were located in the later days of the war.
What this boils down to is that an American company was manufacturing razors to make the daily lives of Nazi soldiers that much more comfortable. It seems almost perverse, but Gillette’s purchase of Rotbart wasn’t particularly big news at the time, and it wasn’t obvious what was going to happen in Germany just seven years later, even if in hindsight it seems to have been. Gillette was certainly aware of the enormous Nazi government contract at the onset of the remilitarization of Germany, was probably giving a side-eye meme once the United States entered the war…and probably had some amount of their PR department on standby just in case the story broke that one of their major subsidiaries were making luxury items to freely distribute to a regime that was incinerating millions of people after gassing, shooting, experimenting on, or working them to death. Who knows…maybe Gillette was completely hands off and just accepted a nice check from their German subsidiary and was hoping to rely on plausible deniability. That that deniability could have possibly been very plausible at that point seems fairly doubtful.
Me being me, the fact that a lot of these are sold as WWII German relics, some of which are recovered from battlefields and Nazi bunkers directly guided my search. I have absolutely nothing approaching a desire to own genuine Nazi artifacts. I also am not interested in bolstering the trade of them. Someone else can and will do it, and I’m well aware that my own decision to seek one out that wasn’t advertised as a Nazi-era razor isn’t going to make a whole lot of a dent in the appeal to Nazi memorabilia collectors, and I’m also aware that a curiosity for WWII does not equate to a penchant for Naziism. It doesn’t matter. Something about looting a WWII bunker and making money off Nazi-owned artifacts (specifically because they were Nazi-owned) doesn’t sit right with me. Call me an anthropologist if you want, but there’s some ethical issues there that I’m not going to elaborate on in greater depth here because if you genuinely need that explanation in this case, it will eclipse the subject of this post.
Anyway. Shaving with an exotic and collectible razor that gives an altogether different experience and which is directly or indirectly tied to one of the most horrible events in human history means these things fetch a premium. I’m just a Germanophilic anthropologist who happens to be researching the history of shaving, so I shopped for a better deal. My razor came from Florida and the case came from Macedonia.
I haven’t done a lot of shaving with this razor. I used one Treet Platinum blade, and one Big Ben. My technique has come a long way since starting this experiment. Just being able to recognize what it is about my shave that is the issue with a given razor speaks to that–each razor is different, even subtly. The Rotbart is not so subtle. With more blade exposure, high blade feel, and an almost obnoxiously large blade angle, it’s going to be a bit of a learning curve even for experienced wet shavers.
But, this razor is fantastic. It’s a testament to Gillette’s ingenuity and German craftsmanship, while also illuminating the cultural differences between very mundane and every day objects. It also hearkens back to an incredibly dark time in human history and sheds some light on the fact that, regardless of what is going on in the world some aspect of day to day life remains. People are people.
Whether working 9-5, flying your private helicopter to your mega yacht, or committing or suffering atrocities, people are people. We all have our routine and we all share some amount of overlap in those routines and/or their intention. Knowing the indirect connection between my razor and the perpetrators of the Holocaust is…weirdly grounding. “Normal” is relative, no matter how sublime or perverse, and we all are just a few steps removed from a reality we today find unbearable. It humanizes evil, somehow, to know that it, too, partakes in the mundane.
In studying and communicating on what it means to be human, that may be one of the more important lessons to convey.
