Last updated on June 14, 2021
The first pattern of Soldbuch as made and issued in 1939 had a very limited amount of space on pages 6 and 7 to record the items a soldier was issued. The pre-printed item list omitted many basic items issued to nearly every soldier, such as ammunition pouches, clothing bags, or the Zeltbahn, and there was very little space provided to add these in, and no space for the many other items often recorded on these pages, such as Gamaschen or special clothing items. To fix this problem, later patterns of the Soldbuch had many more items pre-printed on these pages, along with more space to record items not present in the list. However, very many books were made and issued with the first batches in 1939, and stocks of these early books continued to be issued throughout the war. To update these books, and also to add more space in cases where these pages were filled with entries after years of service, a wide variety of inserts were made to be pasted into the Soldbuch. Some were fairly close copies of the equipment issue pages in later pattern books, others were more elaborate fold-out inserts. The equipment issues and checks were fairly frequent for many soldiers, these were conducted when a soldier was transferred, deployed to the field, or at various times when equipment reissues took place. In any Soldbuch that was carried for a few years by a soldier who saw field service, it is typical to find at least one of these inserts. Here is one of the fold-out types:
This page would be pasted at the top onto the top of page 7 in the Soldbuch, then folded in the middle with the lower half folded up and over the upper half, to enable it to fit neatly in the book (you can see the crease from the fold on the line that says “Portepee”). This particular insert was issued in 1945 and was the last of multiple inserts pasted onto these pages of a Soldbuch issued in 1939. I have reproduced this insert and you can download it using the link at the start of this post, it is sized to be printed on A4 paper as it is slightly more than 11 inches long. If you want to print it out but don’t have A4 paper, you can get some larger sized sketch pad paper and trim it to size, 8.3″ x 11.7″.