Platanenmuster: The Waffen-SS “Plane Tree” Pattern — and the Name They Never Used

A camouflage most people have never seen up close, and that nearly everyone who has seen it calls by a name the soldiers who wore it never used. The Waffen-SS “Plane Tree” — Platanenmuster in German, often written “Platanentarn” — is the pattern where the story of German camouflage naming becomes most explicit. It is the pattern many histories call the first Waffen-SS camouflage, and it is the pattern whose familiar name is almost certainly a post-war coinage.

This article separates what is documented about the design — its variants, its printing, its reversible garments, its place in the SS pattern family — from what is only collector vocabulary.

The name is ours, not theirs

The name Platanenmuster is German for “plane-tree pattern,” and Platanentarn is “plane-tree camouflage.” Both describe the mottled, dappled effect of plane-tree bark, which the design is said to echo.

But here is the caveat that matters: like nearly every name attached to the Waffen-SS patterns, “Platanenmuster” is not a documented contemporary administrative designation. German-language sources state plainly that the current naming of the Waffen-SS patterns comes from the post-war period. The Waffen-SS did not publicly document a name for this design the way a modern procurement office would; what survives is a design without a confirmed official name.

So when the collector market, the enthusiast literature, or a reproduction seller calls this “Platanenmuster” or “Platanentarn,” they are using the descriptive post-war vocabulary that camouflaged the SS patterns — the same vocabulary that produced “pea dot,” “oak leaf,” and “blurred edge.”

The first dotted Waffen-SS pattern

The significance of the design is contextual. Within the SS pattern family, the Plane Tree is generally regarded as the first pattern to use a dotted, dappled overlay, and so it is the first dotted camouflage pattern of the Waffen-SS. It is this dot-and-dapple treatment, sitting over broader leaf and bark shapes, that separates it from the sharp geometric splinter patterns of the Heer.

The attributed designer is Johann Georg Otto Schick, a Munich art professor and director of the German camouflage research unit — the department known by the German word for camouflage, Tarnung, hence “Abteilung T” — acting at the request of an SS officer. The attribution is the conventional one; no surviving primary design order records the commission for the Plane Tree.

A design with numbered variants

The most interesting documented fact about the Plane Tree is its variant system. There are six basic variants, numbered 1 to 6. Crucially, they were printed in pairs on the same screen: the right half of number 1 was on the same printing screen as the right half of number 2, and so on for numbers 3 and 4, and 5 and 6. The same applied to the left halves.

The designs were drawn so that when Zeltbahnen (shelter quarters) were joined together, the colours and patterns would match up. The numbers themselves appeared on each Zeltbahn section, near the reinforcing panel in the lower centre of the triangle. The numbered designs were used for making up the shelter quarters; on reversible garments the numbers typically came in pairs, one side spring and the other autumn.

Spring and autumn, hand and roller

Like most SS patterns of the generation, the Plane Tree was reversible, printed with a green-toned spring (or summer) side on one face and a yellow-toned autumn side on the other. On a reversible smock this allowed two-way wear.

The printing technique matters to the design’s history. The early SS patterns were screen printed by hand, which did not allow large quantities to be produced efficiently. With the increase in demand as the war progressed, roller-printed versions of the patterns were introduced in 1940. The Plane Tree, in regular production from approximately 1940 to 1944, thus sits at the transition from hand-screened to roller-printed SS designs.

The design appears in the late 1930s and was produced through around 1944, with regular volume production from approximately 1940.

The garment, not just the pattern

It is worth keeping the garment and the pattern separate, as with any camouflage. The Plane Tree was printed on reversible smocks (including the M40 and M42 variants, the M42 with horizontal lower pockets), on helmet covers, and on Zeltbahn shelter quarters. To say a soldier “wore Plane Tree” is to describe the pattern; the object in question was usually a reversible smock or a shelter quarter he could also wear as a poncho or rain cape.

When a modern reproduction seller offers “an M40 Platanenmuster smock,” they are offering a reproduction of the garment, printed with a modern copy of the pattern — not a period original, and not a piece with an official wartime name.

Where it sits in the family

The Plane Tree belongs to the Waffen-SS line of dot-and-dapple designs, and the lineages here are design relations, not repeat identities. The patterns are linked by a shared design language rather than by one being a copy of another. The Oak Leaf pattern, in its roller-printed forms today known as Oak Leaf A and Oak Leaf B, belongs to the same family, and the specialist source records a design relationship in one direction only: the basic Oak Leaf pattern was also used as a base design for later Plane Tree designs. Plane Tree and Oak Leaf are best described as relatives within one design language, not as one descending from the other. The SS pattern line culminated in the Erbsenmuster, the “pea dot” of 1944.

It is also tempting, and it is a claim best avoided, to say the Plane Tree is the direct ancestor of the modern German Bundeswehr Flecktarn. Flecktarn, in its current form, is a Bundeswehr development of the 1970s and 1980s, and the connection is a design relation — an early spot-and-dapple concept echoed in a later pattern — not a direct lineage. We state it as a design relation, not as Flecktarn descending from the Plane Tree.

Reading a surviving example

On a genuine period piece — or a faithful reproduction — the identifying feature is the dappled overlay of small irregular dots sitting on larger, softer leaf and bark forms, with the whole read broken up by the number-printed shelter-quarter formats. The spring side is greener; the autumn side browner and yellower.

Two cautions are worth carrying when you read a photograph of this pattern. Similar-looking pieces may not be the same design: the six numbered variants were printed in shared-screen pairs, so two garments that look alike can belong to different numbered variants. And a modern reproduction is often close enough to a period piece to be taken for one — how a smock looks does not by itself settle its age or its issue.

Naming, in the end

The Plane Tree is, in a real sense, a case study in the naming problem of German camouflage. The design is real, documented, and distinctive. Its variants and its printing are well understood. And yet the name it carries is one that the soldiers who wore it almost certainly never used. Every time a seller writes “Platanenmuster” on a listing, they are using a modern word for a wartime design that is otherwise unnamed in the public record. That is worth remembering when you look at a Plane Tree pattern: the design is period and genuine; the name is ours, not theirs.

The dot-and-dapple SS family lives on at MegaCamo in the post-war patterns it helped shape. Explore the German military range, the wider camouflage collection, and the complete pattern list to see where the Plane Tree sits in the wider history of European camouflage.