Picture 003 clearly shows “Hptfw.” for Hauptfeldwebel. And it is indeed “Amon” rather than “Umon”, see here for an example.
What’s funny is that this is “unßerm” (meaning “our”) with an Eszett, but that’s not how it should be spelt. It’s “unserm” with a plain “s” in modern German, and I don’t think it was anything else in 1941.
Either way, strictly speaking it should be “unserem”, but the second “e” often gets dropped in spoken German.
ETA: or what Mops said
Oh, and one last thing: Google tells me that “Stawiko” means “Stabs- und Wirtschaftskompanie”. I don’t know much about the German military past or present, though, so I can’t quite translate that.
ETA: to sum up: “To our senior NCO Amon by his Stabs- und Wirtschaftskompanie, December 1941”
I think Wirtschafskompanie would translate to economics or management in practice, so it would be the Staff- and Management Company.
Just chipping in that the “von Feiner” thing really is “von seiner”. The Fraktur lowercase f would have a small horizontal stroke which the s lacks, and that stroke is absent here.
To summarize: It seems that a company tasked with staff and auxiliary work presented its senior NCO, one Hauptfeldwebel Amon, with this cup in December 1941, probably on the occasion of his retirement or transfer. The engraver seems not to have been up to date with the orthography standardization of 1901.
This thread is kind of awesome. “Straight Dope: The History Detectives.”
Looking at the pics, I’m not so sure about the ‘Amon’ anymore – the first letter and the U in ‘Unßerm’ seem completely alike.
I did think that “von” was usually an indication of nobility, although the aristocracy in the German Sprachraum also included numerous–perhaps mostly–untitled gentry roughly analogous to squires in the UK–for a fictional example, the Bennett family in Pride And Prejudice. From what I’ve read, however, it is somewhat more common that you find non-noble “vons” in the areas adjacent to the Low Countries, in which cases it seems to be analogous to “van” across the border.
American fiction and film seems to have had a slight obsession with “von” and German nobility. The literary Dr. Frankenstein was a French-speaking Swiss bourgeois, but Hollywood converted him into the German Baron von Frankenstein, holed up in his mountain fortress.
Definitely looks like Umon. Is there a possibility it was a visiting Japanese official?
No. They’re different letter shapes. At least they look very different to me. Look at the bottom strokes of both letters. The “A” in “Amon” has two strokes, while the “U” in “Unßerm” has one. The curve on the rounded bottom stroke in Amon is convex, while the other one is concave. Also the left-most stroke on the “A” has more of a curve to it than the one on the “U”, which is consistent with the look of Fraktur typefaces. This is not exactly the same typeface, but it has both characteristics I mention above.