Figure 1.-- This German boy in 1940 wears suspender shorts with what looks like tan long stockings.

We note German children wearing the tan cotton stockings being commonly worn in Germany during the 1940s. We note boys and girls as well as awide range odcfemocraphic and social groups wearing them. The photographic record suggests that the tan colors were the most common color of long stockings worn throughout the decade. We have found vintage tan cotton stockings worn during both the 1940s and 1950s illustrate the common color as well as the garter button, already sewn onto the top, by which the stocking would be attached to the elastic strap of a child’s Leibchen. A German reader of the period recalls the “brownish” or tan long stockings that he wore as a boy during the late-1930s and into the 1940s. Long stockings were often more common in German rural areas than in cities although they were by no means exclusively a rural style. We note a farm boy of the 1940s in beige stockings with halter shorts who clearly lived on a farm. Two urban children, a boy and a girl, can be seen playing in the snow, wearing the same common tan shade of hosiery, but in this case with double socks because of the need to keep their feet warm. Various school class portrait photos of the late-1940s show mainly dark brown long stockings, but the lighter shades of brown and tan also appear. In a 1947 class about half the boys wear beige or light tan stockings. Note that one of the boys has rolled his beige stockings down to resemble knee socks. We also note the third boy from the right in the first row of a 1948 class, who also wears the lighter color stockings. A 1948 class at the Heinrich Heine School shows one boy (first row, second from the end on the right), wearing dark tan or light brown long stockings. A boy in the same class wears knee socks of approximately the same tan color. We observe three German children (probably in the late 1940s or early 1950s) one of whom is wearing very long tan long stockings. We are not quite sure if this child is male or female, but the shortness of the tunic suggests a boy. The stockings here are so long as to suggest tights, but tights did not become commercially available in the country until about 1957 and even then took a few years to be widely accepted.