EK 1914 A document theory....

[Chris Boonzaier]

In all wars except WW1 the Iron Cross document was an official award document, all awards coming from the Kaiser before that time and the docs came from him as well, or in WW2 where they came from Adi, awarded by commanding generals on his behalf and the documents being the standard official award document.

In WW1 it was a more or less spur of the moment thing to allow the generals to make the awards and there was no official document. Indeed, there were a whole lot of preliminary documents and unlike WW2 where the doc for the EK came from Divisional level, in WW1 the approval was from a high level but it depended on the Corps or Division as to who issued the document. In some Corps the douments came from the Corps itself, in others it was left up the Regt or sometimes even the Company to issue the docs. These docs were NOT the award, simply a confirmation of the award.

In WW2 there were initially such low level preliminary documents for the EK, but these were soon officially forbidden.

My theory is...... hitler probably had crappy hand written docs, was allergic to them, and therefore saw to it that quality (but boring) EK docs were availible for WW2 :-)

anyone seen Hitlers docs?