EK 1939 Posthumous award document EK 1

[dedehansen]

Hello Gents,

today I want to show you a rare document.

[dedehansen]

His death notice

Edited September 29, 2014 by dedehansen

[dedehansen]

His portrait photo

Comments welcome

Kind regards

Andreas

[Chris Boonzaier]

Fantastically rare, they stopped that very early in the war....

[dedehansen]

Thanks Chris,

in 33 year collecting I´ve only seen a handful.

Regards

Andreas

[hucks216]

Very nice example and as mentioned, very rare. I wonder what the provision was for issuing such citations instead of the normal EK citation, i.e. why single out a particular soldier for this issue when others received the normal variant of citation for a posthumous issue? Interesting that it was issued a full year after the mans deeds.

[Brian R]

This is an extraordinary set of documents. These formal awards are quite rare in that initial regulations stated that special posthumous awards could be initiated by local commands and sent to OKH (or OKW) in the event of tremendous bravery/circumstances. It appears that the higher authorities reserved the rights to process these awards but seldom did so as the war progressed, and casualties became so frequent (especially after Barbarossa in 1941). This particular set is interesting in that the date coincides with the start of Fall Rot, the second phase of the war in France. You will see a lot of casualty related awards dating from June 5th or so as the French put up surprisingly stiff resistance after suffering so heavily in the prior weeks, surprising the Germans.

There are a couple of posthumous awards in my book, Iron Cross Award Documents of World War II - both formal and informal (on division level). See.... http://kleinekillpress.com/premiere-book-release.html

[sanya13]

Very nice set congrat