EK1 awarded by the kaiser

[Chris Boonzaier]

Of course, maybe he lost his EK1 in 1923 and picked up another one, Or GIs stole it in 1945 and he got another one....

Or, like the rest of an intact group this was the Cross awarded to Hautpmann Lempelius in Riga in September 1917. I tend to think it is.

I did not get the whole group, but got all the important parts :-)

[Chris Boonzaier]

Some more goodies from the group. The Landwehr Medal has been added to complete the bar....

More...

[Gerd Becker]

Now thats a nice documented group. How often did Wilhelm hand out EK´s himself? There can´t be too much of these around, right?

[Chris Boonzaier]

Hi,

 

not too rare, they had Kaiser parades and he did masses in one go. he must have handed out tens of thousands during the war.

But it is nice to have one :-)

[saschaw]

 

On 26/03/2016 at 19:24, Chris Boonzaier said:

But it is nice to have one :-)

I totally agree there were thousands if not tens of thousands of crosses, both classes, handed over by the Kaiser himself, or by the Kronprinz and others - but in most cases, I fear, we just don't know due to the lack of documentation, so it's that what makes these pieces so special.

Here's an extraordinary nice and also pretty interesting example I was able to offer last year: The 1st class EK awarded to Bernhard von Schweinitz (1883–1951) in October 1916. He was honor knight of the Johanniterorden, and won, among others, an HOH3X. Furthermore, he was the adjutant of Prussian prince Adalbert! I bought it as a single award, but luckily, in the mean time it could be reunited with his medal and ribbon bars by one of our friends.

[VtwinVince]

Very cool. I had an EK1 that had been awarded by Wilhelm to a Bavarian pilot in 1916 and was engraved as such on the reverse. Pity I don't have it.

[saschaw]

Yeah, I see, but we really cannot keep everything...

That's still the probably hardest thing for me about being a dealer.

[Chris Boonzaier]

Often, when there was a parade, the EK docs were changed to show the award had been handed out by the kaiser,,,

[toot]

WOW!! now that is killer!! thanks for sharing with us!