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AUTHENTIC SCHLACHTSCHIFF ,,TIRPITZ’’ SHIELD INSIGNIA
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A WORLD
WAR II ERA
GERMAN WAPPEN
OR SHIELD
BEARING THE
EMBLEM OF
THE BATTLESHIP
,,TIRPITZ’’,
ONCE OWNED
BY A MEMBER
OF HER
ORIGINAL CREW
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| This grouping was once the property of a documented, provable member of the crew of the Nazi Kriegsmarine battleship ,,TIRPITZ’’ who survived the ship’s sinking in Altenfjord, Norway. |
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| Sister ship of the mighty ,,Bismarck'', the ,,TIRPITZ’’ was the biggest, fastest and most heavily gunned battleship in the entire German Navy when Chancellor Adolf Hitler assigned her to Norway in an attempt to prevent the Allies from shipping war supplies to the Soviet Union. Sinking, or even crippling the ,,TIRPITZ’’ was one of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's principal was aims. The British employed an underwater “Chariot”, X-craft midget submarines, and finally a Royal Air Force “Tallboy” bomb to send the ,,TIRPITZ’’ to the bottom on 11 November 1944.
One of the Matrosen aboard the ,,TIRPITZ’’ at the time of her sinking was Machinist-Ober-Gefreiten Alfred Schade N 13434/41 T who had held the Flotten=Kriegsabzeichen (Fleet War Badge) since 11 September 1943.
After the war Gefreiten Schade emigrated to Canada and spent much of his life is sales work on the west coast.
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| The ,,TIRPITZ’’ ship Wappen shown and offered here measures 6-1/2 x 6-3/4 inches, is made of heavy painted metal and is mounted on a wooden shield. The back of the wooden shield is stamped Gustav Becker - Schiffswappen and bears the address on Kaiserstraße in Wilhelmshafen where Schade bought it. He took the ,,TIRPITZ’’ Wappen to his mother in Hamburg during World War II and recovered it years later from her apartment after she died. In a clear plastic “pocket” stapled to the back of the shield is a photocopy of the award document for Ober-Gefreiten Schade’s ,,TIRPITZ’’ Flotten=Kriegsabzeichen. |
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| Also included with this lot are four issues (dates from 1981 - 1985) of ,,Der Scheinwerfer’’ (The Spotlight), the official magazine of the organization for survivors of the sinking of the ,,TIRPITZ’’. Each magazine measures about 8-1/4 x 11-3/4 inches and contains around 8 pages of news, history, meeting details, death announcements (including that of Friedrich Karl Topp), etc. |
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The lot also includes a black cap talley about one meter long with the words SCHLACHTSCHIFF TIRPITZ embroidered in golden thread, and a nice First Edition of the book “The Death of The Tirpitz” by Ludovic Kennedy as published by Little, Brown & Company of Boston in 1979. The 7-1/4 x 10 inch, 176 page, very heavily illustrated hardcover book is the final word on what happened to the ,,TIRPITZ’’. The book has its original dust jacket, but is missing the front end paper.
This ,,TIRPITZ’’ Wappen is an absolutely authentic Third Reich period item and comes with a signed, notarized document regarding its origins and its receipt from ,,TIRPITZ’’ crewman and survivor Alfred Schade. |
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| This USM Books web page is Copyright © 2005 by USM, Inc., and the text and images on it are fully protected by international copyright law. It is therefore, illegal for anyone to take any of the material found here and use it for their own purposes without our written permission, irrespective of any excuse they may feel they have for doing so. We will expose and prosecute those guilty of theft of our copyrighted material. |
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USM, Inc. Post Office Box 2600, Rapid City, SD 57709-2600 USA
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