Original German WWII Kriegsmarine Navy NCO Cap Insignia Set – Eagle & Wreathed Cockade Original Items

Original Items: Only One Set of 2 Available. This is a lovely pair of items that were more than likely removed from the same uniform cap and brought home by a GI after the war. They are both in good service used condition, and look to be the style used on later war NCO caps, as they are both solid metal, and not embroidered.

The Items In This Collection:

– NCO Visor Cap Eagle: Nice quality, stamped visor cap eagle with out-stretched wings, clutching a wreathed, canted swas in its talons, with a long attachment pin on the bottom. It looks to originally have had a gold wash over the brass, which has now partly oxidized and flaked away.

– NCO Visor Cap Wreath and Cockade: stamped and plated metal oak-leaf wreath on a cut-out, padded dark navy blue wool base. The wreath encompasses a stamped metal national tri-color cockade, with the paint still mostly intact. It still has the fabric backing, but there are signs that it was installed on a cap band at some point.

Both items are in lovely condition and come ready to display!

The Kriegsmarine was the navy of NSDAP Germany from 1935 to 1945. It superseded the Imperial German Navy of the German Empire (1871–1918) and the inter-war Reichsmarine (1919–1935) of the Weimar Republic. The Kriegsmarine was one of three official branches, along with the Heer and the Luftwaffe, of the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces from 1935 to 1945.

In violation of the Treaty of Versailles, the Kriegsmarine grew rapidly during German naval rearmament in the 1930s. The 1919 treaty had limited the size of the German navy and prohibited the building of submarines. Kriegsmarine ships were deployed to the waters around Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) under the guise of enforcing non-intervention, but in reality supported the Nationalists against the Spanish Republicans.

In January 1939, Plan Z, a massive shipbuilding program, was ordered, calling for surface naval parity with the British Royal Navy by 1944. When World War II broke out in September 1939, Plan Z was shelved in favor of a crash building program for submarines (U-boats) instead of capital surface warships, and land and air forces were given priority of strategic resources.

The Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine (as for all branches of armed forces during the period of absolute NSDAP power) was Adolf H, who exercised his authority through the Oberkommando der Marine (“High Command of the Navy”).

The Kriegsmarine’s most significant ships were the U-boats, most of which were constructed after Plan Z was abandoned at the beginning of World War II. Wolfpacks were rapidly assembled groups of submarines which attacked British convoys during the first half of the Battle of the Atlantic but this tactic was largely abandoned by May 1943 when U-boat losses mounted. Along with the U-boats, surface commerce raiders (including auxiliary cruisers) were used to disrupt Allied shipping in the early years of the war, the most famous of these being the heavy cruisers Admiral Graf Spee and Admiral Scheer and the battleship Bismarck. However, the adoption of convoy escorts, especially in the Atlantic, greatly reduced the effectiveness of surface commerce raiders against convoys.

Following the end of World War II in 1945, the Kriegsmarine’s remaining ships were divided up among the Allied powers and were used for various purposes including minesweeping. Some were loaded with superfluous chemical weapons and scuttled.