Who wore my HJ Honour badge? (HJ Ehrenzeichen)

Here is another one (Ratisbon)

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Rolf Kretschmer. Award number "67258".

member since 1939 !!! must be a writing error

Michael :denmark
 

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Here is another 100286 coming up for auction with a different name ... same as post #7 .. so which one is the fake Joe ?

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Here is number 89115
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Found another 73 badges today and have added them to the list in post #1
 
On a roll here. Another 40 or so found yesterday. Only many, many thousands to go :)
 
I must have added a couple of hundred more badges over the last week or so but we're still just scratching the surface. Still, a few hundred is better than nothing I suppose :) It's definitely possible to see a pattern though with blocks of badge numbers having been allocated to a Gebiet.
 
Just added a load more including badge number 143611. That's about 20,000 higher than the previous high. It was awarded to someone who lived just down the road from me too :blink:
 
Huge update to the list in post #1 so if anyone has one of the badges listed just give me a shout and I'll get the details on the badge holder to you. I'll be adding a few hundred more tomorrow but after a week of typing I've had enough so it's time to crack open the wine :thumb:
 
I have squeezed everything possible out of the sources I was using so until I can get to Leipzig and the State Archive for more that's it for now. I was able to add thousands of badge numbers to the database though and every now and again here on the forum and on other sites I'm starting to find badges that are now attributable where they once were not. Okay, it's a small badge that was issued at least 156000 times and we're not talking GPB and Blood Order importance but still, if I had one of these badges I think it would be nice to be able to put a name/location to the the number.

I'm still researching names in the four-digit and less range as I want to see if there really is any merit in the theory that higher ranks received these badges more than other people from the Alte Garde. At the moment there are some higher ranks there but the sources didn't usually give the wearer's rank so I have been cross-referencing the names to promotion lists to see I can find out more. I did that with one name yesterday and he turned out to be the HJ-Gebiet Berlin Stabsleiter in the rank of Hauptbannführer.

One "star" among the badges that I found was for Otto Hamann who later went on to become Gebietsführer Berlin and who died leading HJ Regiment Berlin in the final battle for the city.
 
Just a follow-up to the above post regarding the method involved in allocating numbers and whether this had anything to do with rank:

Well, indirectly it did but only because someone who joined the Hitler Youth in 1928 was more likely to have achieved higher rank by 1935 as opposed to someone who joined in 1932. The actual award criterion was seniority and this can be seen very well in the case of Gebiet Thüringen for which I had excellent sources.

I can see that the first batch of honour badges was received and awarded by Gebiet Thüringen in May 1935. This small number of three-digit badges went to those who were members of the Hitler Youth in 1928 and 1929. The next batch arrived in late-June 1935, was much larger and was for members who joined in 1930. This batch was all four-digit numbers. In September 1935 the next large batch consisting of a block of five-digit numbers around 11000 higher than the previous batch is issued to recipients in Gebiet Thüringen who joined in 1931 and in December those who joined in 1932 received their badges. This last batch, which included this badge, was in a block of numbers 15000 higher than the previous batch.

With these numbers being allocated centrally by the RJF it can be successfully argued I think that the policy was to award lower numbers to personnel with higher seniority. The very lowest serial numbers (one-digit, two-digit) would, I think have been allocated to members who were instrumental in growing the Hitler Youth movement in the very early days. This is perhaps evidenced by badge serial numbers 1, 15 and 29 that all went to very high ranks. However, more data on these extremely low award numbers will be needed to fully prove that theory.





I deleted a post just now that I made in the thread yesterday where I said that the years mentioned were those when the recipient was born... Anyone who read this post yesterday and today must have been thinking "what is he talking about?" Anyway, obviously I didn't mean to write that and I'm putting it down to the wine :)
 
I deleted a post just now that I made in the thread yesterday where I said that the years mentioned were those when the recipient was born... Anyone who read this post yesterday and today must have been thinking "what is he talking about?" Anyway, obviously I didn't mean to write that and I'm putting it down to the wine :)
:pound:
 
Can anyone help me out with this guy's surname please?

Gerhard ............
Maihausen in Oldenburg

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...and this one?

Käte .......

..........

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How about the one on the right Henrik?

Looks like Jakob Seel and the location seems to be ...deburg? No idea what that is after burg either..

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I've been able to add a few more award serial numbers for the HJ Honour badge to the list in post #1 in the last few weeks. As you can see below, the figure quoted for many years now in books and on websites for the number of badges awarded is out by at least 25,000 and possibly even more. That's not big news of course but we now have some proof to back things up.

From period publications:

153641. This badge serial appears in a list dated Aug 1936. I found two other badges in the 140,000 range in period sources and we have surviving badges in the 130,000 range here and here so I have no reason to doubt that 153641 is a good number.

188383. This one appears in a period source from 1938 but as I have not yet seen a serial number in a period publication, or indeed anywhere else, that even remotely approaches the 180,000s (I have assumed that it's a typo and have left it out of the list. Also, it was listed right next to badge number 108381 in a list of lost badges so again, 188383 must be a typo.

674223. Same for this one found in another list in a period publication from 1936 . Definitely a typo.



Going to the other extreme, badge serial number 1 is claimed, in two separate sources, for/by two different people. No surprise there :)
 
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