Imperial Navy Fähnrich zur See Shoulder Cords

[Rick Research]

Just got these in today from Helmut Weitze. Only executive corps (zur See) officer cadets wore these in the Imperial navy, since in the other branches, candidates came up through the Warrant Officer ranks.

The lower one is turned bottom up to show how the cords are woven together. Note the Imperial tri-color "V"s, one side black, the other red and white striped, which alternates from one row of Vs to the next.

[Rick Research]

"Baby Huns"

And here is an undated, uncaptioned photo from 1905 of two teenaged brothers, both later to have extremely noteworthy careers, with Big Brother on the left as a Fähnrich zur See wearing officers' cap badge and dagger knot, and these slender cords on his ratings monkey jacket. Baby Brother, only in the navy a matter of weeks, is a mere Seekadett and so wears a single bullion Imperial cockade and a dagger without knot.

One would be the most successful submarine commander of WW1, yet lose his life in the air in the next war, the other would combine flying with submarines fairly unsuccessfully, and then he became a Luftwaffe general. But here, they are only 19 and 17-- and look about 13 and 10!

[Mike Dunn]

Rick--interesting! How the heck did you know what these were for?? What are the names of the kids in the photo?? Mike

[Rick Research]

Actually the same ugly little strings (without the "V"s and with branch devices for ALL other branches of cadets) were used by the German navy afterwards, and those show up all the time.

They are the von Arnauld de la Perière brothers. Lothar (1886-1941) on the left was the highest scoring Uboat ace of WW1, and was killed in an air crash at Le Bourget airfield in Paris as a Vizeadmiral zS zV. (He was unusually vain and once a WW1 postcard celebrity, can usually be found with his ears cropped to a daintier size--often obviously crudely! Another odd thing about him is that he took along a camera crew for his Meditteranean trips-- so you can often see him and his crew sinking ships on The History Channel etc to this day!) On the right is Friedrich (1888-1969), who spent the last 3 years of WW1 as a French POW. He stayed in the navy until 1930, but joined the Luftwaffe in 1934 and rose to commander of Luftzeuggruppe 17, Vienna.

An 8 buck flea market find years ago, and no ID on the photo!

[Rick Research]

brought back up for Hannibal