help with collar tab ID

[Bueschwd]

This collar tab looks handmade seems old and is unusually thick. A black backgroud white silver tiger would be SS indian volunteer corp but doesn't quite look like the very few examples I was able to find. Any ideas? Fake, tailor made, original?

https://imgur.com/a/B39GTDm

[peter monahan]

The Indische Freiwilligen Legion [ Indian Volunteer Legion [aka Azad Hind Legion] wore a leaping tiger shoulder patch but not, as far as I know, any unit specific collar tabs.

[Gordon Craig]

Bueschwd,

This collar tab has nothing to do with the Free India movement. As Peter has said, they wore standard Heer collar tabs.

Regards,

Gordon

[HPL2008]

Very late in the war, the Indian legion was transferred to Waffen-SS control, and SS insignia were adopted. (In practice, only to a very limited degree, it would seem, as photos are extremely scarce.)

See: http://dev.wehrmacht-awards.com/foru...d.php?t=251750

(But the collar patch from the first post is a very crude fake.)

[peter monahan]

"Very late in the war, the Indian legion was transferred to Waffen-SS control, and SS insignia were adopted. (In practice, only to a very limited degree, it would seem, as photos are extremely scarce.)"

Yes, all foreign volunteers were subsumed by the Waffen SS late in the war - I wasn't able to find the date quickly for my first post - but all the visual evidence which I turned up must have dated from the pre-SS period, with the standard Wehrmacht collar patches .

I had a vague idea that the SS 'Indische Legion' had the typical SS divisional patches - in this case a tiger's head - but didn't find any examples pictured. I suspect, as you say, that while the patches were authorized and maybe even manufactured, in most cases they diud not get to the actual troops in the field. I'd guess that supplying the 'foreigners' would not have been a top priority for the SS supply chain.

Finally, as you say, the example above is clearly a fake. Thanks for taking the extra time do do a proper search.