Tannenberg Veterens enamel

[Mike Pinkus]

I am assuming this is a veterens badge....pretty cool piece...i havent seen many of these with a named locality...anybody else have one?
mike

[Mike Pinkus]

marked Lauer..Nurnbg on back

[Eric Stahlhut]

Hi Mike, it's an Organization bage

It's actually a member's pin the Tannenberg Bund, which I believe (off the top of my head) to have been led by Hindenburg.
It's interesting to note the Imperial and NSDAP symbols mixed together on a badge, which is not frequently seen. Cool!

[Mike Pinkus]

Eric
i also thought the mixing of the imperial and nazi symbols was unique...i am suprised not to have more comments.....
you say its an association piece(Bund)...for veterens of the battle correct?
mike

[Eric Stahlhut]

Political Organization

The Tannenberg Bund was formed and led by Ludendorff (my mistake) in 1926, when he was estranged from Hitler. It was a nationalist organization. It was later banned in 1931.

[VerKuilen Ager]

As already noted, the Tannenberg Bund was a political organization, not a veteran's group. The pin shown was the first style membership pin. A later version was somewhat similar to that of the NSDAP, having a mobile swastika in the center of a circle that was surrounded by a band bearing the letters (to left and right) "T" and "B". There was also a woman's version but I don't know what it looked like. These are all listed by Heering and Hüsken as catalog numbers 5102a, b, and c.

Here, from Robert Wistrich's Who's Who in Nazi Germany is some extended info that might be of interest.

" . . . As the imprisoned Hitler's candidate for the presidential elections of 1925, Ludendorff did poorly, winning only 1.1 per
cent of the votes, which led to a further cooling in the relations between the two men.
Influenced by his second wife, Dr Mathilde von Kemnitz (1877-1966), Ludendorff founded the Tannenbergbund in 1926, disseminating countless pamphlets and books attacking the "supranational" powers of Judaism, freemasonry and Jesuitism, and producing a literature so eccentric that even the Nazis disavowed some of his more insane ravings. According to Ludendorff, occult forces "above the State" had engaged in diabolical intrigues against the German nation which had climaxed in November 1918. The "supranational powers" had planned the assassination at Sarajevo which sparked off World War I, the Russian Revolution, the entry of America into the war, the Versailles Treaty and other happenings in order to secure Judeo-Masonic world-rule. In his more extravagant fantasies, Ludendorff concluded that Mozart and Schiller had been assassinated by "the Cheka of the supranational secret society". Ludendorff's growing persecution-mania led to his discovering "Jews", "Freemasons" and "Romanists" among his own friends and fellow-combatants. Although Ludendorff was a Nazi hero because of his role in the putsch, such obsessions provoked top Party leaders like Alfred Rosenberg to ridicule his "psychosis" and "perverted political imagination". For his part. Hitler, at a public meeting in Regensburg in 1927, claimed that Ludendorff was himself a Freemason, a charge which was left unanswered. Relations beween Hitler and Ludendorff deteriorated to the point that the latter warned President von Hindenburg in 1933 that "this sinister individual [Hitler] will lead our country into the abyss and our nation to an unprecedented catastrophe". Nonetheless, following his death in Tutzing, Bavaria, on 20 December 1937, Ludendorff received a State funeral and was eulogized as a "great patriot" The pseudo-religious movement he had founded, Deutsche Gotteserkenntnis (Community of Believers), a new Germanic religion which worshipped the old pagan Norse gods, was officially recognized in 1939 by the Nazi regime. After the war Ludendorff's wife resumed her propaganda against Christianity, freemasonry and Judaism in Bavaria, embracing such outlandish and bizarre theories as the idea that Wall Street bankers had financed Hitler's electoral campaigns. In November 1949 she appeared before a de-Nazification court in Munich and on 5 January 1950 she was found guilty as a "Major Offender" and sentenced to two years' directed labour. The revived Ludendorff movement was eventually banned by the Federal government in May 1961."

[Mike Pinkus]

Histaria
thanks for the heads up on this...
mike