NASDAP Long Service medals

[McCulloh]

Recently over on the other forum (GDdaggers.com) I noted that somebody had proudly displayed their newly purchased NASDAP 25 year cross on a female ribbon.
After perusing Angloia and Doehle and checking "Partei Statistik" books from 1939 and 1944 (and some other academic works), I did some quick calculating and based upon party numbers from the reconstituted party in Feb. 1925 through 1928 (the years that one would've belonged to get a 25 year medal by the end of the war), I came up with a figure of a maximum of 7,600 possible female awards (by '45).But actually, given "wastage" as noted in Party records, there probably were only@ 2,200 female potential 25 year medal holders.
Given the same statistics for men (who made up 92% of the party before 1933) one would arrive at a possible number of 82,000 possible 25 year crosses, but with "wastage" (at a lower percentile rate) of actually @50,000 crosses for men.
So, two questions:
1. does anybody know if htese awards continued after Jan. 1942 and
2. how many "honor awards" were given out?
Thanks,
Cheers
JemC

[Rick Research]

Revise theoretical numbers downwards dramatically-- the only people eligible for continuous Party service would have also held the Golden Party Badge for the same length of service. Although given for membership numbers "under 100,000" there were actually ONLY something like 22,000--NOT 100,000--members who had the requisite "unbroken service" when the GPBs were bestowed in 1934. Stephen Lautens would know all about the exact GPB numbers.

Now, from those roughly 22,000, most were "Hansy-come-latelies" from 1927/28 (#100,000 was reached in the latter year)... and only 1925/26 members would have actually squeaked under the time limit (counting started in February 1925 but had to be completed by October of the previous year for the annual awards the following 30 January of 1940+) for theoretical 30 January 1945 bestowals.

I'd say, just playing with these numbers, that no more than say 5 or 6 thousand Nazis were elible for the 25 Years Cross. Certainly, in 35+ years of collecting I have only encountered one REAL ribbon bar with it, and perhaps half a dozen medal groups that were not dubious. Most of the originals of this Cross were probably from unissued contract stock-- certainly the market is flooded with zillions of fakes and has been for decades.

Assuming that the 8% female membership was a constant (again, I would think most joined 1927/28 rather than 1925/26) that would make theoretically possible only about 400 female Nazis eligible for an NSDAP 25.



Anyone else want to try the math for any other potential numbers range?

[McCulloh]

Well:
heres' my revised figuring...
7.8% of the party was female before 1932 (Partei Statistik).
In December, 1928, there were @115,000 party members.(@55,000 active). The SA files show members joining in May 1st at # 130,626. Another Obgpnfuhr. joined June 21 and was #142290 and a last Obrgrpfhr. joined Oct. 1 and was # 180713.
By December, 1929, there were @200,000 party members.(98,000 active). The Statistik #s I quoted were active dues-paying members-not Party numbers awarded-sorry.
In June of 1930, there were @320,000 + NSDAP members.
This means that to be in the first 100,000-one had to be a member by September/October of 1928!
The medal was given not only for continuous party membership but also for continuous membership in party affiliated organizations, NSKK, SA, HJ usw.(officers only), etc.. Given the size of the SA and the number of members of affiliated persons, it seems reasonable to round upwards. While Party rules stated that auxillery members (SA, DAF etc.) were supposed to be party members, many were not-especially in the SA. There were large numbers of people, especially after 1929, who could not afford monthly dues-paying membership in the party, hence Goebbels fretting about finances.
So my argument would be that possibly @30,000 persons (rightly accepting the golden party badge thesis) would have been eligable for the medal, of whom statistically @8% were female.
Academic research has shown that before 1932, about 10-15% of the NSDAP, annually, did not renew their membership.But significant numbers did stay on in other membership roles (notibly SA,HJ).
The years (months?) before Jan 1933 counted as double. Obviously, given the benefits (and perils), almost nobody left the party after the Machtergreifung. So there's another whole calculation (and thread) for 10 and 15 year medals.

[Rick Research]

Whoops!! I'm getting out of my fields here, so I just went and verified:

NSDAP Long Service Crosses were NOT given to mere ordinary dues paying members (that was all that was required for a Gold Party Badge) but only to uniformed career Party functionaries: Political Leaders, SA, SS, etc.

Now, these "Golden Pheasants" would have had to have had the SAME length of service, pre January 1933 counting double, as their contemporary "civilian" Old Fighter comrades with the GPBs-- indeed, for a 25 Years Cross, at least, they would have to have been drawn from AMONG that same 22,000--

so DEDUCT all mere dues paying GPB holders, who were NOT eligible-- and how many 1925-1926 entry NSDAP members were ALSO considered CAREER FUNCTIONARIES?

Even if HALF the 22,000 (again, those span 1925-28, 2 more years than could ever have qualified for a Party 25) somehow wriggled onto the public payroll and were retroactively considered "full timers"... I came up with 5 or 6 thousand above thinking ALL the only-possible-eligible Party members were GPB holders. Half that... and no more than 2-3,000 25 Years NSDAP Service Cross holders were possible at a theoretical maximum. Deduct wartime deaths from all causes, and ....

Possible numbers are plummeting AGAIN!!!

PS--

I just went and checked on the 900 Gau Hessen-Nassau Gold Party Badge holders-- only one-third of them had joined before 1927.

Taking the 22,000 Gold Party Badge holders as a rough control estimate of continuous Nazi activism, one third was about 8,000 probable 1925/26 members. If say half of those 8,000 somehow managed to be considered Full Time Flunctionaries (and that is probably high rather than low), we are down to no more than 4,000 very early Nazis qualified for an eventual NSDAP 25-- deducting all deaths among them after 1934 from that figure.

[McCulloh]

Hmmmm...
Interesting deductions and probably boosting the value of the medal referenced as we type.
I am curious however, what is your source of the qualification for this award being party cadres only? Doehle? That phrase means all Party officers-and about 35% of the Party was "officer status" at any given point.
My reading of the qualifications required are official service in the party or any branch thereof, not full (or even part time) party employment (although even there, given the "highest to lowest member" language, a paid SA trooper should/would have qualified). Remember that in the 1920s many Gauleiters were "volunteers" and unpaid.
I am also struck by the number of NSDAP files referenced in the Kurwitz book where party members often LATER joined the NSDAP after initially belonging to another party association (SA,HJ,NSKK etc.). In other instances, many SA members were not dues paying party members at all until after 1933.
Indeed, Speer at Nuremberg demonstrated that his party membership came after his enlistment in the SA and afterwards (because he had a car) the Berlin NSKK.
I guess the real key is to see some award documents and then to hear more from that chap who looked up the GAU awards.
I have assumed, out of a liberal construction of the award criteria as I read them, that service was counted annually and not by month, so the 10 months of 1925 would have counted as a year, but thats' just my idiosyncratic reading.
Cheers,

[sjl]

NSDAP Long Service Medals

Hi all,

I saw Rick invoked my name (for better or worse) about NSDAP membership regarding my Gold Party Badge site. I shouldn't do this at the office and away from my reference books, but here goes...

I am certain Rick is right about the NSDAP crosses being only awarded to Party Functionaries (ie - those "employed" by the NSDAP and its higest organizational level bodies - PO, HJ, SS, SA, NSF). It was certainly not awarded to ordinary party members.

NSDAP party numbers are tough to track. In the late 20s and early 30s, people switched right wing party membership frequently. The NSDAP did not re-use party numbers to make it look bigger in the early days. It looks like Party No. 100,000 was issued in mid-1930, although the NSDAP had less than half that number of real members at the time - the rest had dropped out, and they continued to drop out up to and even after March 1933 (when the so-called "March Violets" joined).

On November 9, 1933 the Treasury Department of the NSDAP certified only 22,282 of the first 100,000 NSDAP members were eligible for the Gold Party badge badge (continuous membership). This included 1,795 women, or 8%.

Rick is right that this is the pool from which recipients of the 25 year cross would have to be drawn (less a few for the last joiners). Then this would be much further reduced because far fewer women would actually be NSDAP employees - probably only senior Frauenschaft officials, BDM officers and a few party office secretaries. There would be few if any women employed by the SA, SS, etc.

So, a very, very rare award.

[Bill D.]

Here is a question for anyone who might know: Were the Party Long Service medals "awarded" without any effort on the part of the recipient, or must they have been applied for? I have presumed the latter, since it would seem that the burden would have been more easily placed on an applicant to demonstrate having met the requisite criteria for the award, rather than placing the burden on office personnel to try and track down all of the Party members who were qualified.
Another reason that I have thought this is because I have items to an individual who joined the Party in 1919. He took part in the Putsch in 1923. He was made a Gauleiter in 1925, and had continuous membership in the Party and the SA and a Party position until at least 1939, perhaps longer. Yet although he received the Blood Order and Gold Party Badge, photos of him taken even up until shortly before his death in WW II show him wearing only a short ribbon bar with his WW I medal ribbons on it. His medal bar itself has only his WW I medals on it. I have assumed that between his Blood Order, his GPB, and his "Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler" cuff title, he didn't think that he needed the "Long Service" medals to display his length of membership and never applied for them.
However, if they were "awarded" without any initiative by the recipient, then I would be interested in knowing that.

[McCulloh]

The award was not instituted until quite late-2 April 1939 and first awards were made on Jan 30, 1940. Apparently the cut off date was from the end of October the year before. In the Military Advisor, Jamie Cross shows an award Urkunde dated Jan 30, 1941 and an award doc. pasted into a party book from FEB. 1942! Purportedly the two awards were given simultaneously, so obviously they weren't all given out on the Anniversary of the Machtergreifung. Perhaps your chap didn't survive long enough to receive his award?
Mr. Wotka made a tantalizing reference to having only found 4 in a Gau he researched over at the GD forum, leading me to believe that it might have been an award handed out at the Gau level and thereby requiring some application efforts.
Note also that Himmlers' medal bar only has a 15 year and 10 year cross. Perhaps he had a membership gap or never filled out the forms?
As regards NSDAP party numbers, see Michael H. Katers' THE NAZI PARTY and the notes. There is also a book, Partei-Statistik originally published in Munich in 1935 which broke down the party (published semiannually thereafter) and has lots of good information.
The stats were confirmed and expanded on in a series of statistical studies done after @10,000 random files were pulled from the Berlin Document Center (my student work study job at college was to collate and translate some of these files).
By the way, as I mentioned over at the GD thread, I have seen correspondence (I think it was sold by Bill Shea @1993) of an early party member who attempted to get his early party number back after 4 years in the Reichsheer and his earlier number was given away! He did get another "older" number as I remember, but am not sure about the badge.
Lastly, Rick cited Littlejohn & Dodkins work @1970 regarding the Parteileiter as awardees-but also the members of the SS, SA, etc. etc.. Every other secondary source (Angolia, Cross, Ailsby who probably were all using Doehle and each other as sources) indicates that the medals were for "Party cadres", and that includes The Party offices in Berlin,Munich, every Gau,Kreis,Block and auxillery formations-probably including Austria after 1938.
I still would like to see more on this subject. 8% of 3,000 is a mere 240 medals to 25 year females.
Speer once told Gitta Sereny that to really understand the Third reich one had to understand the phenomenon of the "Alter Kampfer" in German poltical society. It strikes me as logical that they would restrict the award somewhat, but I suspect that my larger estimated award numbers thesis still bears investigation, since 30,000 aint a lot of folks out of 80 million. After all, if one already has a prestigeous GPB being given out, why bother with a LS medal, unless it meets some unmet need?
The early Nazis were strikingly loyal to one another (and the ones I met as a kid still were to some degree) and it is very possible, I would argue, that this sort of award could easily have been made in addition to the GPB and beyond, as many other party affiliated members were not continuous party members because they couldn't afford it (esp.SS and SA men).
One of the memos Goebbels wrote in 1929 regarding party finances specifically noted that the depression was helping recruitment, but also many "old and faithful comrades" could not pay their dues.
The answer to Bill D's question certainly would be in this chaps' party file, which should be on microfilm at the Congressional Library?
Cheers,

[McCulloh]

RE: The actual regs

Mr. Wotka has posted the actual regs over at the "other" forum. It is full of ambiguity, but supports ricks' view>
Now, on the question #2:
Anybody seen 25 year medal Urkunde issued for 1945? i suspect they don't exist given the Gauleiter and SS bars with provenance that I've seen. My guess is they stopped in 1944.
More on this topic soon.
Cheers,
JeMc

[Bill D.]

I did in fact go to the National Archives to research the individual to whom i referred. Unfortunately, there was no NSDAP file for him. I did find his SA file, which included the authorization to purchase the small version of the Gold Party Badge, though.

[McCulloh]

Hmmmm...

In the Book: The SA Generals (1998) theres' a wealth of Party information and SA research. The book is a precis of the chaps' Doctoral thesis at the frei Universitat in Berlin and a lot of the docs at the BDC (including your chaps NSDAP file) are probably at the Hoover Institute in California. The actual dissertation has tonnes of footnotes, including files #s at the BDC and YOUR chap MUST be in it. Indeed, I suspect his medal bar might have been sold by Regina Green recently (see the Lowell show pics over in Regional).
May I ask who is the chap in question?
Cheers,
JeMc

[Bill D.]

J.E....
The individual to whom I was referring was a man named Hermann Fobke. He was a WW I veteran of a Pioneer and Anti-Tank unit, wounded by gas and taken prisoner. He returned to Germany after the war, and he joined the NSDAP in 1919. In 1923 he was attending University in Munich, where he also served in the Stosstrupp Adolf Hitler, and it was as a member of the Stosstrupp that he took part in the Putsch. For this he was awarded the Blood Order, which I have, cased.

Following the Putsch he was tried and convicted and served his sentence in Landsberg Prison with Hitler, for whom he served as the liason to the North German branches of the Party while they were in prison . Hitler would later present to Fobke an inscribed, dedicated first edition of Mein Kampf (current whereabouts unknown, though it survived the war and reached the hands of a collector someplace).

In 1925, when Hitler reconstituted the Party, he appointed Fobke a Gauleiter. Fobke went on to hold posts as a Deputy Gauleiter and Inspector General of a Gau. His membership from the "new" party in 1925 (with a membership number in the 2,000 range) led to his Gold Party badge.

He was a writer and newspaperman by profession, and when he left his Party positions in early 1939, he went to work for a newspaper.

With the arrival of the war he served in the Army as a Sonderfuhrer of Officer rank, working as a war reporter for the Propaganda Ministry (a document that I found in the National Archives was a report from the early days of the Party that Fobke wrote to Hitler about a new speaker that had joined the Party, Joseph Goebels. Among the items given to me by Fobke's son was a Christmas card from Goebels. They seemed to have maintained contacts with each other as two alte kampfer).

Fobke died in the Crimea in 1943. His eldest son, a 17 year old former student in the Nappola system, was shot in the neck with two other youths in late April of 1945 by a squad of Waffen SS troops. The young men were a part of a RAD unit, working on clearing bomb damage from outside a small town. Apparently the SS unit came upon them, looked at their apparent age, their hodgepodge of uniform pieces, and, concluding that their papers were not in complete order as RAD workers, decided that they were deserters and shot them then and there.

There is a saying that the revolution will eventually devour its own children. In the case of Hermann Fobke, it became a fact.

Fobke did not attain Generals's rank in the SA. I looked through all of the material on him in the Archives, which included the index to materials on him at the Hoover Institute. Unfortunately, not all of the files of the NSDAP members survived the war, and his apparently was one that did not.

[McCulloh]

Hmmm..

Wow! Interesting! O.K. I guessed wrong about whom you were referring to... however, as I remember, there are 2 separate sets of NASDAP file cards, indicating files, overlapping but not cross-indexed at the BDC. My understanding is that the Hoover Institute has copies of almost all the files, but only one set of "index " cards. Is it possible they do have his file, but not his index card?
If so, might his records be found under the "Altkampfer" list that the Justice Ministry created for the Gold Party badges or the Berlin Gau records?
Just a thought-
Cheers,
JeMc (Jeff)

[JoeW]

25 Jahre NSDAP DAZ

I had visited this thread and really enjoyed the discussion of the award probability of the gold level using the data from Partei Statistik. Jeff, I wanted to advise you of a post I made to the similar thread on the "other" web site. I found a reference in a 1941 Gau Oberdonnau publication which stated that the gold long service medals would be awarded for the first time in January 1942. I would have uploaded the scan of the document, but I am not allowed to post attachments here. You may view it on the "other" site thread. This publication shortens the window in which the gold level award could have been made. Oh, I had my gold DAZ for a few years before I decided to post it for discussion. I don't believe it was ever issued, as the ribbon has never been used. It remains fully folded and the prescribed length as indicated in the Org Book.

It is amazing what information about rarity comes from serious research like yours on the gold DAZ. Take for instance the Police Fahnentrager Ringkragen. Studying the RPT books and some police publications, one can see that there were probably less than 100 of them produced by Junker. Compare that with the Heer Fahnentrager Ringkragen or even the SS one.

[McCulloh]

Wilkommen!!

Hi Joe!
Thanks!! I too enjoyed this thread and its got me a researching away (in my spare moments). I was going to add to this a series of "hypothetical" awards numbers based upon the Partei Statistik Bucher and the NSDAP summaery. Stay tuned and I shall post it here and over at GD.com...
Did you see the earlier thread about the Police Rangelist that Glenn J. got?
It has a series of interesting entries, including NSDAP#s.

I am still left with the question as to whether the 25 year medals were awarded after 1942! I suspect not and as Rick said, there was some creative accounting done by old Party guys to get their awards.
Cheers,
JeMc