U-Boat photos from the crew of U-406.

[Adrian]

I finally got round to taking some pics of my collection of photos from U-406 today so thought I would share them here. For those that don't know, a relation by marriage, Richard Koch served aboard her during the war - hence my interest in this particular boat - up until her sinking by HMS Spey. He was a POW here in England where he met his wife, my Grandfather's cousin.
I took the following photos to show her to see if she could identify him in the photos but sadly her age and eyesight prevented her from doing so. She did tell me he was awarded the EK2 and EK1 and also the U-Boot Kriegsabzeichen during his service.
Unfortunately not many of his possessions survived, some being on the bottom of the Atlantic and after the war he stayed in England and those left in Germany disappeared behind the Iron Curtain.
There are reports about U-406 however I belive the boat was mis-identified as the boat under attack in the photos here is not a type VIIC as U-406 was. You can also read the interrogation reports from the survivors.
Anyway, back to the photos. I obtained these purely by chance a couple of years ago on eBay. I was scanning through a particular seller's offerings and came across photos labelled as being from U-406. I could hardly believe it. A small amount of research later confirmed this was U-406 going by the conning tower emblem. I immediately saved them in my 'watch' list and waited for the auctions to end.
When they did I bid on every single one of them. I didn't get them all, annoyingly I didn't win a single shot showing the conning tower and therefore don't own an image of the emblem, a bird as you can see in my signature. I did win 80% of them though and they are shown below.
If that stroke of luck wasn't enough, a few weeks later I was searching though eBay listings again and found some more, all apparently from a former crew member of U-406 and from a different seller. There was no doubt these new photos were from the same crew as the same crew members appaeared in both lots of photos from different sources. I won every single photo this time round and added them to my first group.
I'll shut up now and post the images. The first one is of the whole crew. You can see several faces here appear throughout the rest of the images.

[Little Mermaid]

Adrian, what a marvelous story and coincidence - and such a pity that you didn´t get all of the photos. It really is worth it when you find items from/off someone who served on a vessel

[Little Mermaid]

And, if I can help in any way, just shout!

[Adrian]

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[Adrian]

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[Little Mermaid]

Impressive and beautiful. Thanks for letting us see them

[Adrian]

Slightly warmer climes......

[talltom]

some brilliant photos adrian must have been hell working in such fridgid conditions especially on a sub thanks for sharing

interesting selection of awards shown too: dk,ek1, minesweepers,destroyer,uboat so many just brilliant

[Adrian]

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[Adrian]

The last lot of photos are all land based. Obviously I have no idea of the chronological order of any of them so forgive the random way in which I've posted them. I tried to group them in the best way I could for ease of viewing rather than guess an order.