Navy edition Krieg Flag 10ft by 6 ft signed by GI in Lemark 1945 interesting detective work..

[pjnixon]

Hi Gentlemen,

Just fishing for comments about anything anyone can tell me about large flags, ie what they were used for, ie ships or just wall decor. I would also like info about what I need to show provinance, from family of this chap (Emil) who signed my flag.

I thought I would show my detective work to seek the required paperwork for a genuine provinance of this item from the Gi's family who signed this flag.

This is signed by a GI and I currently found his family members (he died in 1994) and have yet to ring but intend to to ask about what they know about this flag relating to Emil, the signer.

I found his details by looking at when the USA's armed forces entered the town of Lamark Germany, then I discovered the tank battalion who was there about the date on the flag. It was the 691st, I looked at the names of these chaps and Emil was not among them.

This lead me to look at the infantry divisions associated with the tank battalion, of which were several over the course of the war, but only one specific infantry division was assigned to this tank Battalionat the date on the flag, it was the 76th infantry.

I then looked at any history about these chaps and found that my Flag signing GI (Emil Benarcik) won a Bronze Star.

From there I found a death notice in a paper that listed some reletives......oddly I saw this obituary when first looking for Emil via google first but didnt see the relatives because of the way it was written, my mistake..so I ended up doing the research the hard way, but I did get some history about the events leading up to this flags capture...

I used some online phone companies to find addresses and phone numbers of his reletives...I thought they may be interested in who has it now...especially far away in australia.

So anyway I anticipate calling soonish (Im in australia), what would I need to claim "provinance" of this flag?

[qotd]

G'day,

I have one of these flags, though mine is slightly bigger. If it is a Navy flag it will have a stamp of an eagle and swastika with a "M" underneath. There is a thread here that will tell you by size what ype of ship it would have been used on. If it is not Naval, then it would have been flown at Barracks, airfields and such, wherever troops were on active service. As to the rest I am not sure.

Mine would have been flown off a Destroyer, though there is no way to link a flag to a particular ship normaly. here are some pics of the marking to look for for a Kriegsmarine Flag