Gau Essen

[David North]

The ubiquitous "Gau Essen" as one of the most easily recognisable and well known buckles within our collecting area and yet having said that, virtually is nothing is known about it.

A general consensus however that it is definitely not SS.

Constant in design and finish, although there is an unsubstantiated suggestion that there are two versions with very, very minor eagle design variations.

Thank goodness an easy to spot fake !

Regards,

David

[Douglas]

As previously stated, no one really knows the history of the Gau Essen buckle; this is my speculation.

As you previously demonstrated, the Gau Essen buckle when compared to other known Assmann nickel buckles appears to be the same indicating that F.W. Assmann produced the Gau Essen buckles.

Josef Terboven was founder and Gauleiter of Gau Essen, and was a very powerful man in the early Nazi Party. I suspect he had Assmann design a buckle for his Gau Essen using the SS buckle design as a model.

Since this is a Gau buckle, I would classify it as an SA buckle, not SS.

Interestingly, I don’t believe any nickel SS buckles were made with the same catch as used in many other nickel buckles.

Some history of the Gau Essen and Gauleiter Josef Tervoven

The Gau Essen was an administrative division of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 in the northern parts of the Prussian Rhine Province. Before that, from 1928 to 1933, it was the regional subdivision of the Nazi Party in that area. The position of Gauleiter in Essen was held by Josef Terboven throughout the history of the Gau.
In 1923 Terboven joined the NSDAP and took part in the Hitler-Ludendorff putsch in Munich in the same year . In 1925 he founded the Essen local group, which he led as leader of the Essen SA. In 1928 he became Gauleiter of Essen .

In the Reichstag election of 1930 , Terboven was elected to the Reichstag for the NSDAP (constituency 23 – Düsseldorf West). He was able to defend the mandate in the coming, still free, elections and also kept it in the National Socialist Reichstag .

On June 29, 1934, he married Ilse Stahl, a former secretary of Joseph Goebbels , who attended the church wedding together with Hitler in the Essen Minster . After the National Socialists came to power , Terboven was appointed to the Prussian State Council and (in addition to his official party position as Gauleiter) on February 5, 1935, to the President of the Rhine Province. In 1936 he was appointed SA Obergruppenfuhrer . The rank of Obergruppenführer was created in 1932 by Ernst Röhm and was intended as a seniormost rank of the Nazi stormtroopers for use by Röhm and his top SA generals.