Anti-Partisan Guerrilla Warfare Badge aged solid back WW2 German

Anti-Partisan Guerrilla Warfare Badge WWII German, given for 50 days in combat. These are high grade badges, with nice detail and featuring correct clasp/pin on the back, featuring the Assmann ‘A’. Limited supply

Bandit-warfare Badge (Bandenkampfabzeichen) was a World War II decoration of Nazi Germany awarded to members of the army, Luftwaffe, Order Police, and Waffen-SS for participating in Nazi security warfare (Bandenbekämpfung). The badge was instituted on 30 January 1944 by Adolf Hitler after authorization/recommendation by Heinrich Himmler.

Especially on the Eastern Front, the terms “partisan” and “bandit” were applied by the Nazi security apparatus to Jews, communists, Soviet state officials, Red Army stragglers, and any other persons deemed to pose a security risk. Rear-area security operations against armed irregular fighters (“pacification actions”) were often indistinguishable from massacres of civilians, accompanied by burning down villages, destroying crops, stealing livestock, deporting able-bodied population for slave labor to Germany and leaving parent-less children on their own.

All versions of the badge feature a skull and crossed bones at the base, with a laurel wreath of oak leaves around the sides and a sword in the center. The sword’s handle has the “sun-wheel” swastika, with the blade plunged into a Hydra whose five heads represent the “partisans”. The second version of the badge had larger oak leaves in the wreath and a larger “sun-wheel” swastika. Historian Philip W. Blood notes the similarities between the symbol of the occultist Thule Society, with a sword and a swastika, and the design of the badge.