It has been a fair old while since I posted something from my collection so here is a Soldbuch I received a year or two ago, I haven’t posted anywhere before and is quite a scarce example as it is to a soldier who fought through the winter of 1941/42 in Russia and received the Cholmschild after fighting in that bitter battle.

Soldbücher or Wehrpässe to holders of the Cholmschild do not crop up very often - I can only recall seeing 3 others being on the market and one of those had a dubious Cholmschild entry - and for some reason they tend to have the photo removed possibly to stop the Russians identifying them postwar as defenders of Cholm, but that is just a theory. This one however still has his photo showing two of his three awards in wear although unfortunately a blacked out part of the photo prevents us from seeing the Cholmschild on his sleeve.

For the period in question this soldier served in Jagdkommando 8 (having previously served in Gebirgsjäger-Rgt 138) which in the early stages of the battle for Cholm fought on the southern and southwestern side of the pocket. He was wounded in the early stages of the fighting and by early February he was back in Germany in a Reservelazarett at Celle.
During and after recovery he went through the usual ‘Ersatz und Ausbildung’ type units before ending up with 7./Gren.Rgt 387 which is a possible indicator of how much recovery time he took as that Regiment wasn’t formed until October 1944! It is possible of course that he was used as training staff for some of that period. However, in 1945 he was again wounded when 168.Volksgrenadier-Division was fighting on the Western Front and he wasn’t released from the hospital until 1st May 1945 so effectively his war was over.

A nice little additional snippet from the Soldbuch is the method of shipping him home after he was wounded on the Eastern Front in 1941, first by the Hospital Ship ‘Meteor’ and then by the Hospital Ship ‘Straßburg’ which would account for the unusually seen (in a Heer Soldbuch at least) wound code of 179a which came from the Kriegsmarine medical books and was issued in this case by Marinelazarett Mürwik in Flensburg, northern Germany. 179a-c was the Naval equivalent of a Heer injury code of 31 & 34.

The entries for his Cholmschild and Infanterie-Sturm-Abzeichen were entered in to the Soldbuch very late in the war both being entered on 25th October 1944 while he served with Stamm.Kp./Geb.Jäg.Ers.Btl 136. The Cholmschild is entered with the attribution of Jagdkommando 8 while the ISA is entered for service with his previous unit, Geb.Jäg.Rgt 138. The one award missing is the Wound Badge in Black. By the time they got round to updating his records he had already been wounded a number of times so instead of entering the Wound Badge in Black and then Silver they have just bypassed the entry for the Black grade and entered the Wound Badge in Silver in January 1945.

For anyone interested in this seldom covered battle I would highly recommend the book ‘Besieged’ by Jason Mark which covers it in great detail.

Click to enlarge the picture