Following the invasion of Norway, the collaborator government established was run by Vidkun Quisling and his Nasjonal Samling party. Quisling had plans from the onset to establish a Naval force, however the Kriegsmarine refused to allow non-German controlled ships in the water until May of 1942, when an agreement was made to establish the Hirdmarine. Quisling dreamed of it becoming the future or Norway's naval power, but it seems to have never gotten too successful, reaching only around 400 members after the first 6 months.

 

The Hirdmarine wore an emblem on both cap and left sleeve of a Raven sitting atop the NS sun cross symbol, imposed over an anchor. It seems that both the hat badge and sleeve insignia were the same patch...size and all. No one has been able to show any signs of a metal cap emblem.

 

I was fortunate enough awhile back to pick up one of these Hirdsmarine patches...

Here's a photo of Quisling inspecting the Hirdmarine that shows the patch in wear. Image and article can be found on wikipedia

https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirdmarinen

And such a patch on a cap, from Justismuseet... https://digitaltmuseum.no/021026498518/hirdmarine-lue

For youth ages 13-17, too young to join the Hirdmarine, they could join the Unghirdmarine...the naval branch of the NS Youth group, which itself was based off the Hitler Youth. The cap emblem for the Unghirdmarine was the same as the rest of the NS Youth, however the red background of the sun cross was not painted on the Unghirdmarine, whereas it was painted red for other youth groups

 

The prongs on most, if not all, Nasjonal Samling cap emblems were extremely thin wires and more often than not you find one or more prong missing from the emblems. Additionally, the silver wash tends to largely be absent on the youth emblems. Here are two Unghirdmarine cap emblems in my collection...

Here are some illustrations from the 1944 Nasjonal Samling yearbook, showing both Unghirdmarine and Hirdmarine uniforms in wear...

Very neat Hirdmarine insignia. I have collected collaborationist Police uniforms and insignia but I have never run into any NS Police stuff that I could buy. You have chosen a difficult field to collect in the US. Do you find much on this side of the pond?

I got very lucky and found the above, plus a few more pieces, from a large collection of all kinds of international stuff here in the US...

 

However, other than that, it seems very much limited to Norway. It is almost impossible to find any English speaking sites discussing it, so learning is a long, slow process of Google translate. The majority of interest in this field also tends to reside in Norway, and NS Police in particular have a very strong following, with the NS Police cap badge being one of the most reproduced pieces.

Very interesting area of collecting, .. great looking pieces

Jeez, talk about rare. It's surprising any of this survived. Thank you for sharing and the education.

That's what I'm learning...lots of NS stuff was discarded or destroyed... supporting the collaborator government was akin to treason, so much so that the name Quisling is now synonymous to traitor

Excellent collection ! We sure learn some thing new every day. Thank you for the great posting.

 

Tony

I worked for a company whose corporate headquarters was in Finland for about five years and made a number of trips to Scandanavia. I was constantly looking for WWII insignia related to Finland, Norway and Denmark (Sweden was neutral). I can tell you that even ASKING about these types of insignia even 65- 70 years after the fact would very often get you very dirty and disguested looks from the shopkeepers and those at the outdoor markets that spring up during the summertime. I had a number of close friends who lived and worked in Norway and Finland and even they were of no help to me to find items from the time period. I would actually bet that it is easier to find these types of items in the US than it would be to find them in Norway or Finland.

 

As an aside- I remember walking the large open markets on the Rhine in Germany when the local police would find something WWII German. They would pull the items off the dealer's table and burn anything that could be burned, or would stomp on metal badges and metals. You could still find the items at the sales, but you had to ask to see them and about half the time you would get the same evil looks and lectures in German about the evil of the Nazis.

 

Allan

I don't think much of it migrated to the US outside of collectors importing it...not many bringbacks here from that region. I have found most sales being made by Scandinavian collectors...even European dealers have very little of it on their sites. I think I got lucky with the above pieces, the man selling it was selling a very large assortment of multi-national pieces, must have been an international collection built up over many years