Amazing picture with Helmet in full view! Never opened – still in very good condition! Would be nice in a cabinet beside a German Helmet – these posed shots with helmets are very hard to find.  

Interesting and famous SS Battle – in Metz 1944. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Metz [av_video src=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwNJXBHNJbg’ format=’16-9′ width=’16’ height=’9′ custom_class=” av_uid=’av-2273ih’]

Likely a member of Regiment Der Führer! They later would commit a massacre in Oradour and in several other towns they hung people in retaliation for the murdered soldiers. See – As the 2nd SS Division redeployed to Normandy, French resistance fighters harassed it. On June 9, 1944, Lammerding issued orders for the division to “cleanse” the area around Clermont-Ferrand of partisans. That same day, members of the division had displayed what “cleansing” of partisans would mean. In retaliation for an attack, soldiers of Das Reich hanged 99 male inhabitants of the village Tulle, near Limoges. The next day, June 10, 1944, soldiers of the 3rd Company, 1st Battalion, 4th SS-Panzergrenadier Regiment (motorized infantry) Der Führer, a subordinate unit of the 2nd SS Panzer Division since April 1944, advanced to the village of Oradour-sur-Glane. Led by the commander of the 1st Battalion, SS Major Adolf Diekmann, the Waffen-SS troops surrounded the village at midday. At that point in time, the village population had almost doubled to about 650 people, swelled by refugees, including some Jewish refugees, from other parts of France. Massacre and destruction of Oradour-sur-Glane
The SS soldiers rounded up the entire population and concentrated them on the market square. Thereafter they separated the villagers by gender. Members of the 1st and 2nd platoons took the 197 men to several barns on the edge of town and locked them in. The 3rd platoon locked up 240 women and 205 children in the village church. Then the SS men set fire to the barns and threw grenades through the windows of the church, shooting those who sought to escape the flames. After 642 inhabitants, including seven Jewish refugees, were dead, the company looted the empty dwellings and then burned the village to the ground. At about 8:00 p.m. on the evening of June 10, the SS men withdrew from the smoking ruins. Only seven villagers survived the massacre: six men and a woman, all of them more or less severely injured. About fifteen other inhabitants of the village were able to escape the Germans before the massacre started or evade the roundup by hiding. https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007840 [av_video src=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TwrwJJ3G6w’ format=’16-9′ width=’16’ height=’9′ custom_class=” av_uid=’av-2i8xz3′]