WW2 German M40 Winter Camouflage Battle Recovered Helmet Soldier Named with Liner and maker mark.

We don’t want to call this German M40 Helmet a relic as the shell is in super condition.

This is a great example of a battlefield found, German M40 winter camouflage helmet (Stahlhelm) which was found in the Kurland (Courland) pocket at the positions of the German 16th or 18th Armies.

It is an extremely solid example, with just a couple of small cracks to the front peak. It is complete with its Liner Ring and most of its leather liner, although the leather  liner itself has seen better days and is fragile and is also loose. We have fed it some leather food to try and preserve it. This helmet shows most of the original paint and also a lot of its winter camo paint as well. It is also named, although hard to read.

It shows it’s maker mark ET64, which means it was made by Eisenhuettenwerke Thale A.G., Thale /Harz and it’s size is 64.
This is a very rare winter battlefield camouflage helmet in this condition from the German/Russian theatre of war, and would look great in any WW2 collection. 

The Courland Pocket was an area of the Courland Peninsula where a group of Nazi German forces from the Reichskommissariat Ostland were cut off and surrounded by the Red Army for almost a year, lasting from July 1944 until May 1945.

The pocket was created during the Red Army's Baltic Offensive, when forces of the 1st Baltic Front reached the Baltic Sea near Memel during its lesser Memel Offensive Operation phases. This action isolated the German Army Group North from the rest of the German forces, having been pushed from the south by the Red Army, standing in a front between Tukums and Libau in Latvia, with the Baltic Sea in the West, the Irbe Strait in the North and the Gulf of Riga in the East behind the Germans. Renamed Army Group Courland on 25 January, the Army Group in the Courland Pocket remained isolated until the end of the war. When they were ordered to surrender to the Soviet command on 8 May, they were in "blackout" and did not get the official order before 10 May, two days after the capitulation of Germany. It was one of the last German groups to surrender in Europe.