"Automatic" Iron Cross
On 1 June 1940, Hitler decreed that any recipient of the Wound Badge in Silver or Gold be automatically awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class if that individual did not already have that decoration. This pluralism meant that, for example, a sailor who lost a hand or foot in action while serving on an E-boat at the Kuban bridgehead would receive not only the Wound Badge in Silver, but also the Fast Attack Craft War Badge, the Kuban Shield, and the Iron Cross 2nd Class, purely on account of the wound sustained.
Read more about this topic: Wound Badge
Famous quotes containing the words automatic, iron and/or cross:
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”
—Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)
“Should the German people lay down their arms, the Soviets ... would occupy all eastern and south-eastern Europe together with the greater part of the Reich. Over all this territory, which with the Soviet Union included, would be of enormous extent, an iron curtain would at once descend.”
—Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945)
“I know we’re not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don’t care that we don’t.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)