Item

An original Second World War German bullion collar tab (Kragenpatte) of the Zollgrenzschutz, the Customs Border Guard of the German customs administration. It is worked on a bottle-green wool base — the branch color of the customs service — in heavy hand-embroidered silver bullion wire with a bright, high-relief finish. The tab measures approximately 4.8 cm long by 2.8 cm wide; as the piece rests directly against the Lobo Forensics scale in the photograph, this is a close-approximate reading. The reverse retains its original buckram stiffener and folded green facing, with adhesive and mounting traces showing it was uniform-removed, and light age entirely consistent with a genuine period piece. No maker's mark is present on the backing.

Design & Rank

The face carries a full silver bullion twisted-cord border enclosing a laurel spray with a central tied knot, and above the spray two six-pointed bullion stars set side by side. Read against the official period uniform plate for the Landzollbeamten (Zollgrenzschutz), the wreath-and-pip system marks rank within the senior official grades (höherer Dienst): the plain laurel denotes the Zollrat, a single star the Regierungsrat/Oberzollrat level, and this two-star arrangement a grade higher still — the senior councillor tier, Oberregierungsrat/Ministerialrat, standing just below the Generalinspekteur des Zollgrenzschutzes at the top of the service. In the customs official hierarchy this equates to a senior field-grade appointment, and the fully hand-wired bullion construction is itself a mark of that elevated grade. (The plate labels the single-star group explicitly; the two-star tab is the next rung up in the same senior-official ladder.)

History

The Zollgrenzschutz, the Customs Border Guard, was the uniformed frontier arm of the German customs administration under the Reich finance authorities — a civil customs service, not a military formation, charged with guarding the land frontiers, controlling crossing points, and combating smuggling. Its officials wore field-green uniforms faced in bottle green, and its senior grades administered whole frontier districts, directing the customs officers and border stations along a stretch of the Reich's boundary. As Germany's frontiers shifted through the later 1930s and the war years, the service's responsibilities grew, and the men at this senior-councillor level carried real administrative authority over the border apparatus. High-grade bullion insignia from the customs border service is markedly scarcer than ordinary army cloth — most surviving customs items are the lower enlisted-equivalent grades — so a senior official's two-star collar tab in hand-embroidered silver wire is a genuinely uncommon and impressive survivor, a tangible artifact of the leadership that ran Germany's frontier control during the period.

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