Germany, Wehrmacht. A Private Late-War Photo Album, with Award Documents and D-Day Content, to Grenadier Kurt Wurl

 (Heer Fotoalbum). A fascinating private wartime photo album belonging to eventual-Grenadier Kurt Wurl, who initially served with a Kriegsmarine coastal artillery unit in France before transferring to Heer (Grenadie-Regiment 404) service, consisting of a card stock binding with the cover featuring a uniform-removed Kriegsmarine tropical cap eagle measuring 65 mm (w) x 30 mm (h), the interior content consisting of paper stock pages pasted with 47 private wartime images, 27 tourist images, postcards, and newspaper clippings, and additional ephemera and handwritten notes documenting the owner’s wartime career, opening with Kriegsmarine service in occupied France, including scenes of training as a fresh recruit in the late winter and early spring, with images of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, Rheims, and Épernay, with depictions of personnel on duty and at leisure (with one wearing a Kriegsmarine High Seas Fleet Badge), transitioning to images of the owner’s friends and comrades, with the final third of the album transitioning to content from D-Day and the subsequent Normandy campaign (beginning with Wurl’s handwritten account of operations against Allied forces in France through July 1944), with newspaper clippings detailing the advances of American forces (and surrender of German units as resistance crumbled), concluding with images of a prisoner of war (POW) camp in Westbury, Wiltshire, England, following Wurl’s entering into Allied custody, notably featuring a hand-sketched depiction of the camp and a typewritten letter of best wishes for Christmas and New Years (1946/1947) from a Major and camp commander, also including an award document for a 1939 Iron Cross II Class, named to Wurl as a Grenadier of Grenadier-Regiment 404, issued from headquarters on 9 October 1944 and certified by the handwritten signature of a Generalleutnant, measuring 22 cm (w) x 19 cm (h), demonstrating the detachment of some of the interior pages from the spine as well as the loosening of a small number of photos, a superb primary account of a participant of the Normandy campaign who survived the war in Allied captivity in near extremely fine condition.