Bremen Transatlantic Flight Medal 1928 Kohl von Hunefeld Junkers Aviation Germany

Original German commemorative medal of 1928 marking the flight of the aircraft Bremen, the first successful east-to-west crossing of the North Atlantic by a heavier-than-air machine. The medal is struck in silvered metal and measures 1.5 inches (approximately 38 millimeters) in diameter.

The obverse bears the conjoined profile busts of two aviators in leather flying helmets and goggles, identified by the surrounding legends VON HÜNEFELD at left and HERMANN KÖHL at right, with the date 13. APRIL 1928 in the exergue below. The reverse depicts a single-engined monoplane banking over a heaving sea beneath a broken sky, encircled by the motto ALLEN GEWALTEN ZUM TROTZ SICH ERHALTEN ("to hold firm in defiance of all powers"), a line drawn from Goethe, with the aircraft's name BREMEN across the base. The design names the two German members of the crew, the pilot and the expedition's aristocratic sponsor, and omits the Irish airman who completed the trio, distinguishing this German-issue type from the three-portrait versions of the medal that add Fitzmaurice and carry a different reverse legend.

The flight it commemorates was one of the landmark achievements of the pioneering age of aviation. Charles Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic from west to east, with the prevailing winds, in 1927; the far harder passage from Europe to North America, against those winds, had defeated every previous attempt. On the morning of 12 April 1928 the Bremen, a Junkers W33 low-wing monoplane of all-metal corrugated construction registered D-1167, lifted off from Baldonnel Aerodrome near Dublin, Ireland, laden with fuel for the crossing to New York. Aboard were the pilot Captain Hermann Köhl, a former army and airline flyer; Ehrenfried Günther Freiherr von Hünefeld, the frail aristocrat and North German Lloyd shipping official whose determination and financing had driven the venture; and the Irish Major James Fitzmaurice, who had joined for the attempt. After some thirty-six and a half hours battling fog, blizzard, and compass failure over the ocean, blind for hundreds of miles, they came down not at New York but on the frozen surface of a reservoir on remote Greenly Island, off the coast of Labrador on the Quebec side, on 13 April 1928. The landing damaged the aircraft, but all three men survived, and their feat was celebrated across Germany, Ireland, and the United States as the conquest of the "wrong-way" Atlantic. The Bremen itself survives, preserved today in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

The medal belongs to the wave of commemorative art that followed the flight, issued to a German public hungry for national achievement in the aftermath of the First World War and eager to honor Köhl and von Hünefeld as heroes. Von Hünefeld, already gravely ill, died of cancer less than a year later, in February 1929, which lent the commemoratives an added elegiac weight. The choice of a Goethe line for the reverse, and the naming of the aircraft for the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, root the piece in German cultural and civic pride, presenting the transatlantic crossing as a triumph of will against overwhelming natural force.

Condition is good and consistent with a struck medal of its age. The relief is clear on both faces, the twin portraits and the aircraft sharply modeled, and all legends and the date fully legible. The surfaces show handling wear, some darkening and unevenness to the silvered finish, and minor edge marks, with an area of brighter rubbing on the obverse high points. There is no significant damage, and the medal presents solidly.

For the collector, the medal offers a well-modeled, clearly legible memento of a first-rank aviation milestone, naming two of its principal figures and the famous aircraft, and carrying a literary German motto. Bremen-flight material is collected across aviation, German, and interwar history, and the two-portrait German-issue medal is a distinct and desirable variant. As a 1928 aviation commemorative it falls just outside the Imperial German period proper, honoring a Weimar-era flight, but its subject, its German aviator and aristocratic honorees, and its naming for the Hanseatic city of Bremen place it naturally alongside German personality, nobility, and aviation collections.