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Europe/Germany : Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

 

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BigDaddyDave

11 Sep 2017
03:48:14pm
I've come across a neighbor who inherited a pile of used pre-WW II German stamps. My question pertains to Scott Catalog #033. It's pretty heavily cancelled. Of course, cancellation of Nazi era stamps is usually a good thing. Could anyone guess just how badly the heavy cancellation of this stamp impact the 'real' vs. the catalog value?

Thanks for your help!

Big Daddy Dave

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Opa
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11 Sep 2017
05:39:30pm
re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Unfortunately these are not rare stamps, so clean cancel would be better. You should check the watermark on the stamp for wafers or lozenges. If it has the later the Michel lists it at €400. In the condition of the stamp, I expect you would receive about €25 to
€30. For wafer Watermark only a few cents. Hope I could help.

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BigDaddyDave

11 Sep 2017
11:42:21pm
re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Opa, Thanks for your response. I'll definitely check the watermarks... Take Care, Big Daddy Davde

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Guthrum
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12 Sep 2017
07:18:52am
re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

"Of course, cancellation of Nazi era stamps is usually a good thing."

This would appear to be an inflation-period stamp from around 1923, and so definitely not from the Nazi era. But why is cancellation of Nazi era stamps usually a good thing? Mint Third Reich issues are generally catalogued more highly than used.

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malcolm197

13 Sep 2017
03:40:52pm
re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Ian

I take your point about catalogue values. However if you look at auction sites and similar,postally used Reich stamps, particularly commemoratives, are much less evident than used.

It is not my field, but I wonder if the demand for mint stamps is more driven by the design and the iconography, rather than by their purpose, and the price is being pushed up by historians and students of the political, propaganda and social aspects of the period ? Certainly other artefacts relating to the period seem to be more highly prized than German material of other periods, and those of other countries.

Malcolm

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pigdoc

09 Jan 2018
01:49:14pm
re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Not to subvert this thread too badly, but for BigDaddyDave's interest, I present an item recently acquired for my collection for the price of a few dollars. It's a usage of inflation postage, which by itself is not very interesting...except for the postmark - Munich, November 10, 1923. This is the day after the Beer Hall Putsch was suppressed in that city.Image Not Found
As such, the contents of this letter would probably have been supremely interesting. For those more accomplished students of this era in history, do the sender/recipient or address bear any interesting correlations to the event? I think the sender is a publishing house, correct? I wonder if the address bears any geographical correlation to the event. By the way, I'm new to SOR, and my main collecting interest now is "twofors" or "threefors" that contain intersections of historical and postal events that are not planned or intentional.

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pigdoc

09 Jan 2018
02:09:39pm
re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Whoops, should have done my homework...AND probably started a new thread on this one.

I googled Dr. Ernst Boepple. There's a Wikipedia page for him. Wow.

He took over the Deutsche Volksverlag publishing house in 1919, was one of the founders of the German Worker's Party, and indeed, participated in the Beer Hall Putsch. From wiki: "The Deutsche Volksverlag published a large section of the early formative National Socialist literature..."

Now, I *really* wish I had the contents of this envelope!

Apparently, Dr. Boepple was not in jail on November 10, 1923 (a Saturday, by the way)...or, he had a ghost writer.

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Guthrum
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10 Jan 2018
05:53:27am
re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Paul, you'd do well to identify the addressee - I've always found pre-war German script impossible to decipher!

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pigdoc

10 Jan 2018
12:01:10pm
re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Yes, as I thought about it later, it would make sense to attempt to decipher the addressee information.

Here's what I have so far.

The addressee city is obviously Hamburg. I'm also very confident that the street name (below the city) is Mönckeberg Str. 3. At this location, in 1913, the Klopperhaus was built. This was an 8-story office building that was converted in the late 1960s to a gallery. Mönckebergstraße is, today, a shopping district.

For the addressee's name, I'm pretty sure the first name is "Waldemar". And, if you compare the first character of the surname to the "H" of Hamburg, they are identical
Wikipedia has a list of notable Nazi party members. The only Waldemar H is Waldemar Hoven, who was the chief physician at Buchenwald concentration camp. He was convicted during the Nuremberg trials for various terminal experimentation on inmates and was hanged in 1948.

Waldemar Hoven's history is recorded in various places, perhaps the most reliable is the Nuremberg testimony he gave, where he stated that he was secretary at his father's sanitorium from 1924 to 1930. He testified that he was in the US between 1921 and 1924. So, this makes my read of the letter's CDS problematical if Hoven is the addressee. It could be 1928.

I did surf around for examples of other Munich cancellations of this period and found a couple from the early 1930s that had an identical format. So, it seems that the cancellation is not someone's fantasy.

The other thing that makes it likely for this to be correspondence between Boepple and Hoven is that Wikipedia says that "Boepple was deeply implicated in the Final Solution...". If this all fits together, it would seem to be tentative evidence that the Nazis were planning the Holocaust for more than a decade before the outbreak of WWII.

I believe the title word on the envelope (word before "Waldemar") is Brief_____ which would translate to "letter"-something.

Again, the contents of this cover would have been very interesting. I have to wonder if they were to enlist Hoven as a co-conspirator in the Final Solution. Hoven joined the SS in 1934, years after this letter was sent to him.

That's my story, anyway!

Thanks for motivating me to do this research!
And, who says inflation postage is boring?

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dollhaus

10 Jan 2018
12:55:03pm
re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Nice bit of detective work! And yes, it does make you that much more curious about the possible contents.

In tracking items like this, the German items always pose a problem. Fraktur is bad enough, but when you throw in Suetterlin handwriting, I have to throw in the towel.There are a few who frequent the site who can do pretty well with handwritten material. Jansimon comes to mind.

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pigdoc

10 Jan 2018
01:48:19pm
re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Whoops, when attempting to verify the CDS, I neglected to consider the contemporary postage rate.

Here is a nice summary of the periods of the inflation postage rates:
http://www.germanyphilatelicsocietyusa.org/chapters/tc/rates/rates.pdf

The cover has a 200 Million mark stamp on it. That was correct for a 25g letter between November 5 and November 11, 1923. So, the CDS *has* to be November 10, 1923.

Besides, monetary reform took effect on December 1, 1923. So, the CDS *couldn't* be 1928.

So now, either the addressee is NOT Waldemar Hoven, because he testified that he was in the US in 1923, OR he lied about that at the Nuremburg trials.

Here's the page with Hoven's Nuremberg testimony:
http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/documents/1826-affidavit-concerning-waldemar-hovens?q=%2Ahoven#p.1

...sigh...

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Bobstamp
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10 Jan 2018
11:20:42pm
re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Back to Big Daddy Dave's inflation-era stamp...

I'm not certain, but it appears to me that the cancellation reads "LUBECK".

Lubeck, in Schleswig-Holstein, northern Germany, is a major German port. It was the leading city of the Hanseatic League, and because of its extensive Brick Gothic architecture, it is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

Lubeck is of interest to me because it was the first German city to be targeted for an area bombing raid by the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force, in 1942. Up to that time, the RAF had had a dismal success rate against Germany, with most of its bombs completely missing their targets (factories and military installations) but often destroying homes and killing civilians. For a time, not because of civilian deaths but because of heavy losses of bombers over Germany, the bombing campaign was suspended.

The head of the RAF, Arthur "Bomber" Harris, developed plans, approved by Churchill, to bomb cities rather than individual targets, first with high-explosive bombs to destroy structures, followed by incendiary bombs to ignite the debris left by the high-explosive bombs. It was hoped that such bombing would create firestorms that would destroy entire cities. That didn't often happen because the development of firestorms depended on the right conditions of air temperature, wind, humidity, and the types of fuels that were available.

Lubeck was targeted for such a raid on 28 March 1942. The raid resulted in a firestorm that caused severe damage to the historic city centre. This raid destroyed three large churches and much of the built-up area; the bells of St Marienkircke plunged to the stone floor. Later in the war, raids on cities such as Hamburg and Dresden created huge firestorms with horrific results. Churchill tried, unsuccessfully, to distance himself from these raids and blame Harris, but it is clear that the British cabinet and not just Arthur Harris that shouldered the responsibility. And it has to be noted that it was the Germans themselves who first used area bombing, first on Rotterdam and then on London and other British cities.

I learned about Arthur Harris and area bombing raids while researching a wartime postcard that I bought in an antique store in British Columbia. It was posted by a Canadian airman, Joe Hicks, who was killed when his bomber crashed in Denmark following an area bombing raid on Rostock in northern Germany. For details, see Sgt. Joe Hicks and the Battle for Europe.

Bob

PS — A curious coincidence: Just this afternoon I was reading about the firestorm that destroyed Hamburg. A couple of hours later, I met an elderly German woman who turned out to be a survivor of the Hamburg firestorm. After the war, she married a British soldier and they both emigrated to Canada.


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pigdoc

11 Jan 2018
09:44:32am
re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Hi bob,

Yes, thanks for pulling this thread back on-topic!

In that reference I posted yesterday from the German Philatelic Society, the author asserts that about 90% of the postally-used German inflation issues have faked cancellations.
Wow, that's a BIG number!

As far as Big Daddy's 800 Thousand mark issue at the top of this thread, I fully agree that it looks like Lubeck was the PO. What I would do next to verify the authenticity of the cancellation would be to determine the periods when this stamp would most likely have been used. For example, 800 Thousand marks was the rate for 25-50 grams between October 1 and 10, 1923. Then, look at other German material from that specific interval from Lubeck to see if the cancel is the correct style. It looks like the date is the 22nd day of some month, so this rules out October 1 to 10 for that rate, so try the next iteration. And so on. There might be some opportunity in employing sophisticated imaging techniques to tease out the rest of the CDS, but you can bet a dollar to a donut hole that it's 1923. In fact, that might be part of a "3" peeking out of the lower loop on the 8 of 800 on the stamp.

I intend to plumb this group for their expertise in this area (stay tuned), because I'm sure that it is vast.

Over the years, I have pondered what might be useful criteria to make the distinction between authentic and faked cancellations, beyond the obvious ones relating to issue dates, postal rates, cancellation styles, etc. Thinking about the various qualities of cancellations. It just seems to me that it would be extremely difficult to expertly fake a cancellation. Much more difficult than faking an overprint, for example.

I know there are many faked Zeppelin covers out there, and most of these are fairly obvious fakes, to me. Often, the rubber-stamped cachets are poorly done.



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Bobstamp
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11 Jan 2018
11:00:42am
re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

My understanding is that the inflation stamp cancellations weren't faked per se, but were "favour cancelled" by postal clerks for sale to customers, using standard cancellation hammers, which is why it's hard to impossible to determine if an individual stamp was used postally. I suppose you could describe the "faked" cancellations as philatelic. Perhaps someone can tell me if my understanding is correct.

Bob

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pigdoc

11 Jan 2018
11:29:18am
re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

I kind of get your point Bob.

However, there are a couple of logical issues that I'm having trouble justifying.

If I put myself in the shoes of anyone living through those times of hyperinflation, I'd have a VERY difficult time shelling out cash that is being extremely rapidly devalued for anything non-essential (like a cancelled stamp). That is, unless I was a 1%-er.

And, because the duration of 'true' use of inflation stamps was relatively short (6-8 months) and the rates of inflation were so high, it should be fairly easy to suss out a cancellation with a date that doesn't correspond to the period a stamp was in use. Monetary reform came in rather abruptly (on December 1, 1923), so if inflation issues have cancellations after that date, it would be obvious that it was done as a favor.

Next question, I guess, is how 'corruptable' postal workers were. Could they be induced to apply back-dated cancellations?

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Author/Postings
BigDaddyDave

11 Sep 2017
03:48:14pm

I've come across a neighbor who inherited a pile of used pre-WW II German stamps. My question pertains to Scott Catalog #033. It's pretty heavily cancelled. Of course, cancellation of Nazi era stamps is usually a good thing. Could anyone guess just how badly the heavy cancellation of this stamp impact the 'real' vs. the catalog value?

Thanks for your help!

Big Daddy Dave

Image Not Found

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Opa

11 Sep 2017
05:39:30pm

re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Unfortunately these are not rare stamps, so clean cancel would be better. You should check the watermark on the stamp for wafers or lozenges. If it has the later the Michel lists it at €400. In the condition of the stamp, I expect you would receive about €25 to
€30. For wafer Watermark only a few cents. Hope I could help.

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BigDaddyDave

11 Sep 2017
11:42:21pm

re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Opa, Thanks for your response. I'll definitely check the watermarks... Take Care, Big Daddy Davde

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Guthrum

12 Sep 2017
07:18:52am

re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

"Of course, cancellation of Nazi era stamps is usually a good thing."

This would appear to be an inflation-period stamp from around 1923, and so definitely not from the Nazi era. But why is cancellation of Nazi era stamps usually a good thing? Mint Third Reich issues are generally catalogued more highly than used.

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malcolm197

13 Sep 2017
03:40:52pm

re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Ian

I take your point about catalogue values. However if you look at auction sites and similar,postally used Reich stamps, particularly commemoratives, are much less evident than used.

It is not my field, but I wonder if the demand for mint stamps is more driven by the design and the iconography, rather than by their purpose, and the price is being pushed up by historians and students of the political, propaganda and social aspects of the period ? Certainly other artefacts relating to the period seem to be more highly prized than German material of other periods, and those of other countries.

Malcolm

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pigdoc

09 Jan 2018
01:49:14pm

re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Not to subvert this thread too badly, but for BigDaddyDave's interest, I present an item recently acquired for my collection for the price of a few dollars. It's a usage of inflation postage, which by itself is not very interesting...except for the postmark - Munich, November 10, 1923. This is the day after the Beer Hall Putsch was suppressed in that city.Image Not Found
As such, the contents of this letter would probably have been supremely interesting. For those more accomplished students of this era in history, do the sender/recipient or address bear any interesting correlations to the event? I think the sender is a publishing house, correct? I wonder if the address bears any geographical correlation to the event. By the way, I'm new to SOR, and my main collecting interest now is "twofors" or "threefors" that contain intersections of historical and postal events that are not planned or intentional.

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pigdoc

09 Jan 2018
02:09:39pm

re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Whoops, should have done my homework...AND probably started a new thread on this one.

I googled Dr. Ernst Boepple. There's a Wikipedia page for him. Wow.

He took over the Deutsche Volksverlag publishing house in 1919, was one of the founders of the German Worker's Party, and indeed, participated in the Beer Hall Putsch. From wiki: "The Deutsche Volksverlag published a large section of the early formative National Socialist literature..."

Now, I *really* wish I had the contents of this envelope!

Apparently, Dr. Boepple was not in jail on November 10, 1923 (a Saturday, by the way)...or, he had a ghost writer.

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Guthrum

10 Jan 2018
05:53:27am

re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Paul, you'd do well to identify the addressee - I've always found pre-war German script impossible to decipher!

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pigdoc

10 Jan 2018
12:01:10pm

re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Yes, as I thought about it later, it would make sense to attempt to decipher the addressee information.

Here's what I have so far.

The addressee city is obviously Hamburg. I'm also very confident that the street name (below the city) is Mönckeberg Str. 3. At this location, in 1913, the Klopperhaus was built. This was an 8-story office building that was converted in the late 1960s to a gallery. Mönckebergstraße is, today, a shopping district.

For the addressee's name, I'm pretty sure the first name is "Waldemar". And, if you compare the first character of the surname to the "H" of Hamburg, they are identical
Wikipedia has a list of notable Nazi party members. The only Waldemar H is Waldemar Hoven, who was the chief physician at Buchenwald concentration camp. He was convicted during the Nuremberg trials for various terminal experimentation on inmates and was hanged in 1948.

Waldemar Hoven's history is recorded in various places, perhaps the most reliable is the Nuremberg testimony he gave, where he stated that he was secretary at his father's sanitorium from 1924 to 1930. He testified that he was in the US between 1921 and 1924. So, this makes my read of the letter's CDS problematical if Hoven is the addressee. It could be 1928.

I did surf around for examples of other Munich cancellations of this period and found a couple from the early 1930s that had an identical format. So, it seems that the cancellation is not someone's fantasy.

The other thing that makes it likely for this to be correspondence between Boepple and Hoven is that Wikipedia says that "Boepple was deeply implicated in the Final Solution...". If this all fits together, it would seem to be tentative evidence that the Nazis were planning the Holocaust for more than a decade before the outbreak of WWII.

I believe the title word on the envelope (word before "Waldemar") is Brief_____ which would translate to "letter"-something.

Again, the contents of this cover would have been very interesting. I have to wonder if they were to enlist Hoven as a co-conspirator in the Final Solution. Hoven joined the SS in 1934, years after this letter was sent to him.

That's my story, anyway!

Thanks for motivating me to do this research!
And, who says inflation postage is boring?

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dollhaus

10 Jan 2018
12:55:03pm

re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Nice bit of detective work! And yes, it does make you that much more curious about the possible contents.

In tracking items like this, the German items always pose a problem. Fraktur is bad enough, but when you throw in Suetterlin handwriting, I have to throw in the towel.There are a few who frequent the site who can do pretty well with handwritten material. Jansimon comes to mind.

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pigdoc

10 Jan 2018
01:48:19pm

re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Whoops, when attempting to verify the CDS, I neglected to consider the contemporary postage rate.

Here is a nice summary of the periods of the inflation postage rates:
http://www.germanyphilatelicsocietyusa.org/chapters/tc/rates/rates.pdf

The cover has a 200 Million mark stamp on it. That was correct for a 25g letter between November 5 and November 11, 1923. So, the CDS *has* to be November 10, 1923.

Besides, monetary reform took effect on December 1, 1923. So, the CDS *couldn't* be 1928.

So now, either the addressee is NOT Waldemar Hoven, because he testified that he was in the US in 1923, OR he lied about that at the Nuremburg trials.

Here's the page with Hoven's Nuremberg testimony:
http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/documents/1826-affidavit-concerning-waldemar-hovens?q=%2Ahoven#p.1

...sigh...

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Bobstamp

10 Jan 2018
11:20:42pm

re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Back to Big Daddy Dave's inflation-era stamp...

I'm not certain, but it appears to me that the cancellation reads "LUBECK".

Lubeck, in Schleswig-Holstein, northern Germany, is a major German port. It was the leading city of the Hanseatic League, and because of its extensive Brick Gothic architecture, it is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

Lubeck is of interest to me because it was the first German city to be targeted for an area bombing raid by the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force, in 1942. Up to that time, the RAF had had a dismal success rate against Germany, with most of its bombs completely missing their targets (factories and military installations) but often destroying homes and killing civilians. For a time, not because of civilian deaths but because of heavy losses of bombers over Germany, the bombing campaign was suspended.

The head of the RAF, Arthur "Bomber" Harris, developed plans, approved by Churchill, to bomb cities rather than individual targets, first with high-explosive bombs to destroy structures, followed by incendiary bombs to ignite the debris left by the high-explosive bombs. It was hoped that such bombing would create firestorms that would destroy entire cities. That didn't often happen because the development of firestorms depended on the right conditions of air temperature, wind, humidity, and the types of fuels that were available.

Lubeck was targeted for such a raid on 28 March 1942. The raid resulted in a firestorm that caused severe damage to the historic city centre. This raid destroyed three large churches and much of the built-up area; the bells of St Marienkircke plunged to the stone floor. Later in the war, raids on cities such as Hamburg and Dresden created huge firestorms with horrific results. Churchill tried, unsuccessfully, to distance himself from these raids and blame Harris, but it is clear that the British cabinet and not just Arthur Harris that shouldered the responsibility. And it has to be noted that it was the Germans themselves who first used area bombing, first on Rotterdam and then on London and other British cities.

I learned about Arthur Harris and area bombing raids while researching a wartime postcard that I bought in an antique store in British Columbia. It was posted by a Canadian airman, Joe Hicks, who was killed when his bomber crashed in Denmark following an area bombing raid on Rostock in northern Germany. For details, see Sgt. Joe Hicks and the Battle for Europe.

Bob

PS — A curious coincidence: Just this afternoon I was reading about the firestorm that destroyed Hamburg. A couple of hours later, I met an elderly German woman who turned out to be a survivor of the Hamburg firestorm. After the war, she married a British soldier and they both emigrated to Canada.


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pigdoc

11 Jan 2018
09:44:32am

re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

Hi bob,

Yes, thanks for pulling this thread back on-topic!

In that reference I posted yesterday from the German Philatelic Society, the author asserts that about 90% of the postally-used German inflation issues have faked cancellations.
Wow, that's a BIG number!

As far as Big Daddy's 800 Thousand mark issue at the top of this thread, I fully agree that it looks like Lubeck was the PO. What I would do next to verify the authenticity of the cancellation would be to determine the periods when this stamp would most likely have been used. For example, 800 Thousand marks was the rate for 25-50 grams between October 1 and 10, 1923. Then, look at other German material from that specific interval from Lubeck to see if the cancel is the correct style. It looks like the date is the 22nd day of some month, so this rules out October 1 to 10 for that rate, so try the next iteration. And so on. There might be some opportunity in employing sophisticated imaging techniques to tease out the rest of the CDS, but you can bet a dollar to a donut hole that it's 1923. In fact, that might be part of a "3" peeking out of the lower loop on the 8 of 800 on the stamp.

I intend to plumb this group for their expertise in this area (stay tuned), because I'm sure that it is vast.

Over the years, I have pondered what might be useful criteria to make the distinction between authentic and faked cancellations, beyond the obvious ones relating to issue dates, postal rates, cancellation styles, etc. Thinking about the various qualities of cancellations. It just seems to me that it would be extremely difficult to expertly fake a cancellation. Much more difficult than faking an overprint, for example.

I know there are many faked Zeppelin covers out there, and most of these are fairly obvious fakes, to me. Often, the rubber-stamped cachets are poorly done.



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Bobstamp

11 Jan 2018
11:00:42am

re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

My understanding is that the inflation stamp cancellations weren't faked per se, but were "favour cancelled" by postal clerks for sale to customers, using standard cancellation hammers, which is why it's hard to impossible to determine if an individual stamp was used postally. I suppose you could describe the "faked" cancellations as philatelic. Perhaps someone can tell me if my understanding is correct.

Bob

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pigdoc

11 Jan 2018
11:29:18am

re: Value of a Pre-WW II German Stamp

I kind of get your point Bob.

However, there are a couple of logical issues that I'm having trouble justifying.

If I put myself in the shoes of anyone living through those times of hyperinflation, I'd have a VERY difficult time shelling out cash that is being extremely rapidly devalued for anything non-essential (like a cancelled stamp). That is, unless I was a 1%-er.

And, because the duration of 'true' use of inflation stamps was relatively short (6-8 months) and the rates of inflation were so high, it should be fairly easy to suss out a cancellation with a date that doesn't correspond to the period a stamp was in use. Monetary reform came in rather abruptly (on December 1, 1923), so if inflation issues have cancellations after that date, it would be obvious that it was done as a favor.

Next question, I guess, is how 'corruptable' postal workers were. Could they be induced to apply back-dated cancellations?

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