Tuesday, April 14, 2026

Why the USSR Rejected this West German Ju 52 Cover

Mr. Enthusiastic Newsletter , postal war

Why was this cover rejected?

The most likely reason is that the stamp was not seen in the USSR as a harmless aviation commemorative. A contemporary German newspaper article makes the issue much clearer: the 20 Pfennig Ju 52 stamp was said to show aircraft D-2201, identified in the article as the Lufthansa machine used by Hitler in his 1932 presidential election campaign. If that identification was accepted, then the stamp was not simply commemorating early airmail. It was reproducing an aircraft associated with Hitler.

That is what makes this returned cover so important. The letter itself was properly sent. It was a registered West German airmail cover addressed to Riga in the USSR. But it was struck with the Soviet cachet “NON ADMIS - ART 28 … DE LA CONVENTION UPU” and sent back. The cover also received a typed explanatory slip from Postamt Hannover 3, stating that it had been returned by the Soviet postal authorities without a reason being given, and suggesting that the return was linked to objections against valid German postage stamps.

A newspaper article helps explain what those objections probably were. Under the headline “Die alte Ju von der Bundespost”, it argued that the stamp did not depict just any Ju 52. According to the article, the aircraft number on the stamp was D-2201, and that plane was remembered as the one Hitler used during his 1932 campaign for the office of Reich President. In that reading, the stamp became politically charged. It was no longer a nostalgic aviation design, but a reminder of the Nazi past.

That distinction matters. A stamp can be fully valid in the country that issued it and still become unacceptable abroad because of the image it carries. That seems to be exactly what happened here. The issue was not the postage rate, not the registration, and not the address. The issue was the design, or more precisely, what the design was understood to represent.

This is why the cover belongs firmly in the field of Cold War postkrieg. The postal system became a place where political memory and symbolism overruled normal postal logic. West Germany had issued a valid commemorative stamp. The Soviet side appears to have treated that same stamp as ideologically objectionable. The result was exclusion and return.

For postal history, this is a particularly satisfying item because the evidence works on several levels. The Soviet NON ADMIS cachet shows the formal rejection. The Hannover slip shows that the West German postal side believed valid stamps were the cause. And the contemporary newspaper article explains why this specific stamp could provoke rejection: the Ju 52 shown was understood to be Hitler’s 1932 campaign aircraft.

So this was not simply a cover returned under Article 28. It was a piece of mail caught in the politics of memory. A valid stamp crossed a political border and became unacceptable because the image on it was read not as aviation history, but as a symbol with a Nazi association.

That is what gives this cover its real strength. It is not merely a returned letter. It is evidence of how a single stamp design could trigger political rejection in the Cold War postal system.

The “Hidden Hitler Head” on the 1964 Ellwangen Stamp

Mr. Enthusiastic

On 15 December 1964 the Deutsche Bundespost and the West Berlin postal administration each issued a 50 Pfennig stamp in the long-running definitive series “Deutsche Bauwerke aus zwölf Jahrhunderten”. The value shows Ellwangen, with the castle gate filling the center of the design and a stylized tree growing alongside the building. For most postal customers it was just another new building stamp, slightly rustic in its woodcut style but otherwise unremarkable.

With a little imagination, however, the tree on the right-hand side can be read quite differently. Some observers saw in the branches a small “head with hat”, and those inclined to see politics everywhere quickly interpreted this as a “Hitler head” hidden in the foliage. On its own this would probably have remained a collector’s curiosity, the sort of pattern our brains like to discover in clouds and wallpaper.

In East Germany, though, this perceived image did not remain a harmless joke. Postal-war literature reports that the East German postal authorities “discovered” on this 50 Pfennig Ellwangen stamp a Hitler head with bowler hat concealed in the treetops and used the story for propaganda purposes. It suited the official narrative of latent fascism in the Federal Republic and provided a convenient example that could be shown in philatelic circles and internal briefings.

Interestingly, this interpretation did not lead to a general ban on the stamp. Mail franked with the Ellwangen/Jagst value was, as a rule, accepted in the GDR, even when it appeared on the same cover as the politically sensitive “20 Jahre Vertreibung” stamp of 1965, which was routinely blacked out by the East German post. In most districts the supposed Hitler head remained untouched, which makes the surviving covers all the more instructive.

The notable exception was the Oberpostdirektion Potsdam. In its area the postal staff sometimes took the accusation literally and blacked out only the alleged head in the tree, while leaving the rest of the stamp perfectly readable. On some covers, where the Expulsion stamp had already been obliterated, the “Hitler head” in the Ellwangen tree was also covered. This treatment is recorded in postal-war catalogues under the entry “1964.3‑E Hitler Kopf geschwärzt”.

No official order has yet come to light that would explain this practice. It is therefore unclear whether the blackening was an unofficial initiative by over-zealous postal workers, or whether there was an internal directive that never reached the public record. What we can say is that the measure appears to have been restricted to this one regional administration; elsewhere in the GDR the Ellwangen stamp, Hitler head or not, passed unmolested through the postal system.

From a postal-historical point of view this turns an otherwise ordinary building definitive into a neat little Cold War document. The stamp itself was not withdrawn or surcharged, yet a tiny detail in its design was enough to provoke localised censorship in one East German district. Covers showing the carefully placed black or grey patch in the treetop – especially when they also bear an obliterated Vertreibung stamp – nicely illustrate how political interpretation, propaganda and day‑to‑day postal practice could intersect in the divided Germany of the 1960s.

The CIA's Upside-Down Stamp: How an Invert Error Embarrassed America's Most Secret Agency

Mr. Enthusiastic Errors , Newsletter

Every now and then, the post office accidentally gives collectors a small miracle. In the case of the $1 Rush Lamp and Candle Holder stamp, that miracle came in the form of a tiny upside-down printing that ended up embarrassing the CIA and delighting philatelists worldwide.

America's Light, Printed Crooked

Back in 1979, the United States issued a $1 stamp as part of the Americana definitive series. It's a rather serious design for a workhorse stamp: a colonial rush lamp and candle holder, complete with the motto "America's Light Fueled by Truth and Reason." The idea was to celebrate the American Enlightenment: light, knowledge, rational thought, all packed into a little brown, orange, yellow and tan rectangle.

But this stamp had one more story to tell, not about the Enlightenment, but about human error.

How Do You Turn a Candle Upside Down?

The stamp was produced the hard way: multiple colors, multiple passes, multiple presses at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The flame was printed lithographically, while the detailed brown elements, the holder, the lettering, all the engraved lines, were added later in a separate pass.

At some point between November 1 and 15, 1985, at least one sheet of 400 stamps went wrong. When the already-printed sheets went back to get the brown engraving, one pane of 100 somehow went through the press flipped. The result: the brown portion: holder, candle outline, and inscription, is perfectly upside down relative to the flame.

To non-collectors it might look like just a quirky little design. To us, it's a classic invert error, the kind of thing that makes your heart beat a little faster when you notice it in a pile of ordinary stamps.

Enter the CIA

The story would have been good enough if the sheet had simply gone to a random customer at a random post office. But this is the "CIA invert" for a reason.

In April 1986, an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency was sent to the McLean, Virginia, post office substation to buy stamps with government funds. He came back with a partial sheet of $1 Rush Lamp stamps. For a while, no one noticed anything odd. Only later did one sharp-eyed colleague realize that the brown parts were upside down compared to the flame.

Imagine that moment: a group of intelligence professionals, trained to spot details in satellite photos and classified documents, suddenly discovering that their own postage was more "intelligent" than they had given it credit for.

Nine CIA employees then pooled their money, quietly swapped normal $1 stamps in place of the inverts, and kept some of the error stamps for themselves. The rest were sold to a dealer, and at that point, the story stopped being an internal office curiosity and became philatelic legend.

When the Government Wants Its Stamps Back

Once word got out, the U.S. government was not amused. These stamps had been purchased with public funds, and officials argued that the employees should not profit from what was essentially government property.

Investigations followed, and there were attempts to reclaim the stamps. In the end, four employees reportedly lost their jobs for failing to cooperate, and four of the stamps were returned in exchange for saving those positions. Those four stamps are now preserved at the National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C.

From Office Stationery to Rarity

Only about 95 copies of the CIA invert are accounted for today, making it the rarest and most famous error in the entire Americana series.

Ironically, the Americana definitive series itself was never very popular with the general public and ended up being one of the shortest-lived definitive series of the twentieth century. Yet this one mistake, a single inverted brown printing on a $1 rush lamp stamp, gave the series an enduring fame among collectors that no advertising campaign could ever have achieved.

Next time you flip through a stock book and come across a rather dull brown Americana definitive, take a second look at that rush lamp. Somewhere out there, a handful are still burning, upside down.

Now I am 42 (again)

Mr. Enthusiastic Hope , Newsletter

A philatelic nod to 42

In 2002, I was 42.

I liked the number for a silly reason. It was the famous answer from the books, and I was old enough to enjoy that joke and young enough to repeat it too often. Israel was a harder place then in the way bad weather is hard. You did not like it, but you knew when to take a coat. You watched the news, checked the streets, opened your parcels at the entrance to anywhere, and still went to work, bought groceries, argued about politics, and called it life. This was a few years before the hail of rockets from Gaza.

Back then, fear had borders. It had a bus stop, a market, a cafe, a road junction. It was terrible, but it was concrete. A Jew in Israel knew that he lived with danger, yet he also knew where home was. Home was the place where no one had to explain why the holidays mattered, why history sat at the table with the soup, why one old photograph could silence a room.

I am almost 66 now. Or 42 in hexa, which is the sort of joke that proves I have not changed as much as I pretend.

The world has changed more than I have, or has it?

In 2002, when someone disliked Jews, he usually used old words. They were ugly words, but familiar. They came from the usual cupboards of history. You could point to them and say: there, that is antisemitism. It wore a face that people were still ashamed to show in daylight.

Now it often comes dressed more neatly. It arrives polished, educated, global. It speaks the language of justice while making old accusations sound new. It says "Zionist" and waits to see if anyone objects when it really means "Jew." It claims not to hate Jews while demanding that the only Jewish state behave in a way no other state is ever asked to behave. It tells me that I am imagining things, that I am too sensitive, that this time the hatred is principled.

That may be the strangest change of all. The danger no longer always feels local, or even physical, though of course it can become physical soon enough. It feels moral. It feels like standing in a room where people have decided, very calmly, that Jewish fear does not count as fear, Jewish grief does not count as grief, and Jewish self-defense is the one sin that cannot be forgiven.

In 2002, I worried about whether it was safe to stand in the wrong place.

Now I also worry about whether my child, my people, and my country are allowed to stand anywhere at all.

And yet some things have not changed.

I am still a Jew. I am still an Israeli. I still know that memory is a form of self-defense. I still know that survival is not only breathing, but insisting on living as myself, openly, stubbornly, with humor intact. I still know that our enemies always believe they are modern, while their hatred is ancient.

So yes, the world has changed. It has become faster, louder, and in many ways less honest. And yes, I think it has become less safe for Jews, because hatred now travels farther, hides better, and finds excuses more easily. Violence against Jews is brushed away. "Didn't happen," they say, or ignore it. "Fake news," they say, but it isn't!

But I have changed too.

At 42, I thought resilience meant getting through the day.

At 66, I know it also means refusing to let the world explain me out of my own story.

As a collector, I could not resist ending with a small philatelic wink: a 42-cent stamp for the number that once felt like a joke, and now feels like a marker on the road.

Superman - The Immigrant Story Behind the Cape

Mr. Enthusiastic Hope , Newsletter

Superman - The Immigrant Story

Q: Why end with the IDF?

Because the story arc moves from fantasy to responsibility: a 1938 dream of protection and a modern reality of defense.

Everyone knows Superman has a secret identity, but here is the one nobody talks about: Superman is Jewish. In 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster - two Jewish kids from Cleveland whose families fled Eastern Europe - created Superman.

The timing matters. Depression-era America. News from Europe getting darker. And suddenly a character appears who is not just strong, but stubbornly decent.

Superman’s origin is the giveaway. It is not a neat “chosen one” story. It is closer to Moses. A child sent away from a dying homeland in a vessel. A last desperate act by parents who know what is coming. He grows up in a new place, safe, loved, and slightly out of place.

Clark Kent isn’t Superman hiding among humans. Clark Kent is a Jewish kid passing for white. Nervous, intellectual. Thick glasses. Bumbling. That is Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster: two kids who got picked on and dreamed of being strong. Change your name. Change your clothes. No one suspects what you really are.

Superman’s Kryptonian name pulls people into an argument. Kal-El. “El” is a real Hebrew word meaning God, found in many Hebrew names. The “Kal” part is where the internet gets overconfident. Some people insist it means “swift” or even “voice” in Hebrew. But in Hebrew, “kal” (קל) commonly means “light” (not heavy) or “easy”. So I treat the Hebrew-ness as a strong echo, not a courtroom translation.

For Superman, Krypton does not stay in the past. He keeps it. Not as a flag, but as a bruise. The Fortress of Solitude is basically a private museum of a lost world. He studies it, preserves it, mourns it. That is the immigrant story in one sentence: you cannot go back, but you also cannot let go.

The Nazis noticed, too. Their reaction to Superman was not casual irritation, it was ideological hostility. The character was created by two Jewish artists, and the Nazis knew exactly what they were looking at.

After a 1940 comic strip showed Superman ending the war by arresting Hitler, things escalated fast. In February 1940, Look magazine published a two-page feature by Siegel and Shuster. In it, Superman smashes Germany’s Westwall, flies to Berchtesgaden, grabs a protesting Hitler by the collar, scoops up Joseph Stalin from Moscow, and delivers both “power-mad scoundrels” to the League of Nations in Geneva to stand trial for “unprovoked aggression against defenseless countries.”

The Nazi response was swift and vicious. On April 25, 1940, Das Schwarze Korps, the official newspaper of the SS, published a full-page tirade titled “Jerry Siegel greift ein!” (“Jerry Siegel Intervenes!”). The author repeatedly targeted Siegel’s Jewish heritage, calling him “intellectually and physically circumcised” and an “inventive Israelite.” They even turned his name into a slur, calling him “Jerry Siegellack” (sealing wax), implying his work was a stinking mess that should be ignored.

So yes, it is funny in a bitter way: the most “American” superhero became so successfully American that many people forgot he was an immigrant story. The Man of Steel was forged in the shtetl.

And yet, here we are again.

Antisemitism is no longer something you have to hunt for in dusty newspapers. It is back in daylight. On campuses. In city streets. On social feeds. In the language people pretend is “just criticism.” The old tropes never died. They just changed fonts.

The immigrant story that Superman carried into the 20th century has become part of our 21st-century reality for too many Jewish families: looking over their shoulders, explaining their identity, pushing back against lies and hatred.

What does Superman mean now, when Jews are threatened not just in far-off lands but in broad daylight on social feeds and city streets?

Superman was invented in 1938 because two Jewish kids understood something before the world did: that Jews could not count on being protected when things turned ugly. So they imagined a man who would not wait for permission to stop annihilation.

Today, that fantasy is no longer imaginary.

There is no cape. No perfect morality. No clean victories.
Just young men and women doing something their grandparents were never allowed to do.

The Israeli Defense Forces exist for the same reason Superman was invented:
because Jews learned the hard way what happens when no one else comes.

Superman was the dream of “never again.”
The IDF is what “never again” looks like when you mean it.

So when Superman appears on a stamp today, he is no longer just a nostalgic immigrant story.
He is a reminder of the moment Jews stopped waiting to be rescued and started taking responsibility for their own existence.

FAQ

Is Kal-El “voice of God” in Hebrew?
“El” is a genuine Hebrew element meaning God, but “kal” is commonly “light” (not heavy) or “easy” in Hebrew. So it is better to treat the name as a strong echo, not a literal translation.

Why mention antisemitism today in a story about a superhero?
Because Superman was created at a moment when Jews were watching the world darken, and the themes still resonate when hatred returns in public.

Why end with the IDF?
Because the essay’s point is the movement from fantasy to responsibility: a 1938 dream of protection and a modern reality of defense.

Kishinev, Bondi, and the Erosion of Empathy

Mr. Enthusiastic Antisemitism , Nazi

The Bondi terrorist attack and calls for “death to the IDF” and “globalize the Intifada” have had an effect on me, more than I let on, making me wonder what has happened to the world. We are living in a time when facts seem optional and empathy is increasingly selective. We have watched respected voices deny or minimize atrocities committed against Jews, including the refusal by parts of the #MeToo movement to acknowledge the rape and sexual violence inflicted on Israeli women. Silence, deflection, and moral hesitation have become familiar responses whenever Jewish suffering does not fit a preferred narrative. This deafness is not new. It has a long and uncomfortable history.

From People to “Race”

To understand how this happens, it is worth stepping back to the moment when Jews were no longer discussed as individuals, a religion, or a people, but as something more dangerous and abstract. In April 1903, the Jewish community of Kishinev (today Chișinău, Moldova) was subjected to a brutal pogrom. Over two days, Jewish homes and shops were destroyed, dozens of Jews were murdered, and many more were injured, while the authorities largely stood aside. Pogroms were not new, but Kishinev became a turning point because of the language used to justify the violence.

In the weeks leading up to the pogrom, the local newspaper Bessarabets (Бессарабец) published repeated antisemitic articles accusing Jews of ritual murder and portraying them as an inherent threat. Crucially, Jews were described not simply as a religious group, but as a “race.” One of the paper’s most notorious phrases called for a “crusade against the hated race.” With that shift, Jews were no longer people who practiced a faith or belonged to a historical community. They became a biological problem.

Words, Categories, and Violence

This distinction matters. A religion is a system of belief and practice. A people is a historical and cultural community shaped by shared memory, language, and experience. A race, as defined by late nineteenth-century racial thinking, was imagined as biological, fixed, and immutable. Once Jews were redefined as a race, there was nothing they could do to change their status. Conversion, loyalty, and citizenship became irrelevant. Violence could be reframed as necessity.

Although I am not a religious person, the words of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ring true: first Jews were hated because of their religion, then they were hated because of their race, and now they are hated because of their nation-state. The categories change, but the underlying logic does not. It is always about finding a new language to say that Jews, in whatever form, do not belong as free and equal human beings.

Actually Jonathan Sacks used “pogrom” as one of a series of uniquely Jewish words that entered the moral vocabulary of the modern world because of antisemitic violence.

From Kishinev to Nuremberg

This framework did not begin with the Nazis, but it was perfected by them. In 1935, the Nazi regime enacted the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” one of the central Nuremberg Laws. Although presented as a general racial safeguard, its primary target was Jews: the law criminalized marriages and sexual relations between Jews and so-called “German or related blood” and formalized the idea that Jews were a biological contaminant to German society.

Reich Medical Association circular promoting ‘racial hygiene

This racial obsession was not fringe ideology. It was institutionalized. German medical and scientific bodies embraced “racial hygiene” as a central mission, recasting medicine as a tool for deciding whose lives were worth protecting and whose were disposable. Healing gave way to sorting. The postcard illustrated here, showing the memorial to the victims of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, reminds us that this trajectory did not begin with gas chambers or camps. It began with words in newspapers, definitions repeated often enough to feel normal, and the steady erosion of empathy.

The Present

What makes this history so unsettling is how familiar it feels. Then, Jews were dismissed as a race. Today, Jews are often dismissed as an abstraction: a political symbol, a collective accusation, or an inconvenience to a moral narrative. When Jewish victims are ignored, doubted, or explained away, it follows the same logic. Once Jews are no longer seen as individuals, their suffering becomes negotiable.

The Kishinev postal stationery shown above is more than a piece of postal memorabilia. It is a fragment of a world in which neighbors watched while others were beaten, and in which incitement printed on cheap newsprint could turn into broken bodies in the street.Why is it that whenever Israel does anything, Jews far from its borders are treated as if they are responsible?

Looking at it after Bondi, the question almost asks itself: are Jews safe anymore, anywhere in the world?

Operation Diamond: How Israel Stole a Soviet MiG-21 in History's Most Daring Jet Heist

Mr. Enthusiastic Cold War Espionage , Intelligence Operations

In the early 1960s, Israel faced a growing threat from its neighbors. The MiG-21, the Soviet Union’s most advanced fighter jet, which was introduced in 1960, was the backbone of Arab air forces, particularly in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Israeli pilots had never encountered this aircraft in combat, and intelligence on its capabilities was scarce. If war broke out, Israel needed an advantage—something that would turn the tide in the skies.

The mastermind behind the operation was Meir Amit, the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. Amit was known for his audacious strategies, and he understood that acquiring a MiG-21 would give Israel a vital edge. The plan was endorsed by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and Major General Mordechai “Mottie” Hod, the commander of the Israeli Air Force. style="padding-left: 10px;"

But how do you steal a top-secret fighter jet? The answer lay in Munir Redfa, an Iraqi Air Force pilot. Munir Redfa, born in 1934 in Baghdad, felt alienated due to his Christian heritage and had grown disgusted with orders to bomb Kurdish villages. Mossad operatives approached him with an offer: defect to Israel, bring the MiG-21, and secure a new life for himself and his family and of course with a million dollars.

After months of secret meetings, Redfa agreed. His family was smuggled out of Iraq before his flight to ensure their safety. Then, on August 16, 1966, Redfa took off on a routine training mission—but instead of returning to his base, he veered toward Israel.

As Redfa flew toward Israeli airspace, Jordanian radar picked up the rogue aircraft. Alarmed, Jordanian authorities issued alerts to nearby air traffic control stations, and two Jordanian Hawker Hunter jets were scrambled to intercept him. But Redfa was flying at over 9000 meters and at high speed, making it nearly impossible for them to catch him. To make matters more confusing, Iraq failed to respond to Jordan’s inquiries, and Syria falsely claimed responsibility for the aircraft, reassuring Jordan that it was part of a training mission. This miscommunication allowed Redfa to cross Jordanian airspace unchallenged.

As Redfa entered Israeli airspace, he was met by two Dassault Mirage III jets from the Israeli Air Force, which escorted him safely to Hatzor Air Base. Upon landing, Redfa was immediately taken into protective custody, and the MiG-21 was secured for examination.

For Mossad, this was a triumph. Israeli engineers and pilots wasted no time studying the aircraft, uncovering its weaknesses and strengths. The MiG-21 proved to be a goldmine of intelligence. Israeli specialists dissected its technology, learning its flight dynamics, weapon systems, and vulnerabilities. When war erupted in 1967, Israel’s newfound knowledge played a crucial role in achieving air superiority. Israeli pilots used their insights to outmaneuver and destroy dozens of enemy MiG-21s, ensuring dominance over the skies during the Six-Day War. But the significance of Operation Diamond extended beyond Israel. The United States, eager to understand Soviet aviation technology, was granted access to study the aircraft. The insights gained helped U.S. defense planners develop tactics against Soviet-built jets in future conflicts, marking a strategic victory in the Cold War.

After his defection, Redfa lived in Israel for a time before eventually settling in another Western country. He passed away in 1998 due to a heart attack. His MiG-21 remains on display at the Israeli Air Force Museum in Hatzerim, a testament to one of Mossad’s most daring operations.

Munir Redfa's MiG-21, the subject of Operation Diamond, at the Israeli Air Force Museum in Hatzerim

By Oren Rozen - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11051235