page_title: Philatelic fakes and forgeries
section_title: British forgeries
hierarchical_section_title: Philatelic fakes and forgeries / Classification / Government and propaganda forgeries / World War II / British forgeries
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Vom britischen Geheimdienst PWE gefälschte Postkarte, mit gefälschten Briefmarken von Hitler (links) und Himmler (rechts). Alle Stempel sind ebenfalls gefälscht.
context_page_description: In general, philatelic fakes and forgeries are labels that look like postage stamps but have been produced to deceive or defraud. Learning to identify these can be a challenging branch of philately.
  To a large extent the definitions below are consistent with those given in the introduction to various recent editions of the Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue. "We use the term "forgery" to indicate stamps produced to defraud collectors and to defraud stamp-issuing governments. "Fake" is used to indicate the alteration of a genuine stamp to make it appear as something else. Fakes might refer to cancellations, overprints, added or clipped perforations, stamp design alterations, etc." While difficult to do today, one famous case is the Stock Exchange forgery of the late 19th century.
  Questions are often raised about when a stamp is legitimately produced for postage. Matthew Karanian has proposed the following guideline:
  Stamps are legitimate if they are recognized internationally in practice, even if they are not recognized expressly, as by a treaty or international agreement. This is the same principle of international law that applies to the recognition of nation-states.
context_section_description: Great Britain produced forgeries for Germany, France, Italy, Poland (Generalgouvernement), and French Morocco during World War II.
  Regarding Germany, the first forgery was the 12 pfennig Hindenburg head stamp, later followed by the 3, 4, 6, and 8 pfennig values, to distribute propaganda material in Germany. Other stamps such as the Hitler heads and some field post stamps may not have reached circulation.
  A major effort was the production of propaganda stamps. The Hitler head stamp was modified to depict Heinrich Himmler.
  The Himmler stamp was designed by the British secret service with the intention of driving a wedge between the leadership of the Nazi regime. With the idea that Himmler was planning a coup d'état and wanted to make himself a new leader or president of Germany, an allegedly prepared stamp issue with his portrait was considered suitable to bring this idea into the minds of the NS leadership in the first place. The stamp was distributed by British agents, especially in neutral Switzerland. It was hoped that stamp collectors became aware of this stamp and that a major press campaign would subsequently take place about it. It turned out, however, that this forgery did not attract a lot of attention, neither in Switzerland nor in the rest of Europe. In the end, the British agents were forced to take the Himmler stamp directly to stamp dealers to make it public. However, even this measure did not lead to the desired success and the action turned out to be a complete failure, as practically nobody believed in the alleged Himmler overthrow. What was curious, however, was that a member of the US secret service OSS in Bern, of all people, ascribed extraordinary significance to this stamp. On June, 10 1944, US agent Allan Dulles prepared a detailed report for his superior in Washington in which he described the mysterious stamp. As the US side amazingly had not been informed about the counterfeiting operation by the British secret service, the US secret service started superfluous investigations and thus tied up personnel, which finally turned the whole operation into an embarrassing mishap.
  The Jewish concentration camp inmate Adolf Burger, who had participated in Operation Bernhard, commented after the war that Heinrich Himmler was very indignant about this British forgery with his portrait. This apparently prompted him to repay with the same coin and also to commission mocking propaganda stamps on the British side.
  There are two distinctly different versions of the Himmler stamp, one with wide lines, a second type with narrow lines; there are imperforated proofs of the second type in both violet and black, and of the first type in violet. No genuine cancellations have yet been found; all known specimens are clearly forgeries to the collectors' detriment. However, some postcards and envelopes were made by the British secret service PWE, which were prepared with attached Himmler stamps and faked German cancellations. These were intended for neutral countries such as Switzerland, Sweden or probably also Portugal to be distributed there by agents. Some of these postal items have been preserved.
  Another propaganda forgery concerns the 1943 Hitler putsch stamp that shows General Witzleben (a participant in the July 20, 1944 Hitler assassination attempt) and is inscribed Gehängt am 8. August 1944 ("Hanged on...") Other forgeries were based on the welfare stamps from 1938, and the 1944 Hitler putsch stamp.
  Regarding France, Britain produced forgeries of the Iris series and of stamps depicting Marshal Philippe Pétain.
  Propaganda forgeries were also produced for Italy, which was allied with Germany in the Second World War. Thus the design of Michel No. 625 (Italy) was changed by disfiguring the heads of Hitler respectively Mussolini in a caricature-like manner, so that the impression was created to contrast an "aggressive and grim" looking Hitler with a "baffled and intimidated" looking Mussolini. The Italian text was changed from (translated) "Two peoples, one war" to "Two peoples, one Führer", with the word Führer writte
caption: Cancelled Himmler stamps forged by PWE on a postcard.
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