Croatian Stamps



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Dr. David B. Ganse

 

    Dr. Ganse was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1928. As a grade and high school student during the World War II years he began collecting the stamps of the combatant powers. He grew particularly interested in the propaganda value of German issues and finally concentrated his collecting efforts in later years on the Third Reich. its Occupations, and the staunchly supportive state of NDH Croatia.
    When his professional career in the eyecare field, with attendant honors, crashed due to devastating combined illnesses, his hospice-like retirement was made tolerable only by his memberships in the Croatian Philatelic Society, the German Philatelic Society and Third Reich Study Group.
    Of course, none of this would have been at all possible without the understanding and love of a wonderful wife , two successful children, great friends on the internet, thoughtful neighbors and patients who still miss him.


ALPENVORLAND - ADRIA REVISITED
by Dr. David B. Ganse

September 2007


Five Years Later

    For the past five years, My great friend, Tom Mikulic, has kept me apprised of the letters, short articles and now blogs of both applause and brickbats in re: my earlier article of five years ago; some of brickbats and some of applause, however faint.
     For the most part the criticisms consist of an almost blind condemnation ofthose "heretics" who feel there might be more to this story than is to be found in that briefly cryptic and appetite-whetting footnote in Michel which really leaves more to be explained than that hasty rush to judgment.
     Come now, gentlemen; let us be openly logical in our quest for truth, no matter whos reputation might be sullied in the process. At its very worst, it still makes a good yarn, and possibly much more.
     One initial portion of the "legend" which has always troubled me has been the matter of 14,900 sets of 16 stamp sets being produced. In the last days of the fiery collapse of the Third Reich, this would necessitate a precious amount of high quality paper still available. The availability, the exactitude in which this precise number is quoted with utmost certainty, and the unmentioned source for this figure are quite puzzling. It is now important that we know who initially gave this figure. Might it have been an expert "naysayer"? Or, was it derived from the number of sets supposedly produced for its COMPANION set, the Laibach series?
     Then there is the economic largess hoped for by any truly master swindler. Let us look at the likelihood of fine inks, a type face of uncommon sort, the special press, the "investment" price, the most carefully selected printing house, the printer or printers involved, the utter secrecy at a time when the "headhunters" were out in force to string up deserters, There was, at the end of the war, only one possible source for the physical equipage necessary for this project, the Vienna Printing Offices. If this was a wartime attempt by minor criminals to succeed in this game there was litte chance of success The number of involved parties would make secrecy almost impossible. One can scarcely master and match colors by candlelight. Ergo, I feel safe in ruling out swindlers at that time, unless a very limited number who worked at the Printing Office, did this at the very last minute and then spirited whatever was printed out of the buildings before the flames got it.In this case, the A-A issue was spirited out by two or three at most and then squirreled away for a number of years in a most safe and climatically dry place, free of detection and deterioration through time.
     This, I believe, could have been possible. I do not place any credence in the fanciful tale of these stamps being discovered in a smoldering wagonlit in the Trieste railway station after an Allied bombing raid. Though the provenance continues that Red partizan forces then "liberated" a few thousand remaining sets which they bartered away, as originally indicated. There were never any fragments of stamp sheets, no odd pieces, no remnants of other sing
     ed packages. Though there may have been no specific raid on Trieste's railway yard that day, it was common to release any remaining bombs before trying to reach friendly landing fields.
     Some few have made the fact that the denominations were in Lira to be proof of error. If so, the same error would have also occurred with the Laibach set.
     Were I to have been a postwar sort of swindler, I would have looked at the drug and surplus weapons markets for better earnings and being far more lucrative.
     Which does at least bring us to a point of possibility. What if those who judged and branded these to be fakes were aware of the power of their denunciation?
     Common sense would lead us to realize that collecting Nazi issues was far more popular in the United States than in central Europe at that time. Further, any forgeries and fakes would be much more likely to be expected by central European collectors, rather than those in the West. A small set of stamps is likewise apt to be more expensive for the collector than a larger, more common issue. If these were fraudulent, why is it so difficult to come up with this set on the philatelic market?
     As we once again review the claims and counterclaims, it must be rather obvious that the charge leveled by the late Dr Bohne.concerning the late official, Dr./Gauleiter Anton Hofer, in which he supposedly stated that no such issue was even contemplated is rather worthless without any signed statement to that effect. It would never survive for a moment in a court of law. For Dr. Bohne to offer this statement is questionable heresay.
     As to the other rehashes of rushes to judgment, often for stretched reasons, the conclusions so drawn are obfuscatory at best and fallacious at worst. I am not yet persuaded with certainty, that we yet know the answer, and I decline to really denounce these emphatically as either forgeries or genuine. There can hardly be a court which would render a forgery conviction based on the evidence presented thus far, and on the suppositions of a mere handful of these so-called philatelic experts.
    

Dr. David B. Ganse



Pula, Croatia


PART 1 (2002) Entire Set Blocks of 4 Compare two sets Home