Postage stamps

These postage stamps were issued by the Third Reich government in 1944. They feature a portrait of Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, who was appointed Chancellor in 1933 and proclaimed himself Führer in 1934.

The Nazi Party used modern propaganda techniques to gain political power in Germany, and carefully crafted a public image of their leader as a man of strength and determination. Public adulation for Hitler was ever-present in Germany between 1933 and 1945, deliberately cultivated through the dissemination of posters, paintings, busts, stamps, and many other depictions of the Führer.

As supreme leader, Hitler had authority to act outside the laws of the state, and he used this to authorise the indefinite incarceration and mass murder of political and so-called racial enemies. More than six million Jewish people, approximately 3.3 million Soviet prisoners, 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, at least 250,000 Romani people, more than 310,000 Serb civilians, at least 250,000 disabled people, approximately 35,000 Germans deemed ‘asocials’ or criminals, 1700 Jehovah’s witnesses, hundreds if not thousands of gay men, and an unknown number of Black Germans, were murdered by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

Te Papa collected the stamps in 2008 for the purposes of education and to remove them from commercial circulation.

References:

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2023. ‘Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution’. Holocaust Encyclopedia.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. n.d. ‘Making a Leader’. Holocaust Encyclopedia.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. n.d. ‘Selling Nazism in a Democracy 1918–1933: Democracy’. State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. n.d. ‘The SS’. Holocaust Encyclopedia.