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One of the last

PostPosted: Fri Sep 27, 2019 12:14 pm
by townshendp
This window envelope, unfortunately without any destination address but bought (for a princely US$2!) from a Danish dealer among a bunch of mail from Norway to Sweden, was posted in Oslo late in the afternoon of May 5, 1945, just three days before the end of the war in Europe and the day after the German surrender in neighboring Denmark. It reached the German censor’s office in Oslo (code letter ‘o’) probably the next day where it was opened, examined and resealed but news of Germany’s imminent capitulation had begun to circulate before they got round to adding their Nazi-seal validating cachet (there’s nothing on the back of the cover). So the batch of mail of which this letter was part was seized by the newly-liberated Norwegian administration and censored again by them, making it a prized ‘Überroller’, the German term for mail posted in wartime but delivered afterwards. As Oslo was the last German ABP to close my cover was one of the very last to be censored by the Germans during WW2. That’s why I treasure it.